The astronauts are stuck in space and now they will return on Elon Musk’s SpaceX next year. It was their first public comments since the Boeing Starliner capsule that took them to the ISS in June returned to earth. They were not carried along as the capsule developed many technical snags deemed too much risky for them.
Sunita Williams said both she and Butch were aware that it was a test flight and hence it could take more time than just eight days. She said it was not hard to accept that they would be staying at the ISS longer. “We are trained to handle any kind of situation,” Butch Wilmore chipped in. “I don’t look back…we deal with all kind of difficulties in all kind of situations. This is not an easy business. Eight days or eight months whatever it is, we are going to do our best job. That’s the mindset,” Butch said.
‘I was a little bit nervous’
Sunita Williams said she was a little bit nervous that she was not returning home immediately. “In the back of my mind, there are folks on the ground who have some plans like my family…spending times with my mother. And I think I was fretting more about that. Like the things we had planned for this fall or winter…but everybody was on board and that prepared us,” Suni said.
Wilmore and Williams are now full-fledged station crew members, chipping in on routine maintenance and experiments. They along with seven others on board welcomed a Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Russians and an American earlier this week, temporarily raising the station population to 12, a near record.
The two Starliner test pilots – both retired Navy captains and longtime NASA astronauts – will stay at the orbiting laboratory until late February. They have to wait for a SpaceX capsule to bring them back. That spacecraft is due to launch later this month with a reduced crew of two, with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams for the return leg.
Their Starliner capsule marked the first Boeing spaceflight with astronauts. It endured a series of thruster failures and helium leaks before arriving at the space station on June 6. It landed safely in the New Mexico desert earlier this month, but Boeing’s path forward in NASA’s commercial crew program remains uncertain.
The space agency hired SpaceX and Boeing as an orbital taxi service a decade ago after the shuttles retired. SpaceX has been flying astronauts since 2020.