They will be joined on their SpaceX ride home by two astronauts who launched by themselves in September, alongside two empty seats.
During a news conference Tuesday, Wilmore said that while politics is part of life, it did not play into his and Williams's return, moved up a couple weeks thanks to a change in SpaceX capsules. President Trump and SpaceX's Elon Musk said at the end of January that they wanted to accelerate the astronauts' return, blaming the previous administration.
But Williams, in response to a question, did take issue with Musk's recent call to dump the space station in two years, rather than waiting until NASA's projected deorbit in 2031. She noted all the scientific research being performed at the orbiting lab.
"This place is ticking. It's just really amazing, so I would say we're actually in our prime right now," said Williams, a three-time space station resident who is from Needham. "I would think that right now is probably not the right time to say quit, call it quits."
Williams said she cannot wait to be reunited with her Labrador retrievers. The hardest part about the unexpected extended stay, she added, was the wait by their families back home.
"It's been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us," she said. "We're here. We have a mission. We're just just doing what we do every day, and every day is interesting because we're up in space and it's a lot of fun."
Wilmore and Williams expected to be gone just a week or so when they launched last June aboard Boeing's new Starliner capsule, making its crew debut after years of delay. The Starliner had so many problems getting to the space station that NASA ruled it too dangerous to carry anyone else and it flew back empty.
Their homecoming was further delayed by extra completion time needed for the brand new SpaceX capsule that was supposed to deliver their replacements.
Last month, NASA announced the next crew would launch in a used capsule instead, pushing up liftoff to March 12. The two crews will spend about a week together aboard the space station before Wilmore and Williams depart with NASA's Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency's Alexander Gorbunov.
Wilmore and Williams -- retired Navy captains -- have insisted over the months that they are healthy and committed to the mission as long as it takes. They took a spacewalk together in January.
They will wear generic SpaceX flight suits for the ride back, not the usual custom-made outfits bearing their names because their trip home in a Dragon capsule was unplanned. That is fine with them, although Wilmore hinted he might use a pen to write his name on his suit.