by Bob Sparrow
Butch & Suni – “See you next week” NOT!!!
Watching a spectacular moonrise on the evening of the ‘Supermoon blue moon’ a couple of weeks ago made me wonder about those two astronauts who have been circling the earth since June on a NASA mission that was supposed to last eight days. NASA now says that they may not be coming home until February 2025! So, eight days turned into eight months! And you thought you had it bad when your last flight was delayed a couple of hours. The two U.S. astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, left Earth in Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Yes, Boeing, that’s the same company that had trouble keeping a door on an Alaskan 737 aircraft during a flight in January of this year. I’ve since sold my stock in Boeing! And while the door didn’t fly off the Starliner, the problem with their spacecraft seems to be that of helium leaks and thruster failure. To dumb that down for you, if the spacecraft was a man, he would have gas and erectile dysfunction.
Men pushing Boeing Starliner to get it started
I initially imagined these two astronauts circling the earth at 17,505 miles per hour in their 15-foot wide capsule and having to figure out how they were going to survive for the next six months on what they brought with them. It would be like planning a weekend trip to the mountains and being snowed in all winter – think Donner Party. When I thought that was the case, here are some things that crossed my mind:
- Did they pack enough food (and wine) to last that long?
- Forget the wine, did they pack enough oxygen?
- OK, don’t forget the wine
- Who’s taking out the garbage?
- What if the potty needs emptying?
- How happy are their spouses with them spending the Christmas holidays in such close quarters with one another?
As it turns out, the Boeing spacecraft isn’t going to be their home for the next six months, as they were able to catch a passing Uber, in the form of the ISS (International Space Station), and successfully dock with it.
ISS Uber
However, the capacity of the ISS they boarded is seven people, and before Butch and Suni joined the party, there were already seven on board – six men, three Russian cosmonauts, an American chemist, an American physician, an American Navy test pilot, and one woman, an American aerospace engineer. So, I’m guessing there was ‘no room in the Inn’ for these two stranded American astronauts. We’ve not been told what they were doing to accommodate these additional freeloaders. I’m hoping it wasn’t something like Russian roulette, where the Russians would seem to have a clear advantage. With zero gravity, do the newcomers have to sleep by just floating in mid-air in the kitchen, or does everyone just float in mid-air all night when sleeping? And the big question, is there enough wine to get the nine of them through Christmas and New Year’s, although the Russians probably brought their own vodka?
There is a precedent for being trapped in space, in 1991, Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was told that he could not return home because the country that had promised to bring him back home, the Soviet Union, no longer existed. He eventually did get back to Earth after 311 days in space.
I’m sure NASA will figure out a way to get our astronauts back home, after all, they’ve got Boeing working on it right now! Not!!! Boeing has been fired; the astronauts will be coming home aboard a SpaceX capsule.
As I’ve thought about the pluses and minuses of being isolated in space until next February, I’ve concluded that the big plus is that they will miss out on all the political bullshit the rest of us have to endure from now until November 5th.
Where do I sign up to get lost in space for the next three months?