Boeing Starliner astronauts remain busy on ISS, but 'eventually we want to go home'

Now officially seven months on board the International Space Station, the two NASA astronauts who flew up on Boeing’s Starliner last June have a busy schedule in the new year while awaiting their flight home in the spring.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived to the ISS on June 5 on board Starliner, but remained on board after NASA decided to send the spacecraft home without crew because of safety reasons. The duo joined fellow NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Don Pettit for a call from the ISS with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy on Wednesday.

“I want to ask Butch and Suni if you will put to rest, what reporters still keep asking me about how you’re stranded, that they’re concerned that you don’t have any clothes, that you don’t have any food,” Nelson said. “Would you put to rest for the final time, and I hope you never have to answer it again, just how you all are doing?”

Wilmore jumped in to confirm that when the duo first flew up on Starliner for what was originally planned to be as short as an eight-day visit, that there were some clothing issues. Starliner had made a late cargo switch to bring up some emergency hardware needed to make the bathroom work on the station, and because of that, the two crew had to leave behind some personal belongings.

“It was well known that we came up here, we swapped out a couple of components we needed on space station for some of our clothes. So we wore some clothes for a while, but that doesn’t bother us, because, you know, clothes fit loosely up here. It’s not like on Earth where you sweat and it gets bad. I mean, they fit loosely, so you can wear things, honestly, for weeks at a time, and it doesn’t bother you at all.”

The duo have since been reoutfitted with plenty of clothes, he said, with the arrival of Crew-9 last fall, which will eventually be the ride home for Williams and Wilmore.

He also commented that everyone on board is well fed.

“I’ve never seen anyone ever, ever eat as much as Don Pettit can eat. It is amazing to watch this man eat as skinny as he is. So that’s just been a joy within itself,” Wilmore said.

Melroy doubled down on debunking the “stranded” storyline that has perpetuated in some media outlets during the Starliner astronauts’ extended stay.

“So what you’re telling us is you’re not channeling ‘Cast Away,’ and you don’t have a volleyball with a handprint on it that you call Wilson,” Melroy said.

Williams, who actually became the commander for what is now Expedition 72, noted there is too much work to do to think those sort of thoughts.

“No, we’ve got a whole team up here, so we’re not worried about that. And there’s a lot to do as well with the team on the ground,” she said. “We had tons of science experiments with SpaceX (cargo resupply mission) 31. We’ve got space walks coming up. It was really busy when we were waiting for Nick (Hague) to get up here. And it’s just been a joy to be working up here, particularly with our counterparts on the other end of the space station.”

Williams and Hague are slated to perform at least one spacewalk later this month with Wilson and Wilmore potentially going out for second one a week later.

“It’s just a great team, and, no, it doesn’t feel like we’re cast away. Yeah, eventually we want to go home, because we left our families a little while ago, but we have a lot to do while we’re up here,” Williams said. “We’ve got to get all that stuff done before we go home.”

The Starliner astronauts officially became part of the Crew-9 crew when the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom arrived on Sept. 29 with Hague as commander along with mission specialist Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Those two flew up with two seats empty so Wilmore and Williams could have a ride home.

Crew-9 won’t depart the ISS, though, until the arrival of its replacement Crew-10, currently targeting launch in late March.

That could mean Crew-9 may not return to Earth until early April as there would usually be about a week after a replacement crew’s arrival for a handoff period, which could mean Wilmore and Williams would have spent close to 10 months on board.

NASA’s Pettit is on board having arrived on a Soyuz, and will return home on the same Soyuz spacecraft in March.

Williams this week moved into second place for number of combined days by a NASA astronaut in space. With 538 days and counting among three visits to the ISS since 2006, she only trails former NASA astronaut and now Axiom Space employee Peggy Whitson who has logged more than 675 days in space, and has at least one more on tap as commander of the Axiom 4 mission later this year.

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