CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aren’t the first to run late in space, and their 9 ½-month mission falls short of any endurance record.
But never before has a quick trip morphed into such a long haul.
The pair launched last June on a test flight of Boeing’s new Starliner crew capsule, figuring to be gone eight days. By the time they splashed down with SpaceX on Tuesday, they had spent 286 days off the planet — 36 times longer than anticipated.
“If you look at it mathematically, by percentage of the original planned mission, this is the largest percentage extension,” NASA’s space operations chief Ken Bowersox.
A former astronaut, Bowersox saw his own space station mission abruptly prolonged. He was up there with Don Pettit, who’s currently aboard the orbiting lab, when shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry in 2003, killing all seven on board and grounding the shuttle fleet for more than two years.
“The reasons were terrible that we stayed longer on our mission,” said Bowersox, whose planned four-month stay clocked in at more than five months.
Here’s a look at some others who found themselves stuck in space — by choice or not — along with some cool spaceflight statistics.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio saw his mission doubled in length — from 6 months to 12 months — after his assigned Russian Soyuz capsule took a micrometeorite hit while docked to the space station and leaked all its coolant. A replacement capsule was launched to bring Rubio and his two Russian crewmates home in 2023. His 371-day spaceflight is the longest by an American. NASA’s first year-in-space astronaut was Scott Kelly; he logged 340 days at the space station in 2015 and 2016. His identical twin brother, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, also served as a NASA astronaut on short shuttle flights.
Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov spent 14 ½ months aboard the Mir space station in the mid-1990s. He volunteered for it. As a physician, he wanted to observe the changes in the human body and mind after a prolonged period of weightlessness. His 437-day spaceflight remains a world record. Polyakov died in 2022 at age 80.
NASA’s Christina Koch holds the title with her 328-day space station mission in 2019 and 2020. During that same flight, she performed the first all-female spacewalk alongside Jessica Meir. Koch is currently assigned to NASA’s first Artemis crew, which will fly around the moon and back as early as next year.
Russian Oleg Kononenko last year became the first person to crack 1,000 days in space over the course of a career. By the time he returned from the space station last fall, he’d logged an incredible 1,111 days aloft over five spaceflights — a combined total of more than three years. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson is America’s most experienced space flier with 675 days over three long station stints and one short private trip for Axiom Space. She’s due to lead another Axiom crew to the space station later this spring. Because of her delayed homecoming, Williams moved into the No. 2 spot with 608 days in space over three missions.
Williams became the most experienced female spacewalker in the world, thanks to her prolonged mission. She ventured out twice earlier this year for station repairs and maintenance, bringing her spacewalking career total to 62 hours. Over three space station missions, she performed nine spacewalks, one less than Whitson. But Whitson’s spacewalks were shorter, totaling 60 hours.
Retired Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev holds the overall record with 16 spacewalks totaling around 80 hours. NASA’s spacewalking champ is retired astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria with 10 spacewalks for a total of 67 hours.
A NASA tally shows 721 people have flown in space, including tourists on short hops and military X-15 pilots. Of that total, 102 are women. The first person in space was the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. The first American, Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, followed on May 5, 1961. The first woman in space was the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. Of those four, only Tereshkova is still alive.
NASA counts 47 on its active astronaut list. Twenty are women. That doesn’t include several astronauts who have moved over to management roles at the space agency.
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