MERRITT ISLAND, Fla.—Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are not stuck or stranded on the International Space Station, NASA officials said on March 14. Rather, they have been completing an extension of their mission to space and always had the ability to come home at the end of it.
“First principle in space flight, you always have a way to come home, and Butch and Suni have had a way to come home,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program at Kennedy Space Center, told members of the press during a Crew-10 post-launch press conference.
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the International Space Station during the first manned test flight of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule, but issues with that spacecraft arose, and NASA deemed it unsafe for manned reentry. Stich said that before the ultimate decision was made, the two astronauts had three contingencies: come home on Starliner, SpaceX’s Crew-8 capsule, or SpaceX’s Crew-9 capsule....
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