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Spain Warns Small Ships of Possible Orca Run-Ins near the Strait of Gibraltar during the Summer

An Aerial view of Gibraltar rock seen from the neighboring Spanish city of La Linea, Oct. 17, 2019. (AP)
An Aerial view of Gibraltar rock seen from the neighboring Spanish city of La Linea, Oct. 17, 2019. (AP)
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Spain Warns Small Ships of Possible Orca Run-Ins near the Strait of Gibraltar during the Summer

An Aerial view of Gibraltar rock seen from the neighboring Spanish city of La Linea, Oct. 17, 2019. (AP)
An Aerial view of Gibraltar rock seen from the neighboring Spanish city of La Linea, Oct. 17, 2019. (AP)

Following the ramming of a small boat by an orca in the Strait of Gibraltar, authorities in Spain issued recommendations Tuesday that small vessels stick to the coastline in that region to avoid often-scary interactions with killer whales during summer months.

In the latest incident, two people aboard a 15-meter (50-foot) boat in Moroccan waters requested help from Spain’s maritime rescue service Sunday after reporting that an orca knocked the craft several times, damaging its rudder and causing a leak. The people were picked up by a passing oil tanker summoned by the rescuers, and their boat later sank.

Spain’s ministries for transport and the environment, along with its merchant marines, issued notices Tuesday urging both sailing boats and small motorboats to beware of orcas between May and August in the area between the Strait of Gibraltar and the Gulf of Cadiz.

The Atlantic Orca Working Group, a team of Spanish and Portuguese marine life researchers who study killer whales near the Iberia Peninsula, says were 197 such known interactions in 2021 and another 207 in 2022.

A pod of orcas even disrupted a sailing race last year, when a boat sailing from the Netherlands to Italy had a 15-minute encounter with the animals, prompting the crew to drop their craft's sails and raise a clatter to fend them off.

There have been no reports of attacks against swimmers. The interactions on boats seem to stop once the vessel becomes immobilized.

The researchers say that the killer whales seem to be targeting boats in a wide arc covering the western coast of the Iberia Peninsula, from the waters near the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain’s northwestern Galicia.

The orcas off the Iberian coast average from five to 6½ meters (16-21 feet) in length, compared to orcas in Antarctica that reach nine meters (29½ feet).

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NASA Astronauts Return to Earth after Drawn-out Mission in Space

Support teams work around a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 18 March 2025. EPA/NASA/Keegan Barber
Support teams work around a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 18 March 2025. EPA/NASA/Keegan Barber
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NASA Astronauts Return to Earth after Drawn-out Mission in Space

Support teams work around a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 18 March 2025. EPA/NASA/Keegan Barber
Support teams work around a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 18 March 2025. EPA/NASA/Keegan Barber

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth in a SpaceX capsule on Tuesday with a soft splashdown off Florida's coast, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a week-long stay on the International Space Station.
Their return caps a protracted space mission that was fraught with uncertainty and technical troubles, turning a rare instance of NASA's contingency planning - and the latest failures of Starliner - into a global and political spectacle, Reuters reported.
Wilmore and Williams, two veteran NASA astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots, had launched into space as Starliner's first crew in June for what was expected to be an eight-day test mission. But issues with Starliner's propulsion system led to cascading delays to their return home, culminating in a NASA decision to fold them into its crew rotation schedule and return them on a SpaceX craft this year.
On Tuesday morning, Wilmore and Williams strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts and undocked from the ISS at 1.05 a.m. ET (0505 GMT) to embark on a 17-hour trip to Earth.
The four-person crew, formally part of NASA's Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, plunged through Earth's atmosphere, using its heatshield and two sets of parachutes to slow its orbital speed of 17,000 mph (27,359 kph) to a soft 17 mph at splashdown, which occurred at 5:57 p.m. ET some 50 miles off Florida's Gulf Coast under clear skies.
"What a ride," NASA astronaut Nick Hague, the Crew-9 mission commander inside the Dragon capsule, told mission control moments after splashing down. "I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear."
The astronauts will be flown on a NASA plane to their crew quarters at the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston for a few days of routine health checks before NASA flight surgeons say they can go home to their families.
"They will get some well-deserved time off, well-deserved time with their families," NASA's Commercial Crew Program chief Steve Stich told reporters after the splashdown. "It's been a long time for them."
POLITICAL SPECTACLE
The mission captured the attention of US President Donald Trump, who upon taking office in January called for a quicker return of Wilmore and Williams and alleged, without evidence, that former President Joe Biden "abandoned" them on the ISS for political reasons.
NASA acted on Trump's demand by moving Crew-9's replacement mission up sooner, the agency's ISS chief Joel Montalbano said Tuesday. The agency had swapped a delayed SpaceX capsule for one that would be ready sooner and sped through its methodical safety review process to heed the president's call.
Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that Wilmore and Williams will visit the Oval Office after they recover from their mission.
Wilmore earlier this month told reporters on a call from the ISS that he did not believe NASA's decision to keep them on the ISS until Crew-10's arrival had been affected by politics under the Biden administration.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump, had echoed Trump's call for an earlier return, adding the Biden administration spurned a SpaceX offer to provide a dedicated Dragon rescue mission last year.
NASA officials have said the two astronauts had to remain on the ISS to maintain adequate staffing levels and it did not have the budget or the operational need to send a dedicated rescue spacecraft. Crew Dragon flights cost between $100 million to $150 million.
Crew Dragon is the only US spacecraft capable of flying people in orbit. Boeing had hoped Starliner would compete with the SpaceX capsule before the mission with Wilmore and Williams threw its development future into uncertainty.
Stich said on Tuesday that Starliner might need to fly another uncrewed flight - which would be its third such mission and fourth test overall - before it routinely carries US astronauts.
Boeing, which congratulated the astronauts' return on X, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
286 DAYS IN SPACE
The ISS, about 254 miles in altitude, is a football field-sized research lab that has been housed continuously by international crews of astronauts for nearly 25 years, a key platform of science diplomacy managed primarily by the US and Russia.
Swept up in NASA's routine astronaut rotation schedule, Wilmore and Williams worked on roughly 150 science experiments aboard the station until their replacement crew launched last week.
The pair logged 286 days in space on the mission - longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio, whose 371 days in space ending in 2023 were the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.
Living in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.
Williams, capping her third spaceflight, has tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any US astronaut after Peggy Whitson's 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.
"We came prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short," Wilmore told reporters from space earlier this month.
"That's what your nation's human spaceflight program's all about," he said. "Planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that."