The Boeing Starliner's first astronaut crew will speak from space for the first time in two months today (Sept. 13), a week after their spacecraft departed for Earth without them.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the International Space Station aboard Starliner on June 6 after a turbulent docking; five of the capsule's 28 reaction control system thrusters misbehaved as it pursued the ISS downward. After months of troubleshooting, NASA said the risk was too great to send Wilmore and Williams home aboard Starliner as planned; the spacecraft returned safely and autonomously to Earth on Sept. 6.
Wilmore and Williams will speak to reporters in a livestream today at 2:15 p.m. EDT (6:15 p.m. GMT) about their overall experience and what they've been doing on the ISS since then. You can watch the event on Space.com, via NASA+ (formerly NASA Television), to see how they're handling an expected 10-day mission that's been extended to at least eight months.
Williams and Wilmore are U.S. Navy test pilots accustomed to the unexpected. Their Starliner mission, called Crew Flight Test (CFT), was a development effort that always had room in the timeline; NASA also had extra supplies stored aboard the ISS in case the mission was extended.
The astronauts will return home in February 2025 with the two astronauts from SpaceX's Crew 9 mission, integrating into the ISS Expeditions 71 and 72 long-term crews in the meantime. The move represents a shift in Wilmore and Williams' expectations for their time in space: They were scheduled to spend a few days on a test mission and are now part of an ISS crew.
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Normally, the ISS coalition holds transition of command ceremonies in space when a crew departs and when another mission begins. But when space missions change unexpectedly or are extended, NASA typically does not hold ceremonies that are open to the public. (Astronauts can do so informally, however.)
It seems the former CFT astronauts have been thinking about what comes next. In a space-to-ground conversation on Sept. 4, Williams shared her feelings about getting the Starliner capsule, named Calypso, ready to fly back to Earth without astronauts. Her task that day included placing mass simulators in the seats to ensure the center of gravity wouldn't shift during landing activities.
"It's a little bit - obviously - of course, it's a double whammy to pack up Starliner and put simulators in our seats," Williams said. "But you know, we want to do our best to make sure she's in good shape."
Related: NASA Astronaut Frank Rubio Surprises With His Unintended Space Record (VIDEO)Such major changes to missions have happened before: NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and two Russian cosmonauts were ultimately told they would stay in space for 12 months instead of six, after their Russian Soyuz spacecraft suffered a coolant leak in December 2022, requiring a new Soyuz to be sent into space.
Other examples include the ISS crew who had to stay on board the complex longer than expected in 2003 after the deadly accident with the space shuttle Columbia, or the Apollo 13 astronauts who lost their chance at a moon landing in 1970 after their spacecraft was damaged by a burst oxygen tank.
Rituals like the ISS change of command ceremony, which is modeled after that of the U.S. Navy, are typical of something people generally do during "transitions that people don't have control over," Deana Weibel, a cultural anthropologist at Grand Valley State University in Michigan who studies the intersection of religion and space, told Space.com.
"Children are born, people reproduce, members of the community die. When we use rituals to mark these transitions - like baptisms, weddings, and funerals - we are at some level asserting control over them and giving them permission to happen in a very real way."
She indicated that rituals in space may not occur in a formal sense if less predictable changes occur.
And something is lost in such situations; during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, events like funerals and weddings were held online for necessary safety reasons. The peer-reviewed anthropological literature suggests that there was less of a sense of closure among ritual participants when the ceremonies took place without others present, Weibel said.
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Williams and Wilmore are well prepared for a long mission, Weibel said, but their move from Starliner to ISS crew puts them in a "little window" of transition.
"Both Starliner astronauts have been on many ISS missions before," she noted, but "their identities are different this time around, as they started out as crew members on the Starliner. They are now considered part of the expedition crew, but they will always have been the Starliner crew members."
While their identities will change, the Starliner astronauts' transformation could help them be uniquely identified by history, Weibel said. She compared their situation to that of Sergei Krikalev, the cosmonaut who waited a few extra months on the Mir space station after the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. (The new Russia had to negotiate access to the former Soviet landing site, which was in newly independent Kazakhstan.)
"He was not an ordinary cosmonaut, but the 'last Soviet citizen,' whose identity forever linked the past and the present and served as a gateway between them," Weibel said. "These kinds of events do not repeat rituals. They create new stories and new insights, and reveal periods when everything changed."
