How eight days in space turned into a nine-month odyssey

Yahoo

18-03-2025

At 5.57pm local time on Tuesday, astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, along with two crewmates, will splash down off the coast of Florida in a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
Or rather, that is if everything goes to plan – which has not tended to be the case with Williams and Wilmore's mission.
Should they indeed make it back from the International Space Station (ISS) as outlined, it will represent the end of a saga that has seen what was meant to be an eight-day trip turn into the best part of ten months in space, an adventure beset by a litany of delays, technical issues and political friction.
Even last week, the mission that was meant to be bringing the intrepid pair home, at long last, was delayed for 48 hours after an issue with hydraulics – finally lifting off on Friday evening.
During their unexpectedly long stay in orbit, Williams and Wilmore's plight has become political football. Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has claimed that his SpaceX firm offered to send another rocket to get the two astronauts six months ago, but then-President Joe Biden said no. The malfunctioning craft that carried the pair to the ISS in June last year was made by Boeing, the beleaguered aeronautics giant that has endured a series of high-profile disasters.
Donald Trump has seized on the situation as an opportunity to berate his predecessor. In January, he posted on social media that the two astronauts had been 'virtually abandoned in space.' The president's comments were echoed by Musk, who in an interview with Sean Hannity said the pair were 'left up there for political reasons.'
The space community reacted angrily. 'What a lie,' wrote Andreas Mogensen, a Danish astronaut and former commander of the ISS. 'And from someone who complains about the lack of honesty from the mainstream media.' Musk later called Mogensen 'r—---d' and an 'idiot'.
Trump has dialled up the rhetoric as the astronauts' return has drawn closer. 'We love you, and we're coming up to get you, and you shouldn't have been up there so long,' he said last Wednesday while addressing the astronauts from a press conference in the White House. 'The most incompetent president in our history has allowed that to happen to you, but this president won't.'
'I hope they like each other,' he added. 'Maybe they'll love each other, I don't know. But they've been left up there [...] So Elon's going to go up and get them. Should I go on that journey?'
Williams, 59, and Wilmore, 62, are both highly experienced astronauts. Each had undertaken two spaceflights – including months long stints onboard the ISS – before being picked to crew Nasa's Boeing Crew Flight Test, the first manned mission of Boeing's new Starliner spacecraft.
The mission was originally scheduled to launch as far back as 2017, before the first of what would come to be numerous delays scuppered those plans. Because of the setbacks, the crew assigned to the flight changed several times before Nasa confirmed in June 2022 that it would be a two-person expedition, featuring Williams and Wilmore.
By April of last year, preparations were far enough advanced to allow for the Starliner craft to be placed atop its Atlas V launch vehicle, a 191-foot rocket. But the launch was repeatedly postponed thereafter. An original date of May 7 was scrubbed when engineers found a problem with an oxygen valve. A second date of June 1 was cancelled when the ground computer failed. Williams and Wilmore finally blasted off on June 5, when Biden was still president and planning to lead the Democratic party into last November's election.
Although the launch went well, their capsule – named Calypso – encountered difficulties as it approached the ISS, when its thrusters malfunctioned. The proposed return was delayed for several weeks while more tests were done.
On August 24, Nasa announced it was too dangerous for Williams and Wilmore to return in the capsule. This left the agency with three choices: put them on the four-seater SpaceX craft that was already docked, which would have meant delaying the return of two astronauts who were already there. Or SpaceX could launch a new ship to bring them home immediately, but that could have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, leave the station under-staffed and mess up the rest of the schedule.
Ultimately it was decided that Williams and Whitmore would stay with the other astronauts already on the station and come back with the next scheduled return, which would only have two astronauts rather than four. SpaceX takes crewed missions to the ISS every six months or so. Boeing's faulty Starliner returned empty on September 6 – more technical issues emerged during the flight back, but the capsule made it safely to New Mexico.
Meanwhile, Williams and Wilmore remained at the station, busying themselves with tasks and research – investigating what the absence of gravity does to eyesight, cardiac health and brain function, among other things – and preparing for the toll of many months longer than planned in space.
The living quarters aboard the ISS are roughly the size of a six-bedroom house. The pair had been sharing the space with ten others; three from China, three from Russia and four other Americans. Thanks to resupply missions, they had plenty of food and water, as well as personal effects. Onboard, the crew maintained a strict routine; Wilmore rising at 4.30am and Williams two hours later. As well as daily exercise – vital for staying healthy in microgravity – they helped maintain the station, including what they described as 'orbital plumbing,' using replacement parts they brought up in the Starliner.
