NASA's Butch Wilmore retires from astronaut corps after spending 9 unexpected months in space
Wilmore, along with NASA astronaut Suni Williams, piloted the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft last year. The mission gained worldwide attention when the spacecraft experience several serious issues en route to the space station, including thruster outages and gas leaks.
Williams and Wilmore had been expected to stay about eight days in orbit. But NASA and Boeing spent weeks attempting to pinpoint what went wrong with their vehicle and assessing whether Starliner was safe to carry the astronauts home.
The space agency ultimately decided returning the duo to Earth aboard Starliner was too risky a proposition. NASA announced last August that Williams and Wilmore would join the next International Space Station crew rotation along with two other astronauts on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission and remain aboard the orbiting laboratory for several additional months.
Williams and Wilmore ultimately returned home in March — more than nine months after they left Earth. Such a duration of stay in orbit is not uncommon, as astronauts routinely live on the space station for six months or longer when they serve on staff rotation missions.
Both astronauts have maintained the position that they were fully prepared for their extended stay in space, saying they each understood the risks and uncertainty associated with test flying a spacecraft for the first time.
Williams and Wilmore also repeatedly sought to quash narratives that they were 'abandoned,' 'stuck' or 'stranded' in space.
'That's been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it, we both get it,' Wilmore told CNN's Anderson Cooper in February. 'Help us change the narrative, let's change it to: prepared and committed despite what you've been hearing. That's what we prefer.'
Wilmore's 'commitment to NASA's mission and dedication to human space exploration is truly exemplary,' said Steve Koerner, the acting head of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where astronauts train, in a statement Wednesday.
'His lasting legacy of fortitude,' Koerner added, 'will continue to impact and inspire the Johnson workforce, future explorers, and the nation for generations.'
Wilmore's departure from NASA follows the example set by Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the two astronauts who piloted the first crewed test flight of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule in 2020. That mission marked the last for both Behken and Hurley, who have each since retired.
Wilmore, a Naval officer and test pilot who served in 21 combat missions, joined NASA's astronaut corps in 2000.
He flew on three missions during his 25 years of service, including a mission on the space shuttle Atlantis and a trip to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Notably, upon his return to Earth on a SpaceX capsule in March, Wilmore said that he would theoretically fly aboard one of Boeing's Starliner capsules again if given the opportunity.
'We're going to rectify all the issues that we encountered. We're going to fix them, we're going to make it work,' Wilmore said during a March 31 news conference. 'And with that, I'd get on in a heartbeat.'
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBS News
12 minutes ago
- CBS News
Re-Coding the Future
This content was provided by Acumen Media for Ascendion. This advertiser content was paid for and created by Acumen. Neither CBS News nor CBS News Brand Studio, the brand marketing arm of CBS News, were involved in the creation of this content. Throughout history, new forms of energy have shifted the gears of human progress, profoundly changing how people live and work. Ancient societies started with muscle, moved to animals, then harnessed water, steam and eventually, electricity. Today, AI is emerging as our next energy source, like fire, electricity or steam in past revolutions, to power productivity in the knowledge economy. Horses, steam engines and power plants all still matter of course, but the world is increasingly running on code and software. What some are calling Economy 4.0 is the AI-powered transformation of the knowledge economy, with software reordering how value is created, delivered and scaled. AI is the new power for business, but software is the power grid. It's the axle around which our knowledge economy is starting to turn. Software now shapes how we communicate, manage money, access healthcare, shop, learn, and nearly every other aspect of our modern lives. "Software is one of the key elements of making WellSky successful," said Joel Dolisy, Chief Technology Officer. "There is a lot of people interaction that is all enabled through software. [It] is a big, big important part of how we make that happen." And yet, much of the code that shapes the economy is old enough to collect social security. Nearly $3 trillion worth of global business operations still run on COBOL daily. Despite the increasing criticality of code, the world is still reliant on software that may have been developed by our grandparents. The impact: a chilling effect on disruptive innovation. Vimala Suresh, Vice President, CareSource, said, "If that file doesn't get processed in time, the member can't get the surgery they're eligible for. This could be life-threatening. That's how important software is in healthcare." Software development methods, processes, tools and mindsets from the past are crumbling under the pressure of AI-powered systems and potential. This presents leaders with a once-in-a-career opportunity. That's where Ascendion comes in. The company says it's unleashing intelligent agents that enhance humans as it builds software faster and better. Now, engineers using AAVA, a platform of agents aligned to software development and management, are using AI to deliver better code at half the cost and twice the speed. To unlock the potential value, leaders, Ascendion says IT teams, operations, line-of-business, procurement, finance and the C-suite must lean into new ways of designing, building and managing software. This isn't theory or buzzwords. It's happening now using what Ascendion calls Engineering to the Power of AI (EngineeringAI). This means companies can do more with less, allowing more time for talented humans to create, innovate, imagine and lead. David Park, President, Commercial Bank, Axos Bank, said, "With the speed of development and the reduction of cost through AI, we are able to personalize the banking experience. Hyper-personalization is what's most exciting about financial services and the software evolution we are going through." Marc Andreessen was right when he said, "Software is eating the world." Now, thanks to AI, software engineering is the first course. The data is adding up. Gartner predicts AI software will reach $297 billion by 2027. Researchers are uncovering a double-digit decrease in jobs related to writing and coding. A growing number of early adopter CIOs are already reporting that AI can yield efficiency gains of 20% to 40%. Innovation, growth, savings and transparency aren't new, but this is: AI is moving from the computer science lab to every business. The new power revolution from AI is already starting. The first major disruption where real value is being delivered today comes from how software is being built. AI is changing not just what is built, but how it's built. Every new power revolution—fire, water wheels, steam, electricity and now AI—comes with risks, disruptions and unintended consequences. AI's impact on software engineering will be profound, and it needs to be managed so we advance safely and civilly. In the coming years and decades, AI agents will disrupt countless business processes, consumer experiences and jobs. But today, software engineering is being re-coded by the bot. Business leaders, policy makers and employees can embrace the potential for AI and tame new machines so that value generation tips the scales away from risk, fear and failed projects.
