If you go somewhere expecting to stay for eight days and you can’t leave for eight months, most people would consider you “stranded.”
That’s what happened to Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, two NASA astronauts who traveled to the International Space Station in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. During the test flight, the propulsion system malfunctioned, and engineers aren’t sure it would bring the two astronauts back to Earth alive.
Doesn’t this mean the astronauts are stranded?
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Delian Asparouhov, founder and president of Varda Space Industries, which aims to produce medicines and other materials in space, posted on the social media platform X: “I don’t know about you, but if I was stuck at an airport for seven months longer than expected, that would definitely be considered ‘stranded.'”
But for astronauts who spend their careers hoping to travel to space, the extra time in orbit (now 10 weeks) isn’t a nightmarish struggle for survival, as it is for Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut character in the movie “The Martian.”
It could actually be more like your boss asking you if you would like to extend a short business trip to Paris by six months.
“Butch and I have been here before, and it feels like coming home,” Williams, who has made two previous extended stays on the space station, said during a news conference last month. “It’s great to be here, so I’m not complaining.”
Whether Williams and Wilmore are stranded or not, NASA must make a difficult decision within a week about the safest way to return them to Earth.
If NASA concludes that the problems with Starliner’s propulsion system pose too great a risk, it will switch to an alternative plan and send the two astronauts home in Crew Dragon, a spacecraft built by Boeing rival SpaceX.
That, in turn, will lead to a sleight of hand with astronaut assignments to the space station. The next Crew Dragon, scheduled to launch in late September, would carry 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.
All summer, NASA and Boeing officials have hesitated to use the words “stalled” and “stranded,” which would be another black mark on a spacecraft that has been delayed for years by technical setbacks.
“I think reporters use imprecise language to attract viewers,” said Lori Garver, who served as NASA’s deputy director during the Obama administration. “We’re all used to that. I don’t think it’s worth getting defensive about, but they’re not really stuck.”
First, while NASA and Boeing said Starliner would stay at the space station for at least eight days, officials point out that this is a test flight designed to discover problems, so it’s no surprise that not everything went perfectly, they say.
“I think we all knew it was going to take longer,” said Mark Nappi, the Boeing official in charge of the Starliner program. “We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about how long it was going to take, but I think my regret is that we didn’t just say, ‘We’re going to stay there until we’ve done everything we want to do.'”
The reasons for the astronauts’ extended visit—or stranding, if you prefer—have to do with 28 thrusters, known as the reaction control system that Starliner uses for maneuvers. During its approach to the space station, five of them malfunctioned. Although four were revived and Starliner docked safely, concerns remained that they would fail again on the return trip.
Ground tests indicated that the problem may have been caused by a Teflon seal in the thrusters expanding, restricting the flow of fuel.
But subsequent test firings of Starliner’s thrusters in orbit showed that performance had returned to nearly normal. That was puzzling, because you wouldn’t expect a deformed Teflon seal to return to its original shape. That raised the possibility that something else was causing the thruster problems.
Joseph Fragola, an aerospace safety expert who did not work on Starliner but did work on similar thrusters on the lunar lander during the Apollo program in the 1970s, said an imbalance of propellant could have led to a buildup of debris in the thrusters. That would also explain the reduced performance of the thrusters, and the residue could later evaporate, explaining why the thrusters are now functioning normally.
“I don’t know if that’s the problem, but it took us a long time to solve that problem,” Fragola said.
If that is a problem, it could pose a serious hazard. The residue and an unbalanced mix of propellants could cause an explosion, Fragola said.
NASA officials offer another reason to support their claim that Williams and Wilmore are not actually stranded: they remain so confident that Starliner would be used by two astronauts in the event of a space station emergency.
That wasn’t the case in December 2022, when a Russian Soyuz capsule’s radiator leaked, sending all of the vehicle’s coolant into space. A NASA astronaut, Frank Rubio, had traveled to the space station in the Soyuz, and NASA officials decided the damaged spacecraft wasn’t safe enough for an emergency because temperatures inside it could reach lethal levels during re-entry. At that point, a jury-rigged seat was added for Rubio in a Crew Dragon that was also docked with the station.
Rubio was likely stranded on the space station until Russia sent a replacement Soyuz. He was supposed to stay on the station for six months, but he ended up setting the record for the longest stay in orbit by a U.S. astronaut: 371 days.
The extended stays for Williams, Wilmore and Rubio may not have been planned, but they were uncomfortable, as supplies were being brought in by cargo spacecraft.
That wasn’t the case in 2003 for Don Pettit, an astronaut currently in Russia preparing for his fourth spaceflight, a launch to the space station scheduled for September 11. During his first spaceflight 20 years ago, he was one of three astronauts on the space station when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry.
Pettit, NASA’s Ken Bowersox, who is currently a senior NASA official overseeing the Starliner situation and was commander of the ISS at the time, and Nikolai Budarin, a Russian astronaut, were not in immediate danger.
But as the three-man crew grappled with the deaths of seven NASA astronauts — their friends and colleagues — Pettit and Bowersox also quickly realized that the shuttle Atlantis, scheduled to pick them up the following month, would not be arriving anytime soon. They began rationing supplies.
“We immediately ran into a water shortage, a food shortage, a clothing shortage, and we expanded those supplies as best we could,” Pettit said in an interview Friday.
In a 2015 NASA interview, Pettit said there were more than enough supplies. But no one knew how long the shuttles would be grounded.
“It’s like you’re sitting on a mountain of food and clothing, and you start rationing those things, not because you need them for your own mission, but because you’re doing it to extend 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 clothes longer than planned.
“If you get a rash around your midsection, it’s time to change your underwear,” Pettit says.
Pettit and his crew eventually returned to Earth in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in May 2003, three months later than planned.
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