In November, they were able to vote in the election via postal vote. Both have said they miss family and friends; Wilmore especially for missing most of his daughter's final year of high school.
While their stay has been months longer than planned, it is still well short of the record. In 2023, Nasa astronaut Frank Rubio spent 371 days on the ISS. Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days aboard Mir in the mid-1990s.
Nasa has mostly remained discreet on the situation (and were approached for comment), perhaps mindful of causing trouble at a time when Trump and Musk are on the hunt for government spending to cut. When the decision to delay the return was taken last August, the then-Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said that 'politics [had] not played any part' in their thinking.
Although politics might not have been involved, money was. This week, Ken Bowersox, Nasa's associate administrator for space operations, explained that although SpaceX had 'helped with a lot of options' for bringing them home, the agency 'ruled them out pretty quickly just based on how much money we've got in our budget.'
When asked during a space Q&A earlier this month about Musk's claim that he had offered to bring the astronauts home last year, Wilmore confirmed the statements were 'absolutely factual.' However, while he said he 'believed' the billionaire, he admitted that neither he nor Williams had any concrete information about who had offered what to whom, or when.
To some on earth, it appeared irrefutable that the astronauts were abandoned. But experts say otherwise. Libby Jackson, head of space at the Science Museum, says it is a mistake to think of the pair as stranded, given the ISS always has a capsule docked capable of returning all the astronauts in the event of an emergency.
'They have never been stuck or stranded,' she explains. 'There is a general perception that to get to and from the International Space Station you have to wait for a capsule like catching a bus. But it's much more like driving somewhere in your car. The spacecraft is ready and waiting for them to come home at a moment's notice.
'Musk and Trump have played on this sense that they had no way home again. That's not true. It's just that after the problems with the test flight, Nasa decided the right thing for the crew to do was to stay and join the crew. Butch and Sunny are fantastic astronauts who are enjoying having some unexpected time in space. Any astronaut who goes there says it's a brilliant, wonderful place to work.'
Still, in February, Wilmore's 16-year-old daughter, Daryn, posted a video on TikTok in which she appeared to side with the Trump/Musk view of things. 'He's missed out on a lot. It's less the fact that he's up there sometimes; it's more the fact of why,' she said. 'There's a lot of politics, there's a lot of things that I'm not at liberty to say [...] But there's been issues, there's been negligence.'
Whatever the truth of these accusations, as astronauts they will have been prepared for their plans to change, says Clayton Anderson, an author and retired American astronaut who spent five months on the ISS in 2007 after relieving Williams, who had been on her maiden spaceflight. 'If they had told me I would have been up for six months longer than expected, I would have been pretty angry, but I would have dealt with that anger by speaking to my wife on the ground and quickly coming to the understanding that I can't control it, so I'm going to be the best professional astronaut I can be and we're going to suck it up and execute as a family to accommodate what Nasa had decided.'
He adds that sticking to routines, and mentally separating the stint into smaller blocks of time, can help astronauts to cope with long periods in space. 'We did two and a half hours of exercise a day,' he recalls. 'We had a bike, a treadmill and a weights machine. I looked forward to that. Cleaning up afterwards was important to me psychologically. Especially on the days I was going to put on clean underwear or clothes, that was a huge psychological benefit. I imagine they have learned more about themselves, especially in terms of patience, adaptability, forgiveness and mission accomplishment. They are probably focussed on completing the mission. All astronauts have that.'
And while some of the interventions from the White House may appear unhelpful, Anderson says all the publicity is a benefit to the industry. 'Space is cool again,' he says. 'Nasa is always going to be political. People are paying attention. For Butch and Sunny that's helpful. They'll come home and there will be book deals waiting for them, they'll be on the speaking circuit. It's good for them. It's good for the space program that people are arguing about Starliner versus SpaceX, or Elon and what he's doing. It's funny how everybody loved Elon until he supported Trump and now they're all over his ass. But no matter how you hear about space travel, if people are talking about it, that's good.'
Trump, for his part, appears keen to keep the pair in the spotlight, having promised to welcome them back to earth with open arms. 'When they come back, I'll greet them,' he said last week. 'How about that?' The astronauts, in turn, have expressed gratitude to the president for his help.
Reflecting on their odyssey before heading home, Williams told The New York Times she was, in fact, enjoying her extended stay and sad that it might be her last trip into space. 'It makes you really want to enjoy every bit of your time that you have up here,' she said.
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