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Scientists Just Found Something Very Weird About the Mysterious Object Hurtling Into Our Solar System
As evidence continues to mount that the mysterious object with interstellar origins currently speeding toward the inner solar system at a breakneck speed is a comet, not everybody's convinced quite yet. Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb raised the far-fetched, yet tantalizing possibility that the object, which was first spotted by astronomers earlier this year, could have been sent by an extraterrestrial civilization. While he admitted in a blog post last month that it's most likely that "3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet," a letter to the editors of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics has Loeb questioning that conclusion once more. At the heart of the conundrum is the purported comet's tail. The glowing globs of icy particulates conventionally leave a trail of gas and dust in a comet's wake, resulting in their distinctive shape. However, there's a slim chance that 3I/ATLAS may be an outlier. According to the paper, which was authored by an international team of astronomers, 3I/ATLAS "exhibits increasing dust activity and reddening colors during the observation period, with no visible tail detected." The lack of a tail could be "likely due to viewing geometry and low dust production," they posited. The researchers, therefore, called on the astronomy community to continue monitoring the unusual object to glean more "insights into the evolution of interstellar materials under solar radiation." Loeb agreed with the sentiment, arguing in a recent blog post that the "more data we collect, the more difficult it would be for scientists to shove anomalies of 3I/ATLAS under the carpet of traditional thinking." "We are used to finding icy rocks which exhibit familiar cometary tails in the solar system," he added, "but an encounter with objects from interstellar space is a blind date on astronomical scales." To Loeb, it's still too early to definitively conclude that 3I/ATLAS is a comet. To the astronomer, who previously authored a book about the possibility that 'Oumuamua, an interstellar object first observed in 2017, may have been an sent to us by an alien civilization, there's still enough compelling evidence suggesting otherwise. In a follow-up blog post, he pointed out a separate paper, showing that the first images taken of the object by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope showed a nucleus "surrounded by a much larger cloud of dust," and a "diffuse emission ahead of its motion towards the Sun rather than a trailing tail as expected from a typical comet." Loeb has also suggested that 3I/ATLAS' highly unusual trajectory is "fine-tuned to get unusually close to Jupiter, Mars and Venus," an exceedingly improbable path. Loeb and his colleagues have also posited that the object's large size — roughly 12.4 miles in diameter, according to his calculations — makes it an immensely rare, once-in-only-10,000-years encounter. To neatly summarize his stance on the chance that we're looking at a visitor from an interstellar civilization, Loeb and his colleagues constructed the "Loeb Scale," which ranks the chance of a given object being alien technology on a scale of one to ten, where one is "likely natural," and 10 is "confirmed technology" of "extraterrestrial artificial origin." The scale takes "incorporates multiple observable characteristics, including trajectory anomalies, spectroscopic signatures, geometric properties, and other observable characteristics that could distinguish natural from potentially artificial objects" into account. This week, Loeb gave 3I/ATLAS his "Loeb Scale" rating. "As of now, I give 3I/ATLAS a rank of 6, but note that this rank is time-dependent as it reflects the limited data we have so far," he wrote in his blog post. He also took the opportunity to once again warn that the scientific community shouldn't dismiss the possibility of a first encounter, no matter how far-fetched. "The scientific method allows for all possible questions, which are later answered by collecting data and ruling out possibilities," he wrote. "It is anti-scientific to suppress curiosity-driven questions about anomalies before conclusive data is gathered to explain them." More on the object: Existing NASA Spacecraft Could Intercept the Weird Interstellar Object Cruising Into Our Star System Solve the daily Crossword
New York Post
41 minutes ago
- New York Post
Astronaut Butch Wilmore retires from NASA less than 5 months after 286-day spaceflight
One of NASA's two previously stuck astronauts has retired from the space agency, less than five months after his unexpectedly long spaceflight came to an end. NASA announced Butch Wilmore's departure on Wednesday. Wilmore and Suni Williams launched last summer as test pilots on Boeing's first astronaut flight. What should have been a weeklong trip to the International Space Station turned into a stay of more than nine months because of Boeing's malfunctioning Starliner. 5 Astronaut Butch Wilmore waved as he returned to Earth in NASA's SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft on March 18, 2025. NASA 5 Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams smiled and waved before they launched into space on June 5, 2024 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Getty Images Starliner came back empty, and Wilmore and Williams returned to Earth in March with SpaceX. Wilmore, 62, had already retired from the Navy. Williams, 59, also a retired Navy captain, is still with NASA. She joined Second Lady Usha Vance at Johnson Space Center in Houston earlier this week, taking part in a summer reading challenge for schoolchildren. 5 Wilmore spent the holidays on the ISS while he was stranded in space. X / NASA Astronauts 5 NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 mission returned to Earth on March 18, 2025. NASA 5 Wilmore is a veteran pilot and a graduate of the US Naval Test Pilot School. NASA Selected as an astronaut in 2000, Wilmore logged 464 days in orbit over three missions. His final spaceflight made up nearly two-thirds of that total: 286 days. 'Throughout his career, Butch has exemplified the technical excellence of what is required of an astronaut,' NASA's chief astronaut Joe Acaba said in a statement. 'As he steps into this new chapter, that same dedication will no doubt continue to show in whatever he decides to do next.'
