Ride home planned for US astronauts ‘stranded’ in orbit for nine months
After an unplanned nine-month stay at the International Space Station, the US astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’s space odyssey looks finally to be coming to an end.
Though a Nasa-SpaceX mission was postponed on Wednesday, the American space agency now hopes the launch will take place on Friday, meaning the pair could be back on Earth next week.
Wilmore and Williams’ mission, initially due to last eight days, stretched into months due to safety concerns about the Boeing Starliner that was supposed to bring them home. Instead, the pair were integrated into the ISS crew in a mission that became increasingly politically charged, with the US president, Donald Trump, repeatedly suggesting that the astronauts had been “abandoned in space”. Experts say it would be wrong to assume the pair have not relished their unexpected residency at the ISS.
Jan Wörner, a former director general of the European Space Agency (Esa), said: “Astronauts, if they are in space, they can never be stranded as long as there is some hope to come back. It’s more an issue if they are on the ground and they would like to fly and there is no opportunity.”
Astronauts are rigorously selected and trained in patience, resilience and flexibility, Wörner said. “Astronauts don’t see their work as a personal adventure,” he added. “It is something for humanity.”
Once it became clear that they would not be returning on the expected Starliner capsule, Wilmore and Williams were assimilated into the ISS crew, with Williams becoming station commander in September. Two astronauts were stood down from a routine handover flight and their custom-fitted seats were replaced with ones for Wilmore and Williams. The SpaceX Dragon capsule that the pair will return in has been docked at the station since September.
“The reason that the ‘stranded’ thing is difficult for Nasa to embrace is because they’ve always been able to get back,” said Lori Garver, the former Nasa deputy administrator. “They could, in an emergency situation, have returned.”
The astronauts themselves have attempted to reframe perceptions of their extended stay. “That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck – and I get it. We both get it,” Wilmore told CNN last month. “But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight programme is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.”
Garver said: “I take the astronauts at their word when they say they don’t feel stranded. Astronauts are happiest when they’re in space. Of course, they miss their family and their pets. I’ve always wondered how they adapt like that.”
Nonetheless, Trump told the astronauts last week: “We love you, and we’re coming up to get you, and you shouldn’t have been up there so long.”
The episode has highlighted Nasa’s current reliance on SpaceX and has been damaging for Boeing’s ambitions in the space sector. “It’s a disappointment that there wasn’t a second provider to bring them home,” said Garver. “Two American [providers] would be nice for commercial space stations and competitive pricing is always better than a monopoly.”
However, she and others said that delays and technical glitches are also frequent on publicly operated shuttle programmes.
“Space is hard,” said Greg Sadlier, a director of the consultancy know.space. “Launch and rendezvous in orbit, particularly for crewed missions, are the hardest parts of that. Regardless of whether it’s a public or private operator, where there’s an issue with hardware it requires an investigation because there are lives at stake.”
The latest delay, Nasa announced on Wednesday, was due to a problem with a hydraulics system used to control one of two clamps that hold on to the upper portion of the rocket as it sits vertically on the ground pad before launch.
“This is a ground issue,” said the Nasa spokesperson Derrol Nail. Everything was fine with the rocket and the spacecraft.”
The mission is now scheduled for no earlier than Friday evening, dependent on weather conditions and technical issues being resolved.
The Dragon capsule will carry into orbit two Nasa astronauts, Nichole Ayers and Anne McClain, the Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and the Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. Once at the space station, the new crew will spend a few days acclimatising to life of the ISS. Wilmore, Williams and the rest of the current crew will return to Earth a few days later.
