The NASA astronauts who spent several unexpected months in space have shared the details of their ordeal.
Earlier this year in March, astronauts Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Sunita ‘Sunni’ Williams returned to Earth after being on the International Space Station (ISS) since June of the previous year.
The mission was originally planned to last only eight days, but technical problems with their return vehicle extended their stay to 286 days.
Now, they have provided insights into what went wrong during their mission.
In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia, Sunni recounted that initially, their journey proceeded without a hitch.
“The first day was awesome,” she recalled. “The first day the spacecraft worked as designed and flying it was terrific.
“So when we woke up the second day, we were all excited about a rendezvous to the space station and we could see the space station.”
However, things took a turn when they realized something was amiss with the spacecraft’s maneuverability.
Sunni explained: “We knew on the second day, before we started losing thrusters, that things were not acting correctly.
“The spacecraft was working hard to keep us on the trajectory of the space station, but it wasn’t acting like it was designed to.”
Thruster failures began to occur, and, as Sunni described, ‘one after another’ the realization hit that ‘something was absolutely wrong’.
“And as soon as the automated burn started happening, it sounded different.
“I think both of us were like, ‘does that sound right?’ Because you can tell when things are working by the way they sound, right? Like your car is the same way.
“If it sounds a little different, you’re sort of questioning yourself, like ‘am I hearing something?'”
This malfunction forced Butch and Sunni to make a difficult decision: risk returning to Earth or try to dock at the ISS.
Butch, a former US Navy pilot, recounted the critical moment: “We were in a bad situation, no doubt.
“In the history of human space flight, there’s only been a few occasions that the spacecraft has lost the ability to fully control in all six degrees of freedom.
“So, you’re in a craft that you can barely control. You know, you need to dock, or you might not have a ride back home.
“We had to dock,” he added. “We had to dock and if we didn’t dock, I wasn’t sure in the situation we were in that we could actually even make it back to Earth.”
The ISS, Butch believed, would provide them with safety if they could successfully dock.
It was discovered later that a helium leak was responsible for the thruster failures, a scenario that had not been covered during their simulator training sessions.
Thankfully, Butch and Sunni managed to dock safely at the ISS, though they faced uncertainty about their return timeline.
Ultimately, after nine and a half months, they made their way back home on the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.