Months late: Suni Williams and Barry Wilmore back on earth
A few days on board the ISS turned into months for Suni Williams and Barry Wilmore due to problems with the Boeing Starline. Now they have returned.
The SpaceX capsule in water
(Image: NASA)
NASA astronaut Suni Williams and her colleague Barry Wilmore are back on Earth after around nine months on the International Space Station (ISS). Their spacecraft fell into the sea off the coast of Florida on Monday local time as planned. NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov were also on board. “I see a capsule full of grins from ear to ear,” said Hague after the landing, which was broadcast live by NASA. It was “beautiful”, added NASA manager Joel Montalbano. “It's great to have Crew 9 back home.” The return flight had taken around 17 hours.
Williams and Wilmore were the first people to fly to the ISS in Boeing's new Starliner at the beginning of June. However, due to technical problems, the spacecraft was unable to fly them back and had to return to Earth empty. Instead, NASA sent only two space travelers to the ISS at the end of September with a Crew Dragon from Boeing's competitor SpaceX. Two seats on board remained free for Williams and Wilmore. Contrary to what is often claimed, the two were not stranded there, but were working and waiting for the scheduled return flight of their space capsule. It was only because the launch of the next SpaceX space capsule was delayed that their departure was postponed by a few weeks.
After taking office as US President, Donald Trump turned the incident into a political issue and accused his predecessor of abandoning the two on the ISS. He instructed the head of SpaceX to bring them back earlier, which has now been achieved after the back and forth about the return flight – albeit only by a few days. Last weekend, the four-member Crew 10 arrived on the ISS with a Crew Dragon, consisting of Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers from NASA, Takuya Onishi from Japan and the Russian Kirill Peskov. They have now stayed behind with the American Don Pettit and the two Russian cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner.
Long-term stay is not unproblematic
The unscheduled long-term stay of Williams and Wilmore on the ISS required some of the trickiest decisions in NASA's history: in addition to the astronauts' safety as the top priority, they also had to consider that they would need additional supplies such as food and hygiene articles on board the space station. In addition, the extended stay exposed them to more radiation than originally estimated. Meanwhile, the future of Boeing's Starliner remains uncertain. Williams and Wilmore had never flown in a Crew Dragon before – and had completed the necessary landing training in a modified form on board the ISS before the return flight.
(mho)