Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams' wait for this trip aboard the Boeing Starliner was longer than expected.
On May 1, a reporter pointed out that Wilmore and Williams, two veteran astronauts, trained longer for this mission than Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins trained for the Apollo 11 moon landing. I did.
“It feels almost unreal,” Mr. Williams responded.
Then the wait stretched for nearly a month after the first launch attempt on May 6 was canceled due to a malfunctioning valve on the rocket.
Mr. Wilmore and Mr. Williams initially stayed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, hoping the valve could be fixed quickly and a second attempt could be made within a few days.
But engineers discovered a small helium leak on the Starliner, necessitating painstaking troubleshooting.
The two astronauts returned to their home base at Johnson Space Center in Houston on May 10 but remained in quarantine to minimize contact with others and the potential for illness.
“They feel great,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said at a May 24 news conference.
Mr. Wilmore and Mr. Williams spent additional time on the ground in the Starliner spacecraft simulator, practicing how to deal with some of the spacecraft's thruster failures. These are the possible consequences if a helium leak worsens while in space. .
“They have flown the entire incident in terms of rendezvous, deorbiting and entry, and are ready to go,” Mr. Stich said.
Mr. Williams was born in Ohio but grew up in Massachusetts. She was a test pilot for the U.S. Navy and flew more than 3,000 hours in 30 aircraft. She was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1998. She spent 322 days in space and for a time held the record for total time for a female spacewalk.
Mr. Wilmore, a Tennessee native, was a Navy test pilot and flew combat missions over Iraq and Bosnia in the 1990s. He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2000. During his previous two missions, he spent a total of 167 days in space.
Their last orbital trip was several years ago.
Mr. Williams had two extended stays on the International Space Station, the second of which ended in November 2012. Mr. Wilmore spent five and a half months aboard the space station in 2009 after serving as a pilot on a space shuttle mission. From September 2014 to March 2015.
The astronaut mission was delayed in December 2019 after a glitch-filled test flight without a crew on board. In fact, none of the astronauts nominated by NASA to participate in test flights in 2018 are on board the upcoming test flights.
In 2020, Mr. Wilmore was appointed commander of the test flight. In 2022, Ms. Williams took part in a test flight and served as a pilot. (She was originally appointed commander of the second flight, the first operation to take four astronauts to the space station for six months.)