How Two Stranded Astronauts Are Camping Out in Space

The last time I talked to Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams—the two astronauts now stranded aboard the International Space Station (ISS)—was on May 1, 2024. At the time, they were in pre-flight medical quarantine at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, preparing for a May 6 liftoff. The plan was for a brisk and breezy mission—test-flying Boeing’s brand-new Starliner spacecraft up to the ISS for a short eight-day cruise. Both astronauts had been aboard the station before, and both enjoyed the months they spent there. But they were excited about this mission in their Starliner and saw merit in its brevity. The ship can be flown more than once, and the sooner the astronauts returned theirs to Earth, the sooner it could be checked out and made ready for another flight.

“We want to go and get back as quickly as possible so they [can] turn our spacecraft around and also take all those lessons learned and incorporate it into the next Starliner,” Williams told me.

That next Starliner—and even any reflight of the current Starliner—is now very much open to question. The original May 6 launch was scrubbed due to a leaky valve in the upper stage of the crew’s Atlas V rocket. When Williams and Wilmore at last got off the ground on June 5, they did not even make it to the station before they started experiencing other problems—namely failures in some of their thrusters and, later, leaks in the gaseous helium that keeps the thrusters pressurized. Their eight-day stay, which was supposed to end on June 13, has now stretched to more than two months, as Boeing and NASA troubleshoot the thruster problems, trying to determine if the Starliner is a safe enough ship for the astronauts to fly home.

On Aug. 7, NASA revealed that the answer may be no. Williams’ and Wilmore’s short stay may now not be over until February—stretching an eight-day mission to an eight-month one. Rather than allow Starliner to carry the astronauts back to Earth, the space agency is considering flying the spacecraft back empty. A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, intended to carry four people for a five-month station stay beginning in September, would instead be launched with just a crew of two, leaving the other two seats empty to bring Williams and Wilmore home next year.

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So how are the astronauts doing on a crowded space station that is typically home to just six or seven people and is now accommodating nine? Last month, after 35 days in space, Wilmore and Williams were sanguine. 

“We are having a great time here on ISS,” said Williams during a July 10 press conference from orbit. “Butch and I have been up here before and it feels like coming home. So yeah, it’s great to be here.”

We haven't heard any more dispatches from the astronauts, but it has to be getting old by now. For one thing, there’s the matter of sleep. The space station is equipped with only six sleep chambers—phone booth-sized privacy pods with a sleeping bag and a storage area for snacks and personal supplies, along with two laptop computers bungeed to the walls. The enclosures aren’t sound-proof, but the astronauts can fall asleep wearing headphones playing music or sounds of Earth.

But the half a dozen enclosures mean three astronauts are left hanging. One of the astronauts who was already aboard the station, along with Williams, bunk down in a more spartan sleep chamber called a CASA (for Crew Alternate Sleep Accommodation) in the space station’s Columbus module, a laboratory built by the European Space Agency. Wilmore is camping out in a mere sleeping bag in the Japanese Space Agency’s Kibo module.

“Butch is going to have to rough it a little bit,” Williams told me with a laugh, back in May when Wilmore faced the prospect of just eight days of such in-the-open living.

The work schedule the two astronauts are following has changed dramatically over the past two months. Initially, they were to spend most of their eight days aloft working in the Starliner—checking its communications, life support, power, and other systems. But they long since finished up that checklist and have instead been assisting the rest of the crew with science experiments and maintenance chores, including such unglamorous work as repairing a urine processing pump.

Like the rest of the crew, Williams and Wilmore follow a busy work schedule, one dictated by a computer tablet with the day’s chores, breaks, and meal intervals written out in 15-minute increments. A red marker moves through the schedule in real time, letting the astronauts know if they are keeping pace or falling behind.

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“Some days you feel like you’re just chasing the red line,” astronaut Nicole Stott, a space station veteran, told me during a conversation in 2017.

For their first two months aloft, Wilmore and Williams were making do with little in the way of changes of clothes, since they did not pack for a months-long stay. Astronauts do not do laundry in space and instead simply dispose of clothes and change into new ones periodically. Last week, a Cygnus resupply vehicle, built by Northrop Grumman, arrived at the station carrying 8,200 lbs. of hardware, fresh food like fruits and vegetables, and fresh clothes for the Starliner crew.

The first flight of a new crewed American spacecraft has happened only five times before, with the maiden voyages of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, space shuttle Columbia, and Dragon ships. Wilmore and Williams joined the likes of such NASA giants as Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Young, and Wally Schirra in embarking on those first test flights.

“Every now and then, you have to stop and reflect and see your place and understand that, ‘Wow, this is really an honor,’” Williams told me in May. “It's very humbling to be following the footsteps of the folks who have gone before.”

Those folks, of course, got to fly home in the same ship that took them aloft. If Boeing can’t manage that same feat this time, it will be the company, not just the astronauts, that will wind up humbled.