NASA Astronauts Stuck in Space
Photo Credit: Getty Images via BBC
Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams have been stranded in space for months due to technical issues with their original spacecraft, and won’t be back on Earth until February 2025.
On June 5, the Boeing Starliner launched for a test flight from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, with Wilmore and Wiliams aboard.
The Boeing Starliner is a spacecraft designed for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, aimed at transporting people to and from places near the surface of Earth, like the International Space Station (ISS). The purpose of the Starliner’s test flight was to prove that the vessel could safely take astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.
The test mission, which was its first flight with humans onboard, was delayed several times. First scheduled for liftoff in 2017, the launch date was changed to May 6 of this year, before finally being rescheduled for June 5. According to CBC, Wilmore and Williams were originally intended to stay on the capsule for only eight days.
According to BBC, for Wilmore and Williams, a lot of the training for this test flight was to “expect the unexpected”, which came in handy when the spacecraft started experiencing problems.
Before the official launch on May 25, the Starliner experienced its first helium leak, but NASA was able to resolve the issue. However, on June 6, a day after the Starliner launched into space, NASA warned Williams and Wilmore about newly discovered helium leaks, which the astronauts then sealed.
On the same day, when Williams and Wilmore were just about to land on the ISS, docking became unsafe due to a breakdown of five of the capsule’s 28 reaction control system thrusters, which help the capsule navigate around space. Thankfully, four of the five thrusters eventually came back online, and the astronauts were able to manually pilot the spacecraft and dock it on the ISS.
After the thrusters shut down and the helium leaks began, NASA engineers started to examine the causes of these problems. According to NBC News, in late July, NASA reported that Starliner’s propulsion system was consistently working properly and helium leak rates were still within a safe range. However, by mid-August 2024, NASA decided to bring the Starliner back to Earth unoccupied, leaving Wilmore and Williams to reside in the ISS until February 2025, when they will return home on a SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon capsule.
In order to make room for these astronauts on the future Crew-9 return flight, the number of people part of the capsule’s original crew was reduced from four to two.
This is the earliest that the astronauts could return home, since other scheduled SpaceX expeditions would have to be changed in order to bring Williams and Wilmore back to Earth before February.
On September 6 at 6:04 PM ET, the Starliner detached from the ISS and arrived at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico roughly six hours later. Other than a slight malfunction with the navigation system, the journey went smoothly, suggesting that Williams and Wilmore could have been brought back to Earth safely had they been on the spacecraft.