“I miss the Earth so much. I miss my wife. It’s lonely out in space,” sang Elton John. American astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore may be thinking of those lyrics. They’re stranded in orbit aboard the International Space Station until next year.
The two fliers were supposed to fly to the station on a brief test of the new Starliner spaceship, built by the beleaguered Boeing aerospace corporation. Instead, safety concerns about their return to Earth aboard their Boeing craft have turned what was supposed to be an eight-day odyssey into an eight-month ordeal—an orbital mash-up of ”Gilligan’s Island” and “Lost in Space.”
The astronauts, both Navy aviators, took the bad news with “right stuff” aplomb, but they will miss family, friends and holidays until 2025, the earliest time that they can get a ride home aboard a ship built by SpaceX, Boeing’s competitor run by billionaire and James Bond villain lookalike Elon Musk. The Boeing Starliner project was already years behind schedule and billions of bucks over budget when Williams and Wilmore finally soared into orbit earlier this summer.
The concerns over the Starliner’s ability to bring its crew safely back to Earth are just the latest in a round of troubles for Boeing, including a much-publicized incident in January when a Boeing plane lost a door plug in flight, leaving a gaping hole in the fuselage. Disaster was narrowly averted, but the event terrorized passengers and gave the Boeing company another public relations black eye.
The American astronauts are in no immediate danger aboard the huge International Space Station. Still, their situation brought to mind the novel Marooned by aviation and space writer Martin Caidin. First published in 1964 and made into a movie in 1969, Marooned is a fast-paced fictional story of three astronauts who are stranded in space when their ship fails at the end of a long flight. Caidin’s fiction was reflected in fact in 1970, when an explosion aboard the Apollo XIII spacecraft could have doomed its three-man crew. Their rocky return to Earth captured headlines around the world and their ill-fated journey was recounted in the Ron Howard film Apollo 13.
The saga of the Apollo XIII astronauts had a happy ending, but the road to the stars can be deadly. Seven astronauts aboard Space Shuttle Challenger died in 1986 when their fiery chariot exploded during launch. Another seven astronauts died in 2003 when Space Shuttle Columbia broke up while reentering the atmosphere. Three U.S. astronauts were killed in a fire aboard their Apollo I spacecraft during a ground test in 1967. That same year, a Russian cosmonaut was killed when the parachute on his Soyuz spaceship failed.
The deaths of the Americans and the Russian made headlines worldwide in 1967, but the death of another space flier received scant attention at the time. Air Force Major Mike Adams died in 1967 in the crash of the X-15 rocket plane that he had flown to an altitude of just over 50 miles, the altitude that NASA and the Air Force consider the beginning of space. Adams was awarded his astronaut wings posthumously, and in 2004 a Boy Scout troop built a homemade memorial in his honor in the lonely, windswept Mojave Desert near the X-15’s crash site. A plaque at the memorial says, “In memory of his contribution: Major Michael Adams, USAF, the first in-flight fatality of the American space program.”
In 1971, three Russian cosmonauts died aboard their Soyuz spacecraft during its return to Earth after a three week stay aboard the Salyut I space station. Just weeks later, American astronauts of the Apollo XV lunar mission left on the moon’s surface a “Fallen Astronaut” figurine and a memorial plaque bearing the names of Russian and American fliers who had died during the space programs of the two countries.
Astronauts Williams and Wilmore will eventually return to their home planet, but their lengthy and unforeseen voyage could be summed up with the words of science fiction writer Robert Heinlein: “We pray for one last landing/ On the globe that gave us birth./ Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies/ And the cool, green hills of Earth.”
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