NASA recently announced that two astronauts, who have been stranded at the International Space Station for months after the space agency ruled that a Boeing Starline spacecraft wasn’t safe enough to bring them home, will return to Earth in February aboard a SpaceX capsule.
The news has many wondering what this unplanned stay in space means for astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore.
Michael Fossum is a former astronaut who served as a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. He’s now the chief operating officer at Texas A&M’s Galveston campus. He says Williams and Wilmore are prepared for their extended time in space. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: This extended time in space, of course, was not part of the plan for the mission. What was your first thought when you heard that these astronauts might have to stay in space for a little longer?
Michael Fossum: This was a test mission. This was the first human flight of the new Boeing Starliner spacecraft, and you can always find things you don’t anticipate. So when they launched up there, there were worries about some problems with the systems and maybe worry about the spacecraft itself.
I’m not in the technical meetings, but I understand how NASA works. I was in there for a long time. So I’m not surprised that it came around to saying, “we have options. If we didn’t have options, we’d bring them home. Yeah, but we’ve got options.”
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has four seats. You can launch with two people. They’ve already done that once before. So they’ve got an option. And I’m actually proud of NASA and the decision making that led to this.
Well, I mentioned you did the astronaut job for 19 years, including three spaceflights and a stint as a commander of the International Space Station. So is the station prepared to host unexpected guests for such a long period?
Yes. The space station’s large. It’s about the size of 12 school buses – the internal volume of a 747. So there’s plenty of room up there, and there’s the facilities up there.
You also have to think in terms of the systems, because there’s systems to scrub the carbon dioxide out of the air, there’s systems to recycle the water back into drinking water. And those systems can handle it, too. There’s more of them now than there were previously.
And you’ve got to get the supplies up there. The food – there’s always extra food up there. Clothes. Normally, crews will launch with the clothes that they’re going to use during their time up there. In this case, Butch and Suni certainly needed to have sent up from the ground. And that has been set up. So they’re taking care of them.
And you not only know what it is like to live in space for an extended period – you know these particular astronauts. What can you tell us about Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore?
Suni was a classmate of mine I’ve known for over 25 years. And then Butch actually joined in the class two years after us. They’ve been colleagues and friends forever.
They’re absolute professionals. They’re naval aviators with combat experience. So they’ve been through very stressful situations before. They’re senior astronauts. They’ve done shuttle missions and long duration space station missions. So they know the drill. You’re not going to catch them off guard or by surprise.
And they know that things change, and you just don’t have a choice. And so I’m sure that they’re just like, “okay, well, this is it.” Knowing Suni, she’s kind of like “wahoo! I get to spend months in space, and I feel sorry for all those people that are trapped on Earth without the opportunity to come to space.”
I am a little jealous, I guess. Really, what are they doing up there? You’re sent up with a specific mission or a specific plan. With this extended, are they just twiddling their thumbs, or is there work to do up there at the International Space Station?
There’s always work to do on the space station. For most of the life of the space station, we’ve had a backlog of science experiments that we just didn’t have enough crews up there to take care of.
I have a feeling right now they’re working through that backlog fairly quickly with the larger crew up there – with Butch and Suni. I mean, they jumped in to work right away. I’m sure they’re cleaning out the backlog of work to do.
The human body is always under investigation for changes. They’ve already done a lot of those experiments when they were long duration crew members before. But we’re gathering the data on the human physiology, the changes to bones and muscle mass, cardiovascular fitness, etc. And so now we’re getting more data on more test subjects. So, it’s all time effectively used.
I think you touched on this a bit, but let me ask you just right out: Do you feel confident in NASA’s plan to to bring them home, even if it’s a little behind the original schedule?
Personal opinion – I was not in the decision making, but I think NASA’s doing exactly the right thing.
The Boeing spacecraft – I feel sorry for Boeing. This is an embarrassment to them. But again, it was a test mission. Test missions don’t always go perfectly. Sometimes they’ll tell you that that you’ve got stuff you need to continue working on. And that certainly appears to be true here. They found something they wish they hadn’t, but they found it. So this gives them the opportunity to improve that and figure out how to make the propulsion systems more robust.
But I think with the question marks they have with it, absolutely the right answer is “let’s go ahead and bring the crew home on the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft,” which has a lot more of a track record on it. It’s the best thing to do. It’s the safest thing to do. It’s a no-brainer.
Well, I wonder if you can’t kind of clarify this, because I think, from a lay perspective, it feels like NASA’s in another era of space exploration in collaborating with Boeing and with SpaceX, where these are sort of outsourced. Is it true that NASA always worked with outside suppliers and engineers to kind of put things together? Is it really that much different?
NASA has actually never built a human spacecraft themselves. It’s always been contractors that did it. So it hadn’t been NASA engineers. NASA has previously been much more involved in the detailed design and certification and really drove the design, with much more intentionality from the NASA side.
The change in this commercial crew program was to give the companies much more autonomy to do it the way they wanted to do it, and so it was up to them to figure out a lot of things. In the end, NASA had to certify it before putting our crew members on it.
I think it was a good idea in the beginning when everybody kind of thought Boeing had the lead. But SpaceX has helped revolutionize space cargo operations and everything by the work that they’re doing.
