“Butch is going to have to rough it a little bit.”
Bag and Tag
More than two months into what was supposed to be a week-long journey, the stranded NASA astronauts who hitched a ride to the International Space Station on board Boeing’s doomed Starliner spacecraft are apparently being forced to deal with some pretty undignified living standards. As Time notes, the space station was already occupied by seven astronauts before NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived via the Starliner in early June.
Because the Boeing-built craft immediately sprung several helium leaks during its journey to the station, the pair are now stuck on board the ISS indefinitely — and as they previously told the magazine, that means they’re not exactly sleeping in style.
Williams seems to have gotten the better end of the deal by spending the last two months camped out on board the space station’s Crew Alternate Sleep Accommodation (CASA) sleep chamber with another of the extra astronauts hanging out on board the European Space Agency-built Columbus module.
Wilmore, however, has been forced to contend with a sleeping bag in the Japanese Space Agency’s Kibo module.
“Butch is going to have to rough it a little bit,” Williams told Time back in May when she and her copilot thought they’d only be slumming it for a mere eight days.
No Scrubs
It sounds less than ideal — but as the report notes, Williams and Wilmore’s difficulties don’t end with their sleeping arrangements.
As with every ISS mission, the Starliner astronauts initially had specific jobs to do on board the station that would have eaten up their eight-day journey. As Time reports, their main priority was checking in on the Boeing capsule and making sure its communications, life support, and other essential functions were in good shape.
With that checklist done and their journey having been extended until possibly February due to Starliner’s technical issues, Wilmore and Williams have instead been assisting their fellow crew members with their tasks and experiments, including repairing a urine processing pump.
Beyond that lovely job, Wilmore and Williams were also forced to stretch their clothing rations because there’s no laundry on board the ISS. Generally speaking, astronauts pack enough clothes for the length of their journey, and with their trip home having been pushed back repeatedly, the Starliner crew had to make do until a Northrop Grumman resupply mission finally came to deliver them new clothes earlier this month.
There was never much dignity to life on board the ISS, to begin with — and now that they’re stranded there, Williams and Wilmore are likely feeling the burn of Boeing’s shoddy Starliner work.
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