NASA astronauts are returning home - but what else has gone wrong in s

Two astronauts stuck in space for more than nine months are finally on their way back to Earth.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams first blasted off to the ISS on 5 June, expecting to be up there for just eight days.

Read more: Two astronauts stuck in space for more than nine months head back to Earth

However, their problem-plagued Boeing Starliner posed too much of a risk for them to return to Earth, and they’ve been waiting to come home since then.

Although nine months is a long time to be in orbit, the pair aren’t alone in facing extraordinary circumstances in space.

Here are some of the final frontier’s memorable incidents.

The last Soviet citizen

Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev is often dubbed the “last Soviet citizen”.

Mr Krikalev, who passed away in 2022, headed up to the Mir space station on 18 May 1991, along with Britain’s first astronaut Helen Sharman.

But three months later back on Earth, tanks rolled into Moscow’s Red Square, beginning a coup that, while unsuccessful, would ultimately cement the end of the Soviet Union.

One after another, former Soviet states declared independence while Mr Krikalev watched from space.

His hometown of Leningrad became St Petersburg and by December, the communist superpower fractured into 15 nations.

“For us, it was totally unexpected,” Mr Krikalev later said, according to Discovery magazine. “We didn’t understand what happened.

“When we discussed all this, we tried to grasp how it would affect the space program.”