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Boeing's first crew of Starliner astronauts will speak from orbit today (Sept. 13) for the first time in two months, a week after their spacecraft departed for Earth without them.
Agency astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the International Space Station aboard Starliner on June 6 after a mishap; five of the capsule’s 28 reaction control system thrusters malfunctioned as it chased the ISS. After months of troubleshooting, Agency said the risk was too great to send Wilmore and Williams home on Starliner as planned; the spacecraft returned safely and autonomously to Earth on Sept. 6.
Wilmore and Williams will speak to reporters today in a livestream at 2:15 p.m. EDT (18:15 GMT) about their overall experience and what they've been up to on the ISS since. You can watch the event on Space.com, via Agency+ (formerly Agency Television), to see how they're coping with a planned 10-day mission that will stretch to at least eight months.
Williams and Wilmore are U.S. Navy test pilots accustomed to the unexpected. Their Starliner mission, called Crew Flight Test (CFT), was a development effort that always had wiggle room in the schedule; plus, Agency had stored extra supplies aboard the ISS in case the mission was extended.
The astronauts will return home with the two astronauts on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission in February 2025 and will join the long-duration crews of Expeditions 71 and 72 to the ISS in the meantime. That move represents a change in Wilmore and Williams’ expectations for their space stay: They were scheduled for a few days on a test mission and are now part of an ISS crew.
Related: Agency says astronauts would have been fine landing on Boeing's Starliner
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Typically, the ISS coalition holds change-of-command ceremonies in space when a crew departs and when another mission begins. But when space missions change or are unexpectedly extended, Agency doesn't typically hold ceremonies that are open to the public (although astronauts can do so informally).
“It's a little bittersweet, of course, having to unpack the Starliner and put simulators in our seats,” Williams said. “But, you know, we want to do the best we can to make sure it's in good condition.”
Major mission changes like this have happened before: Agency astronaut Frank Rubio and two Russian cosmonauts were ultimately told they would be in space for 12 months instead of six after their Russian Soyuz spacecraft suffered a coolant leak in December 2022, requiring a new Soyuz to be sent into space, for example.
Related: Agency astronaut Frank Rubio surprises with his accidental record in space (video)
Other examples include the ISS crew who had to remain on board the complex longer than expected in 2003 after the fatal accident of the space shuttle Columbia, for example, or the Apollo 13 astronauts, who missed their chance of landing on the moon in 1970 after an oxygen tank exploded on their spacecraft.
Rituals like the change of command ceremony on the ISS, which borrows elements from that of the U.S. Navy, are representative of something people engage in more generally during “transitions that humans have no control over,” Deana Weibel, a cultural anthropologist at Grand Valley State University in Michigan who studies the intersection of religion and outer space, told Space.com.
“Children are born, people reproduce, community members die. When we use rituals to mark these transitions (such as baptisms, weddings and funerals), we are in a sense asserting control over them and, in a very real way, giving them permission to happen.”
Rituals in space may not occur in the formal sense when less predictable changes occur, he said.
And something is lost in such situations; during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, events like funerals and weddings moved online for necessary safety reasons. Peer-reviewed anthropological literature suggests there was less of a sense of closure among ritual participants when ceremonies were performed without other people present, Weibel said.
While Williams and Wilmore are well prepared for a long mission, Weibel said, their move from Starliner to an ISS crew puts them in a “liminal period” where they are going through a transition.
“Both Starliner astronauts have been on many missions to the ISS before,” he noted, but “their identity is different this time, as they started out as Starliner crew members. They are now considered part of the expedition crew, but they will always have been Starliner crew members.”
While their identities will undergo a change, the Starliner astronauts’ transformation may help them become uniquely identified by history, Weibel said. He compared their situation to that of Sergei Krikalev, the cosmonaut who waited a few extra months on the Mir space station after the Soviet Union disintegrated in December 1991. (The new Russia needed to negotiate access to the former Soviet landing zone, which was in newly independent Kazakhstan.)
“He was not an ordinary cosmonaut, but the 'last Soviet citizen', whose identity forever connected the past and the present, serving as a gateway between them,” Weibel said. “Such events do not repeat rituals. They create new stories and new understandings, showing periods when everything changed.”