Two NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, were initially scheduled for an eight-day mission but ended up spending eight months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) due to a spacecraft malfunction. While the president suggested they were stranded, NASA opted for caution and kept them at the ISS while planning a safe return. They are now part of a regular crew, completing a six-month mission.
NASA 's Boeing Crew Flight Test astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore pose with Expedition 71 Flight Engineers Mike Barratt and Tracy C. Dyson , both NASA astronauts, in their spacesuits aboard the International Space Station 's Quest airlock in June 2024. Photograph via NASA .
virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” and that he’d just asked Elon Musk to go retrieve them. But the President said a lot of things last week, and not all of them turned out to be true. The allegedly stranded astronauts traveled to space aboard a craft called the Boeing Starliner. That trip did not go as planned. Prior to docking at the Space Station, the StarlinerThis $4.2 billion spacecraft was “acting like my old, cheap car that I used to have,” says McDowell, who writes the long-running newsletter. “You’d have to sort of coddle it to make it do its thing.” His point is that the Starliner still worked, but the source of the issues was not totally clear.
“Sometimes you can tell in the body language if the astronauts are not really happy with what’s going on,” McDowell says, “but they seem pretty happy up there.” Coleman, a retired astronaut who worked five or so months at the Space Station, agrees. Astronauts wait for years to get missions, so they tend to treasure their time in space.
And are these hardworking astronauts racking up tons of overtime since their eight-day mission ballooned?
NASA Space Station Astronauts Boeing Starliner Spacecraft Malfunction
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