The 8-to-10-day space mission of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams has just become at least 30 days longer, and is now set to last 9 months.
Wilmore and Williams flew the first-ever crewed mission of flawed Boeing’s Starliner capsule to the International Space Station, but were left stranded there after the many issues with the craft that returned empty.
And now they will have to wait a little longer to rejoin us on Earth.
Space.com reported:
“The next crew rotation mission to the International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX’s Crew-10, has been delayed to no earlier than late March 2025, NASA announced on Tuesday (Dec. 17).
Crew-10 was originally slated to fly in February, but it has been pushed back to allow time for SpaceX to complete work on a brand-new Crew Dragon spacecraft for the mission, NASA said in a statement on Tuesday.”
Read: SpaceX Wins Contract To ‘Destroy’ NASA’s International Space Station
Because of the delay, the astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-9 flight will spend one more month in space, since they can’t depart the orbital laboratory until the Crew-10 arrives.
“Crew-9’s manifest includes NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched to the ISS on Starliner in early June and were integrated into the SpaceX mission when Starliner was forced to return to Earth without the astronauts aboard, due to vehicle complications and safety concerns.
The new delay will bring Wilmore and Williams’ time in space to around nine months in total — far longer than the 10 days or so their mission was originally expected to last.”
Wtach: SpaceX Crew-9 arrive at the ISS to conduct research and maintenance, and provide a ‘ride’ to Wilmore and Williams.
Welcome, #Crew9! After floating through the Dragon’s hatch, our new arrivals join the crew aboard the @Space_Station. They’ll spend five months conducting @ISS_Research and maintenance on the orbiting lab. pic.twitter.com/DJX7f9vxlg
— NASA (@NASA) September 29, 2024
Nine months in Space is not unheard of.
NASA astronauts have stayed on the ISS for far longer, including Frank Rubio spending more than 365 straight days, after he and two Russian cosmonauts prolonged their ISS mission when their Soyuz spacecraft sprang a leak.
Besides the considerable extension of their mission, there have also been widespread worries about weight loss and changes to Suni William’s body while on the unexpectedly-long-duration mission.
But she has made a point of saying that she is not weaker, but instead, stronger.
The Economic Times reported:
“’We have been up here for a couple of months, we’ve been working out here’, she said. ‘We have got a bike, we’ve got a treadmill and we have got weight-lifting equipment’.”
She also discussed the impact of exercise on her body.
“’I could definitely tell that weightlifting, which is not something that I do all the time, is something that has changed me. My thighs are a little bit bigger, my body is a little bit bigger, we do a lot of squats’, Williams noted. She further explained the importance of these exercises in maintaining bone density, particularly in the hips and feet, which are affected by prolonged time in space.”
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