The last time I spoke to Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — the two astronauts now stranded aboard the International Space Station (ISS) — was on May 1, 2024. At the time, they were in medical quarantine at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, preparing for launch on May 6. The plan was for a fast-paced, loose mission — a test flight of Boeing’s brand-new Starliner spacecraft up to the ISS for a short eight-day flight. Both astronauts had been aboard the station before, and both enjoyed the months they spent there. But they were excited about this mission with their Starliner, and recognized the benefit of it being short-lived. The craft can be flown more than once, and the sooner the astronauts returned theirs to Earth, the sooner it could be checked out and made ready for another flight.
“We want to get there and back as quickly as possible so they can turn our spacecraft around and incorporate all the lessons learned into the next Starliner,” Williams told me.
That next Starliner — and even any relaunch of the current Starliner — is now highly in doubt. The original May 6 launch was canceled because of a leaky valve in the upper stage of the crew’s Atlas V rocket. When Williams and Wilmore finally lifted off on June 5, they didn’t even reach the station before battling other problems — namely, failures in some of their engines and, later, leaks in the gaseous helium that keeps the engines pressurized. Their eight-day stay, scheduled to end June 13, has now stretched to more than two months as Boeing and NASA fix the engine problems and try to determine whether the Starliner is a safe spacecraft to fly the astronauts home.
On August 7, NASA announced that the answer might be no. Williams and Wilmore’s brief stay could now end as late as February — and an eight-day mission would become an eight-month one. Rather than fly the astronauts back to Earth on Starliner, the space agency is considering flying the spacecraft back empty. A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, which was scheduled to carry four people for a five-month stay at the station starting in September, would instead launch with just two crew members, leaving the other two slots free to bring Williams and Wilmore home next year.
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How are the astronauts faring on a crowded space station that normally only houses six or seven people and now has room for nine? Last month, after 35 days in space, Wilmore and Williams were optimistic.
“We’re having a great time here on the ISS,” Williams said from orbit during a July 10 press conference. “Butch and I have been up here before and it feels like coming home. So yeah, it’s great to be here.”
We haven’t heard any further reports from the astronauts, but it must be getting boring. First, there’s the question of sleep. The space station is equipped with only six sleeping chambers – private capsules the size of a phone booth with a sleeping bag and a storage area for snacks and personal supplies, plus two laptops attached to the walls with rubber bands. The chambers aren’t soundproof, but the astronauts can fall asleep by wearing headphones that play music or Earth sounds.
But the six cabins mean that three astronauts are left behind. One of the astronauts, who was already on board the station, sleeps with Williams in a spartan sleeping chamber called CASA (Crew Alternate Sleep Accommodation) in the space station’s Columbus module, a laboratory built by the European Space Agency. Wilmore camps out in a simple sleeping bag in the Japanese space agency’s Kibo module.
“Butch is going to have a rough time of it,” Williams told me with a laugh in May, when Wilmore was faced with the prospect of only eight days of living outdoors.
The two astronauts’ work schedule has changed dramatically over the past two months. Originally, they were supposed to spend most of their eight days in the air working on the Starliner – checking communications, life support, power and other systems. But that checklist has long since been checked off and they are instead assisting the rest of the crew with scientific experiments and maintenance work, including such unglamorous work as repairing a urine processing pump.
Like the rest of the crew, Williams and Wilmore have a busy work schedule dictated by a tablet computer. The day’s tasks, breaks and meal intervals are noted in 15-minute increments. A red marker moves through the schedule in real time, showing the astronauts whether they are keeping up or falling behind.
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“Some days you feel like you’re just chasing the red line,” astronaut Nicole Stott, a space station veteran, told me during a 2017 interview.
For the first two months in the air, Wilmore and Williams had to make do with little change of clothes because they had not packed for a months-long stay. Astronauts do not do laundry in space; they simply dispose of their clothes and change into new ones regularly. Last week, a Northrop Grumman Cygnus supply vehicle arrived at the station, carrying 3,900 kg of equipment, fresh food such as fruits and vegetables, and fresh clothing for the Starliner crew.
The first flight of a new manned American spacecraft had only happened five times before, with the maiden flights of the space shuttles Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Columbia and Dragon. Wilmore and Williams were there, along with NASA greats such as Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Young and Wally Schirra, when they made these first test flights.
“Every once in a while you have to stop and think, see your place and understand, ‘Wow, this is really an honor,'” Williams told me in May. “It’s very humbling to follow in the footsteps of the people who have gone before us.”
Those people, of course, got to fly home on the same spacecraft that took them to heaven. If Boeing can’t pull off the same feat this time, the company, and not just the astronauts, will be humbled.
