TThe last time I spoke to Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – the two astronauts now stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS) – was on May 1, 2024. At the time, they were in pre-flight medical quarantine at the Kennedy Space Center . in Florida, preparing for takeoff on May 6. The plan was a quick and cheerful mission – testing Boeing’s brand-new Starliner spacecraft to the ISS for a short eight-day cruise. Both astronauts have been aboard the station before and enjoyed the months they spent there. But they were excited about this mission in their Starliner and saw merit in its brevity. The craft can fly more than once, and the sooner astronauts return theirs to Earth, the sooner it can be checked and prepared for another flight.
“We want to get there and back as quickly as possible so they can [can] turn our spacecraft around and also take all the lessons learned and incorporate them into the next Starliner,” Williams told me.
The next Starliner – and even any reflight of the current Starliner – is now very much open to question. The original May 6 launch was canceled due to a valve leak in the upper stage of the crew’s Atlas V rocket. When Williams and Wilmore finally took off on June 5, they didn’t even reach the station before they began experiencing other problems — namely failures in some of their thrusters and, later, leaks in the gaseous helium that keeps the thrusters running. pressurized. The eight-day stay, which was supposed to end June 13, has now stretched on for more than two months as Boeing and NASA troubleshoot thrusters, trying to determine whether the Starliner is a safe enough spacecraft for astronauts to fly. home. .
On August 7th, NASA revealed that the answer may be no. Williams and Wilmore’s short stay may not end until February — stretching an eight-day mission into an eight-month one. Instead of allowing Starliner to carry astronauts back to Earth, the space agency is considering flying the spacecraft back empty. A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, intended to carry four people for a five-month stay at the station starting in September, would launch with just a two-person crew, leaving the other two seats empty to bring Williams and Wilmore home next year. .
read more: After going to space, you need to spend at least three years on Earth recovering from brain damage
So how are the astronauts doing on a crowded space station that normally only houses six or seven people and now holds nine? Last month, after 35 days in space, Wilmore and Williams were optimistic.
“We’re having a lot of fun here on the ISS,” Williams said during an in-orbit press conference on July 10. “Butch and I have been here before and it’s like coming home. So yeah, it’s great to be here.”
We haven’t heard any more communications from the astronauts, but it must be getting old by now. On the one hand, there is the issue of sleep. The space station is equipped with only six sleep chambers– phone booth-sized privacy pods with sleeping bag and storage area for snacks and personal supplies, plus two laptops attached to the walls. The enclosures are not soundproof, but astronauts can fall asleep using headphones playing music or Earth sounds.
But the half-dozen enclosures mean three astronauts are left hanging. One of the astronauts already aboard the station, along with Williams, took up residence in a more spartan sleep chamber called CASA (for Crew Alternate Sleep Accommodation) in the space station’s Columbus module, a laboratory built by the European Space Agency. Wilmore is camped out in a mere sleeping bag in the Japanese Space Agency’s Kibo module.
“Butch is going to have to hang in there for a while,” Williams told me with a laugh in May, when Wilmore faced the prospect of just eight days of such an open life.
The work schedule that the two astronauts follow has changed drastically over the past two months. Initially, they would spend most of the eight days working on the Starliner – checking its communications, life support, power and other systems. But they’ve long since finished that checklist and have instead been helping the rest of the crew with science experiments and maintenance tasks, including unglamorous work like repairing a urine processing pump.
Like the rest of the team, Williams and Wilmore follow a busy work schedule, dictated by a computer tablet with tasks for the day, breaks and meal breaks written in 15-minute increments. A red marker scrolls through the schedule in real time, letting astronauts know if they are keeping pace or falling behind.
read more: Astronomers explain what caused the biggest cosmic explosion ever seen
“Some days you feel like you’re just chasing the red line,” astronaut Nicole Stott, a space station veteran, told me during a 2017 conversation.
During the first two months of their trip, Wilmore and Williams made do with few changes of clothes, as they hadn’t packed for a months-long stay. Astronauts do not wash clothes in space and instead simply discard their clothes and swap out new ones periodically. Last week, a Cygnus resupply vehicle, built by Northrop Grumman, arrived at the station carrying 8,200 lbs. of hardware, fresh food like fruits and vegetables and clean clothes for the Starliner crew.
The first flight of a new manned American spacecraft has happened only five times before, with the maiden voyages of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo spacecraft, the Columbia space shuttle and the Dragon spacecraft. Wilmore and Williams joined NASA giants like Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Young and Wally Schirra in embarking on these first test flights.
“Every once in a while, you have to stop and reflect and see your place and understand that, ‘Wow, this is really an honor,’” Williams told me in May. “It’s very rewarding to follow in the footsteps of the people who came before.”
These people, of course, flew home on the same ship that took them on the flight. If Boeing fails to accomplish the same feat this time, it will be the company, and not just the astronauts, that will end up humiliated.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
