NASA's Boeing Starliner stranded astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have gotten an extended stay on the International Space Station (ISS), denying feeling “stranded” or “stuck” 250 miles above Earth.
According to Independent, Williams and Wilmore went into the ISS in June 2024 on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner, but due to thruster and helium leak issues in the spacecraft, the capsule returned to Earth without them in September.
In a recent conversation with CNN's Anderson Cooper, mission extensions are part of their job, and they did not feel stranded.
Wilmore told Cooper, “We come prepared, we come committed. That is what your human spaceflight program is: It prepares for any and all contingencies that we can conceive of, and we prepare for those. We don't feel abandoned. We don't feel stuck. We don't feel stranded."
“We would never expect to come back, just special for us or anyone, unless it was a medical issue or something really, really out of the (normal) circumstances... Help us change the rhetoric. Let's change it to 'prepared and committed,’" he added.
Furthermore, NASA on February 11, 2025, announced that Williams and Wilmore will return back in Elon Musk’s SpaceX Crew Dragon scheduled to launch on March 12, 2025.
