India, March 19 -- When NASA astronaut Sunita Williams's week-long space journey was extended by a few days last year, her family in Gujarat was not particularly worried. But as her return to Earth kept getting delayed, they feared the worst. As weeks turned into months, their worries grew. Their anxiety peaked when a SpaceX capsule carried Williams and her colleague Butch Wilmore to Earth on Tuesday.

Dinesh Rawal, Williams's cousin who lives in Ahmedabad, said they could not sleep all night and kept praying for her sister's safe return until the SpaceX capsule carrying the astronauts made a soft splashdown off Florida's coast on Tuesday, ending the nine-month space mission fraught with technical troubles and uncertainty.

Rawal said the...