NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are no strangers to time away from their families. Both are retired captains in the US Navy, served in war zones, and are veterans of previous six-month stays on the International Space Station.
When they launched to the space station on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on June 5, the astronauts expected to be home in a few weeks, or perhaps a month, at most. Their minimum mission duration was eight days, but NASA was always likely to approve a short extension. Wilmore and Williams were the first astronauts to soar into orbit on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, a milestone achieved some seven years later than originally envisioned by Boeing and NASA.
However, the test flight fell short of all of its objectives. Wilmore and Williams are now a little more than three months into what has become an eight-month mission on the station. The Starliner spacecraft was beset by problems, culminating in a decision last month by NASA officials to send the capsule back to Earth without the two astronauts. Rather than coming home on Starliner, Wilmore and Williams will return to Earth in February on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
Grateful for options
On Friday, the two astronauts spoke with reporters for the first time since NASA decided they would stay in orbit until early 2025.
“It was trying at times," Wilmore said. "There were some tough times all the way through. Certainly, as the commander or pilot of your spacecraft, you don’t want to see it go off without you, but that’s where we wound up."
Both astronauts are veteran Navy test pilots and have previous flights on space shuttles and Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Captains never want to abandon ship, but that's not what happened with Starliner. Instead, their ship left them.
Williams said she and Wilmore watched Starliner's departure from the space station from the lab's multi-window cupola module last week. They kept busy with several tasks, such as monitoring the undocking and managing the space station's systems during the dynamic phase of the departure.
“We were watching our spaceship fly away at that point in time," Williams said. "I think it’s good we had some extra activities. Of course, we’re very knowledgeable about Starliner, so it was obvious what was happening at each moment.”
NASA's top managers did not have enough confidence in Starliner's safety after five thrusters temporarily failed as the spacecraft approached the space station in June. They weren't ready to risk the lives of the two astronauts on Starliner when engineers weren't convinced the same thrusters, or more, would function as needed during the trip home.
It turned out the suspect thrusters on Starliner worked after it departed the space station and headed for reentry on September 6. One thruster on Starliner's crew module—different in design from the thrusters that previously had trouble—failed on the return journey. Investigating this issue is something Boeing and NASA engineers will add to their to-do list before the next Starliner flight, alongside the earlier problems of overheating thrusters and helium leaks.
“It’s a very risky business, and things do not always turn out the way you want," Wilmore said. "Every single test flight, especially a first flight of a spacecraft or aircraft that’s ever occurred, has found issues... 90 percent of our training is preparing for the unexpected, and sometimes the actual unexpected goes beyond what you even think could happen."
The Starliner capsule safely landed under parachutes in New Mexico one week ago. It was a successful landing but an ending to a disappointing test flight. Williams said NASA made the right decision on Starliner's safety. She and her crewmates on the space station watched live video on their iPads of Starliner's landing.
“It was wonderful that it made it back, and the fact that we weren’t on it didn’t even come into mind at all," Wilmore said. "The decision was made, we flipped that bit, and we go forward with the plan of the day.”
Williams described the space station as her "happy place" but added that she missed her family, friends, and her two dogs. Wilmore said he wasn't upset with the extra time in orbit, but it's a different story for the astronauts' loved ones on the ground.
"We’re here. We’re safe," Wilmore said. "We’re in a place that we’re both familiar with and doing things that we actually enjoy doing. For them [our families], it is different, and they’re going to learn from this, and they’re going to grow from this like they never could have from any other situation.”
This isn't the first time an astronaut has stayed in space much longer than initially planned. Most recently, Frank Rubio, another NASA astronaut, had his mission extended from six months to one year in 2023 after the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that was supposed to bring him home sprung a coolant leak. Russian officials decided the damaged Soyuz wasn't safe enough for humans and launched another Soyuz to rescue Rubio and his crewmates.
“We’re both Navy, we’ve both been on deployments, we’re not surprised when deployments get changed or extended," Williams said. "Our families are used to that as well."
The two astronauts are settling in as long-term residents on the space station. They are trained to perform spacewalks and maintenance and operate the station's robotic arm, and they're getting up to speed on the lab's scientific experiments. Before Starliner left the space station, the astronauts rigged makeshift seats in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft currently moored at the outpost, allowing it to come home with six astronauts instead of the regular complement of four. For the next few weeks, that will be the crew's lifeboat to escape the space station in the event of an emergency.
"We were very fortunate that we have the space station, and that we had the option to stay and we had the option to come back a different way if that’s what the data showed," Wilmore said.
It's easy to contrast the situation with Boeing's Starliner with another time NASA engineers faced some uncertainty about the health of a spacecraft. In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry, and its seven-person crew perished. Some NASA engineers worried about the shuttle's heat shield after a chunk of foam struck Columbia's left wing on launch.
But there was no way for the shuttle to reach the International Space Station to use it as a safe haven, and NASA managers determined it was not possible to launch another space shuttle to rescue Columbia's crew. Ultimately, they concluded an impact of lightweight foam, even at high speed, couldn't do any significant damage to the shuttle's heat shield and approved Columbia for its ill-fated reentry.
This time, NASA had options, and it used them.
SpaceX will launch another Dragon mission later this month with just two crew members—a NASA commander and a Russian cosmonaut—leaving two empty seats to return Wilmore and Williams to Earth next year.
"We’ve got a ride home, and we’re looking forward to the next couple months doing a lot of stuff on the International Space Station," Williams said.
