NASA Astronauts Return After Unexpectedly Long Mission

Astronauts land off the coast of Florida on March 18 (NASA/Keegan Barber)

On Mar. 17,  just before 6pm, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who had embarked on a week-long mission that lasted nine months, landed off the coast of Florida. A replacement crew of US astronauts, Anne McClain and Nicole Ayers, as well as Takuya Onishi (Japan) and Kirill Peskov (Russia), had arrived aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday. The astronauts will soon fly back to Johnson Space Center in Houston.

On June 5, 2024, the thrusters on Boeing's Starliner Spacecraft that took Williams and Wilmore to the ISS malfunctioned, and there were multiple helium leaks. For this reason, in August, NASA made the decision to return the Boeing Starliner without Williams and Wilmore. Both the astronauts and NASA have pushed back on the narrative that the astronauts were “abandoned” or “stuck” in space. NASA stated that they decided to keep Williams and Wilmore as part of the space crew rotation for “technical and budgetary reasons” Furthermore, the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that brought the astronauts home has been docked on the ISS since September.

The ISS is a collaboration between five space agencies and acts as a hub for space science research. While on the ISS, Williams and Wilmore did around 1,000 hours of scientific research as well as maintenance work. Their research focused on microbes and involved testing how microbes produce nutrients in space and how weightlessness affects microscopic organisms.

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore before their launch on June 5, 2024 (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara, File)

Some people raised concerns about the effect of the stay on their health. It is true that their 286 days in space place Williams and Wilmore among the astronauts who have spent the longest consecutive days in space, with the longest spaceflight by a US astronaut being 371 days (completed by Frank Rubio in 2023). Extended time in space does have a significant impact on the individual's health, impacting eyesight and potentially causing genetic changes or skin rashes. The weightlessness associated with being in zero gravity causes a one percent decrease in bone density for every month spent in space. Additionally, being in space can create an “accelerated model for disease.” Dr. Afshin Beheshti, director of the Center for Space Biomedicine at the University of Pittsburgh, explains “you don’t age faster, it’s just that all of the things associated with aging, like cardiovascular risk or cognitive issues … Everything is kind of sped up in space because of that environment.” Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s commercial crew program stressed that the astronauts “looked very healthy” and were “about normal for the landing and recovery phase, where their body is trying to re-adapt.”

Boeing has worked with NASA on space projects since the 1960s, but has been marred by high profile failures in recent years. The ISS Crew Capsule, which NASA contracted Boeing for, failed to reach space in a test in 2019 and has had problems with propulsion system failures and flammability issues since its successful launch in 2022. These events compound the already poor public image of Boeing, with fatal airplane crashes in 2018 and 2019 and the door-plug blowout in 2024. Many worry about Boeing's trustworthiness following these events.