One of the most closely watched astronaut missions of recent memory came to a dramatic close this week as NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore made their triumphant return from the International Space Station.
Originally expected to spend just eight days in orbit, the duo ultimately stayed 286 days — or more than nine months.
The unvarnished facts of the saga are dramatic enough: The Boeing Starliner vehicle they piloted to the orbiting laboratory in June hit one snag after another, including helium leaks and engine outages.
Weeks of troubleshooting ensued. Boeing downplayed the troubles. And NASA ultimately overruled the company, deciding in August the astronauts would stay on the space station and wait to come home aboard the next available SpaceX capsule.
And that was all before President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk began interjecting their own narrative, asserting Williams and Wilmore were “abandoned” — a descriptor the astronauts themselves have rejected.
NASA’s Butch Wilmore (from left), Roscosmos’ Aleksandr Gorbunov, and NASA’s Nick Hague and Suni Williams are seen inside a SpaceX Dragon capsule after it was hoisted onto a recovery ship on Tuesday. NASA/Getty Images
Despite the outsize interest in the unexpected journey, this mission was not record-breaking: A 371-day stay from NASA’s Frank Rubio, for example, was much longer (and included intrigue over a rare tomato grown in space that went missing!).
Williams and Wilmore routinely emphasized they were prepared to take on the scientific and technical aspects of extending their stay and joining the space station crew.
The pair conducted spacewalks and carried out 900 hours of research in microgravity.
Lunar update
While Williams and Wilmore offered new insights into how humans can adapt to life in an extraterrestrial habitat, another pivotal mission helped pave the way for astronauts to venture deeper into space.
Blue Ghost, the robotic lunar lander developed by Texas company Firefly Aerospace, earlier this week concluded its historic 14 days of operation near the moon’s south pole. The vehicle carried 10 NASA research instruments designed to study the moon before the space agency plans to send humans later this decade.
Firefly deemed the mission the first “fully successful” commercial moon landing. (That’s a subtle jab at Firefly’s competitor, Intuitive Machines.)
Blue Ghost beamed about 120 gigabytes of data — equivalent to more than 24,000 songs — back to Earth before signing off Sunday.
In its final dispatch, the automated lander declared it had entered “Monument Mode” and said it will “hold vigil … to watch humanity’s continued journey to the stars.”
