The story could be a Hollywood movie, but it’s not. It might even become one.
They set out to spend eight days at a space station. But the trip lasted nine months.
On Tuesday (18), two NASA astronauts who had been in orbit since last June, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, returned home, concluding a saga that captivated the country since last summer.
Williams and Wilmore launched to the International Space Station on a test flight of the Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that would provide NASA with another option, alongside SpaceX, for transporting astronauts to and from orbit. But the Starliner had issues with its propulsion system, leading NASA to send it back to Earth without a crew on board.
And it was a SpaceX capsule, the Crew Dragon, that brought them back from space on Tuesday.
After months in weightlessness, with their bodies still adjusting to the force of gravity, they were taken from the capsule directly to stretchers.
“Everyone looked very healthy,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, during a press conference after the splashdown. “Everyone seemed to be feeling normal for the landing and recovery phase, where their bodies are trying to readjust.”
Why did they stay in space so long?
In recent months, there has been speculation about whether the astronauts were ‘stuck’ in space. NASA has repeatedly stated that they were not. Their stay up there was part of the schedule. The astronauts themselves agreed:
“It’s work. It’s fun. It’s been hard at times, no doubt,” Wilmore said in a space station interview last week with The New York Times. “But ‘stuck’? No. ‘Trapped’? No. ‘Abandoned’? No.”
According to a summary published by NASA, the astronauts at the space station, which is about 250 miles above Earth, performed a variety of tasks at the station, including maintenance work and nearly a thousand hours of scientific research.
This included a spacewalk by Williams and Wilmore to clean the exterior of the space station to see if Earth microbes could survive and perhaps even thrive in space.
Williams also helped set up an experiment to study how microbes produced nutrients like vitamins, and also conducted research on how weightlessness affected microscopic organisms that could be used to make food and medicine, NASA said.
The astronauts were able to connect with friends, family, and the public on the ground — they had access to email and video calls. Always trying to put a positive spin on the whole experience.
Source: The New York Times