6.03.2025
Boeing Starliner 'Gilligan's Island' astronauts prepping to come home after NASA Crew-10 launch
Closing out an unexpected marathon mission marked by a malfunctioning Boeing Starliner spacecraft and political controversy, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are ramping up activities to return back to Earth from the International Space Station.
“When I talk about them, I sometimes joke that they’re like the Gilligan’s Island crew," retired NASA shuttle astronaut Winston Scott said during a Feb. 13 speech at the Florida Institute of Technology, drawing laughter from the audience.
"They went up for eight days — and it’s turned out to be eight, nine, ten months,” Scott said.
Wilmore and Williams, who earned a master's degree in engineering management from Florida Tech, launched into orbit June 4 during the maiden Starliner crewed test mission to the ISS. But the spacecraft's thrusters malfunctioned, and the duo's roughly weeklong mission got extended and remains underway. The Starliner capsule returned to Earth in September without people aboard.
Now, NASA’s next quartet of astronauts bound for the ISS — Crew-10 — is in routine pre-flight quarantine at Johnson Space Center in Houston. They are scheduled to fly into Kennedy Space Center on Friday, then launch at 7:48 p.m. March 12 from pad 39A aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket.
After a "handover period" of several days aboard the orbiting outpost, Wilmore and Williams will join the two Crew-9 members — NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — for a return trip inside the Dragon with splashdown off the Florida coastline.
"Had they said to return on Starliner, then we would have been happy to return on Starliner. That was not the case," Wilmore said Tuesday while floating inside the ISS during a Crew-9 pre-departure news conference.
"Our roles are different in these spacecraft, obviously. Suni and my role are different on Dragon than what it was on Starliner," Williams said.
"We are just fortunate and thankful, though, that we have seats. And we'll be coming home riding the plasma, splashing down in the ocean. So that's what we're looking forward to," he said.
Crew-10 consists of NASA astronauts Anne McClain (commander) and Nichole Ayers (pilot); Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi (mission specialist); and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov (mission specialist).
During Tuesday's news conference, Wilmore and Williams largely sidestepped questions from journalists regarding politics. In late January, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted a statementsaying President Donald Trump asked his company to bring the two astronauts home as soon as possible — "terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long," Musk said.
The comment sparked debate within the space community. Back in December, NASA announced the Crew-10 launch date would be pushed back from February to no earlier than late March to allow crews time to process a new Dragon spacecraft. But two weeks after Musk's tweet, NASA announced it would accelerate the Crew-10 target launch date to March 12 by using the previously flown Endurance capsule instead.
Wilmore said from his standpoint, politics did not play into the timing of his and Williams' postponed trip back home.
“We came up prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short. That’s what we do in human spaceflight," Wilmore said
"That’s what your nation’s human spaceflight program’s all about — planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that," Wilmore said.
Quelle: Florida Today