How Two Stranded Astronauts Are Camping Out in Space

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are said to be surviving while their eight-day trip stretches into a whole month.

By Jeffrey Kluger

 

The last time I talked 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 pre-flight medical quarantine at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, preparing for a May 6 liftoff. The plan was for a brisk and breezy mission—test-flying Boeing’s brand-new Starliner spacecraft up to the ISS for a short eight-day cruise. Both astronauts had been aboard the station before, and both enjoyed the months they spent there. But they were excited about this mission in their Starliner and saw merit in its brevity. The ship 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 go and get back as quickly as possible so they [can] turn our spacecraft around and also take all those lessons learned and incorporate it into the next Starliner,” Williams said to me.

The next Starliner, and possibly even a reflight of the current Starliner is still in debate. The launch on May 6 was canceled because of leaky valves in an upper section of Crew’s Atlas V rocket. After Williams and Wilmore finally left from the earth on June 5th, they failed to get to the station before they began experiencing other issues. These included failures of certain thrusters, and then ruptures of the gaseous Helium which keeps the thrusters in a state of pressurization. The eight-day period, which was scheduled to conclude at the end of June, has extended to over two months, while Boeing and NASA work to solve the thruster issues and determine whether it is the Starliner is a secure enough spacecraft for astronauts to return home.

On August. 7 NASA announced they had a solution that might be not. Williams and Wilmore’s short stay could not end until February, extending an eight-day journey to an eight-month period. Instead of allowing Starliner to transport their astronauts to Earth Space agency is contemplating returning the spacecraft empty. The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, is designed to carry four passengers for a five-month stay starting in September, could instead be launched with two crew members and leave the remaining two seats vacant to transport Williams and Wilmore home in the coming year.

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How are astronauts faring on a space station, which normally only home to seven or six people, but can now accommodate nine? This month after the space station had been in orbit for 35 days Wilmore as well as Williams were optimistic.

“We are having a great time here on ISS,” Williams said Williams in an interview on July 10 from orbit. “Butch me and I’ve both been on ISS before, and it’s like returning home. So, yeah, it’s nice for us to have arrived.”

There’s been no announcements from the astronauts however, we’re getting old this point. One thing to consider is the issue of sleeping. Space station is outfitted with just six sleeping spaces–phone booth-sized private pods, each with sleeping bags and storage space for food and personal items as well as two laptops bonded to the walls. The rooms aren’t soundproof however, astronauts are able to sleep with headphones on while listening to music or listening to the sounds of Earth.

However, the half dozen enclosures means that three astronauts remain hanging. A third astronaut in the station together with Williams are sleeping in a more basic sleep room dubbed CASA. CASA (for the Crew Alternative Sleep Accommodation) inside Space Station’s Columbus module, a lab designed in the European Space Agency. Wilmore has a place to stay in a simple sleeping bag in Japan’s Space Agency’s Kibo module.

“Butch is going to have to rough it a little bit,” Williams said to me in a joking tone at the time, in May. Wilmore was faced with just eight days of out-of-doors living.

The schedule of work the two astronauts follow has been drastically altered in the last two months. At first, they were expected to spend the majority of their eight days in orbit on the Starliner, checking its communication, life support power, as well as other systems. However, they have since wrapped their checklists and are now assisting the crew in research and maintenance tasks which include such mundane tasks like repairing an urinary processing system.

As the rest of the team, Williams and Wilmore follow their own busy schedules that is written by a tablet computer that lists the day’s chores, breaks, and meal times written down in 15 minute increments. A red marker is able to move through the calendar in real-time, letting the astronauts know whether they’re keeping up or slipping behind.

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“Some days you feel like you’re just chasing the red line,” astronaut Nicole Stott, a space station veteran, said to me in the year 2017.

In the initial two months in space, Wilmore and Williams were living with only the way of changing clothes because they didn’t pack for a month-long stay. Astronauts don’t do laundry in space. Instead, they eliminate clothes and transform to new ones regularly. The week before Cygnus, a Cygnus-powered resupply vehicle designed by Northrop Grumman, arrived at the station with 8,200 pounds. of equipment, fresh food such as fruits and vegetables as well as fresh clothing that were for use by those on the Starliner crew.

First flight by a brand new crewed American spacecraft was only five times in the past, and included the first flights of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo space shuttle Columbia and Dragon vessels. Wilmore as well as Williams joined the likes of NASA giants like Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Young, and Wally Schirra in embarking on the very first tests.

“Every now and then, you have to stop and reflect and see your place and understand that, ‘Wow, this is really an honor,'” Williams said to that to me back in May. “It’s very humbling to be following the footsteps of the folks who have gone before.”

These people were able to return home in the same vessel that carried them to the top of the world. If Boeing isn’t able to pull off the same feat again, it’s the entire company as well as the spacemen who will suffer the consequences.