STUCK IN A SPACE JAM

Rationed clothes and freeze-dried food might not sound ideal but astronauts stranded on the International Space Station insist they're having a 'great' time

- Andrew Griffin

It wasn’t clear how serious he was being. But it sounded like a nice time, the way one might describe a holiday in a postcard home, or the living conditions of a new family guinea pig. “It’s great to be there, enjoying the environment, eating that great space food and being able to look out the window,” said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of Nasa’s space operations mission directorate, in a press conference last month.

He was talking about two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the test pilots of the troubled Boeing Starliner. They left Earth on 5 June on what was supposed to be an eight-day mission to test that spacecraft – but after suffering problems before and during its launch, the Starliner ran into more on its way to the space station, and the problems have continued ever since.

Last weekend – after intense scrutiny and considerations by Nasa – the Starliner detached from the International Space Station and returned to Earth. But Wilmore and Williams were not on board, after engineers at the space agency decided they could not be sure that it could carry them safely, and so opted for them to come home on a later SpaceX flight instead.

That decision ended almost three months of speculation about how the pair would get home. However, it also delayed their journey back dramatically because the SpaceX craft that will give them a lift has not yet even arrived at the space station and will not come back until March 2025. The pair had set off for an eight-day mission, but by the time they get back they will have been stuck in space for eight months. The space station that was supposed to be a brief stop-off has now become a semipermanent home.