They should make a movie about this, it was all fun we were going to space for 8 days and stayed for 9 MONTHS STRANDED NO WAY BACK HOME. i felt so bad for them honestly. Glad they’re safe and home now.
They had a way back home if they needed to. They just didn't have a ride up for their replacements for a few months, so they asked them to stay longer to keep the ISS mission going.
Becoming a NASA astronaut is extremely hard. You have to check a ridiculous number of boxes, and you have to really want it. I think anyone who goes through this process would prefer a 6 month stay on the space station over a 2 week stay on the space station, and the 6 month stay is what they got.
NASA kept them safe and fed, I really don't think you can reasonably knock them from this perspective.
I think the only people who can say they'd prefer an unexpected 9 month stay vs a planned 2 week stay are the ones that were "asked" to stay, and no one else.
Feels like they've been put between a wall and a sword: either they abandon the ISS or come back home. I don't know how I'd feel about that.
You really, really need to read about the actual situation before commenting. They always had a way of coming home at any point if they needed to. There was a literal whole planning session, all publicly available on Nasa's media channels detailing in great depth the steps that were taken prior to Starliner departing to ensure there was always a guaranteed safe way to get them home, even in the event of an entire station evac.
As I say, it's amazing how effective lying to people has become that you genuinely bought that total load of crap that they were stranded.
Erm they didn't plan to go on some 8 days business trip for some work project.
This is their life and profession. The job is extremely difficult, dangerous and mega mega expensive. Hence they don't get to do it as much as they love. Now they did.
What is this about "planning" stuff? They trained and volunteered as astronauts/cosmonauts, and that still typically entails a military career as well, and military families indeed suffer the absence of loved ones, but that is always part of the collective sacrifice that makes America, well, great... and astronauts are public figures, celebrities, smiling for the camera and making prepared statements at each milestone, and that glory they earned this for this crew was simply following orders and being trained/prepared for all eventualities while the rocket scientists worked out the logistics.
And if you follow JPL robotic missions that far outlast their mission objectives and keep going like Energizer Bunnies, then is it not sort of amazing that the astronauts really suffered no privations or hardships, in terms of food/shelter/clothing/hygiene, by extending their missions and doing useful things up there?
People watch "The Martian" and "Lost in Space" and they can't seem to grasp the careful pre-planning, incident response, resource allocation, and orcestration that goes into everything that's done by space programs.
Space missions include sprawling, branching flow-charts of every contingency they imagined, and they inform the press of mission objectives and a proposed timeline, and then life happens and when glitches come up, they roll with them because they prepared for them. Apollo 13, for example, is categorically different than a space habitation in Earth orbit; as a lone vehicle with limited resources and an isolated path, that Apollo mission ran out of planned contingencies to the point of improvising so many things and returning to fundamentals, preserving human life.
It's the peril of human life that definitely adds drama for us, and the ISS being influenced by geopolitics is categorically different than the nationalist glories of Mercury-Gemini-Apollo vs. the Soviets. But with ISS in Earth orbit, receiving regular resupply missions, being a habitable outpost, it's far different than sending up a vehicle like the Space Shuttle while everyone speculates whether another Saturn V could be constructed in time to rescue the crew because tiles fell off their heat shield.
Speaking of Saturn, I've been peering into Greek/Roman mythology, and learning what Cronus/Saturn did with his children and how Aphrodite/Venus was born, gives new insight into super heavy-lift launch vehicles named after the deity.
Personally I don't think that's good enough justification. Being stuck in space doesn't make any country look good, if anything, it makes them look bad for their errors.
But the only people that can actually say this was bad or good are the astronauts themselves, only they know how much they love their work to turn the word "stranded" into something else positive.
> Being stuck in space doesn't make any country look good
They were not stuck in space
> But the only people that can actually say this was bad or good are the astronauts themselves
Multiple people that actually ran this mission have said multiple times that they were not stuck, and explained all the reasons for the extension. And yet you keep ignoring everything except the narrative of "stuck" and "stranded".
oh I don't know, grueling rehab and moderate health consequences in exchange for getting to spend nine months in space seems like it'd be a deal many would take.
"Another astronaut comments on what the Crew-9 people can expect: "The returning astronauts will "struggle to walk, get dizzy easily, and have bad eyesight", because the "build-up of fluid changes the shape of their eyeballs, and weakens their vision". They may need glasses for the rest of their lives.""
They knew these risks when they signed up, and the queue of people dreaming to be astronauts despite these risks is enormous. Some crew members coming back on this mission had gone multiple times.
And loved every minute of being up there. They were promised 8 days in space and got 8 months doing awesome science on the ISS. They’re astronauts; they live for this stuff.
There is always a way home from the ISS. There are always enough spacecraft, including Soyuz, docked to ISS to save the cosmonauts in case of emergency.
See, we can all put stuff in capitals. Doesn't make it true.
Even if you defined "stranded" as being "unable to use the Starliner", then they weren't stranded in September. They could have decided to get in the ship and go home. Not like there's some political officers on board ready to stop them.
If there was any political motivation at all it would simply be to save Boeing's arse. They're one of two commercial airliner manufacturers in the world, so the US clearly has a vested interest in keeping them running.
Q. Did politics influence NASA's decision for you to stay longer in space?
Wilmore: From my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all. From our standpoint, I think that they would agree, we came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short. That's what we do in human spaceflight
The Ars article is filled with mixed messages.
When Starliner had issues, the already prepared backup plan was for them to join the crew and stay until "no earlier than February 2025" and be picked up by SpaceX on the crew rotation.
The early February SpaceX crew rotation was then pushed back by SpaceX to late March.
All of that was already "in the pipeline" as plans and contingency plans before Wilmore even left Earth.
Any offer by Musk falls more in the PR by Musk bucket side of the equation, and as an out of band out of scope offer it was likely just rejected due to there already being a rotation in the works ... which Musk had to push back in any case, casting doubt on any SpaceX ability to met any early pickup offer by Musk.
It's not mixed messaging if you understand the position the astronauts are in. Modern NASA has become deeply intertwined with politics. Many of the things they do are awful ideas and/or will never come to fruition. For instance Artemis is never going anywhere. Any person reasonably well informed in space, including every single astronaut, could offer countless reasons why. But in public they're required to smile, nod, and cheer its inevitable success on. If they don't - they're never going to fly again.
So astronauts will answer direct factual questions truthfully - but their opinions are not going to be given in earnest, but rather 100% political.
And there was no prepared backup for Starliner. That launch had been delayed for years and by the time it actually got off the ground (which never should have been allowed), it was probably as much a shock to NASA (and Boeing) as to everybody else. The final plan was only decided long after the fact, and caused major issues.
Whether the astronauts are rescued after 8 months or a week doesn't change the issue, as far as Boeing's unreliability in space goes. If anything the delay is even more damaging to Boeing because it's an ongoing issue that received ongoing coverage, constantly painting Boeing in a negative light.
