If you go somewhere expecting an eight-day trip and can’t leave for eight months, most people would consider that “being stranded.”
That’s what happened to two NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who traveled to the International Space Station aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in June. During the test flight, the propulsion system failed, and engineers aren’t sure it will get the two astronauts back to Earth alive.
So doesn’t this mean the astronauts will be stranded?
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Delian Asparouhov, founder and president of Varda Space Industries, which aims to produce medicine and other materials in space, posted on social media platform X: “I don’t know about you, but if I’m stranded in an airport for seven months longer than expected, that definitely qualifies as ‘stranded.'”
But for astronauts who spend their careers hoping to travel to space, the extra time in orbit (currently 10 weeks and counting) isn’t as much a nightmarish struggle for survival as Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut character in “The Martian.”
In fact, it might be more like your boss asking you to extend a short business trip to Paris by six months.
“Butch and I have been here before, and it feels like I’ve come home,” Williams, who has spent two extended periods on the space station, said at a news conference last month. “It’s great to be here, so I’m not complaining.”
Whether or not Williams and Wilmore remain stranded, NASA faces a difficult decision within the next week about the safest way to get them back to Earth.
If NASA decides that problems with Starliner’s propulsion system pose too great a risk, it will switch to a backup plan and fly the two astronauts home aboard a Crew Dragon craft made by Boeing rival SpaceX.
That will make juggling astronaut assignments to the space station a challenge. The next Crew Dragon, scheduled to launch in late September, will take two astronauts to the space station instead of four, leaving two seats for Williams and Wilmore on the return trip around February of next year.
NASA and Boeing officials avoided using the words “stuck” and “stranded” over the summer, which would have added another blemish to a spacecraft that has been delayed by technical glitches for years.
“I think reporters use vague language to engage their audience,” said Lori Garver, who served as NASA’s deputy administrator during the Obama administration. “We’re all used to it. I don’t think it’s worth getting defensive about, but they’re not really stuck either.”
First, while NASA and Boeing have said the Starliner will spend at least eight days at the space station, officials say this is a test flight designed to tease out problems, so it’s no surprise that things aren’t perfect.
“I think we all knew it was going to take longer than this,” said Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program executive. “We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about how much longer, but I think my regret is that we didn’t say, ‘We’re going to stay there until we get everything we want done.'”
The reasons for the astronauts’ long stay—or, if you prefer, their stranding—include the Starliner’s 28 thrusters, known as the reaction control system it uses for maneuvering. As it approached the space station, five of them failed. Although four were revived and the Starliner docked safely, concerns persisted that they could fail again on the return journey.
Ground tests showed that the problem may have been caused by the Teflon seal inside the thrusters expanding, restricting the thruster flow.
But subsequent test firings of Starliner’s thrusters in orbit showed that performance had returned to near-normal. This was puzzling, because a warped Teflon seal wouldn’t be expected to return to its original shape. This raised the possibility that something else was causing the thruster problems.
Joseph Fragola, an aviation safety expert who did not work on Starliner but worked with similar thrusters on the lunar lander during the Apollo program in the 1970s, said the imbalance in the thrusters could lead to debris building up inside the thrusters. That could explain the diminished performance of the thrusters, and the residue would then evaporate, explaining why the thrusters are now working normally.
“I don’t know if that’s their problem, but it took us a long time to solve it,” Fragola said.
If that’s a problem, it could pose a serious hazard. The unstable mixture of residue and propellants could lead to an explosion, Fragola said.
NASA officials offer another reason to support their claim that Williams and Wilmore are not truly stranded: They are so confident in the Starliner that the two astronauts would use it in the event of an emergency evacuation from the space station.
That wasn’t the case in December 2022, when a Russian Soyuz capsule’s radiator leaked, sending all of its coolant flying into space. Frank Rubio, a NASA astronaut, had traveled to the space station on the Soyuz, and NASA officials decided the damaged spacecraft wasn’t safe enough for an emergency because temperatures inside could be lethal during re-entry. At that time, a temporary seat was added for Rubio on a Crew Dragon that was also docked at the space station.
Rubio was stranded on the space station until Russia sent a replacement Soyuz. He was scheduled to spend six months on the space station, but he ended up breaking the record for the longest time in orbit by an American astronaut: 371 days.
The extended stay of Williams, Wilmore, and Rubio may have been unplanned, but it was not inconvenient, as a large amount of supplies were brought in via cargo spaceship.
That wasn’t the case in 2003. That wasn’t the case for astronaut Don Pettit, currently in Russia preparing for his fourth space flight and preparing for a launch to the space station scheduled for Sept. 11. During his first space flight two decades ago, he was one of three astronauts aboard the space station when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during re-entry.
Pettit, the senior NASA official currently overseeing the status of Starliner and then-ISS commander Ken Bowersox, and Russian astronaut Nikolai Budarin are not currently in danger, the statement said.
But as the three crew members grappled with the deaths of seven NASA astronauts—their friends and colleagues—Pettit and Bowersox quickly realized that the Atlantis shuttle that was supposed to pick them up next month wouldn’t be arriving anytime soon. They began rationing supplies.
“We were immediately faced with a shortage of water, food and clothing, and we did the best we could to get that help,” Pettit said in an interview Friday.
There was plenty of material there, Pettit said in a 2015 NASA interview, but no one knew how long the shuttles would be on the ground.
“It’s like you’re sitting on a mountain of food and clothing and you start rationing it out not for your own mission but to expand other people’s missions,” Pettit said.
There are no washing machines in space, so clothes are worn for a few days, then used as rags and then thrown away. Pettit said the astronauts ended up wearing their suits longer than planned.
“A telltale sign that it’s time to change your underwear is when a rash starts to appear on your lower back,” Pettit says.
Pettit and his crewmates finally returned to Earth aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in May 2003, three months later than planned.
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