Stranded astronauts didn’t know if they would ‘be able to make it back’

When astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore approached the International Space Station (ISS) last year with failing thrusters on their Boeing Starliner capsule, they were unable to fly forward to dock.

And if they couldn’t dock, they didn’t know if they could make it back home again.

“Docking was imperative,” Mr Wilmore told BBC News, two months after he and Ms Williams finally made a successful return to Earth. “If we weren’t able to dock, would we be able to make it back? We didn’t know.”

The astronauts had been travelling on a test flight that was meant to last eight days. Instead, they ended up staying in space for nearly 10 months.

The first challenge was to dock safely and successfully at the ISS, which they managed to do within several minutes after Mission Control on the ground helped them restart the craft’s thrusters.

Mr Wilmore said that the possibility they might never see Earth again “definitely went through our minds”.

But both astronauts said they didn’t communicate the worst-case scenarios out loud in those moments, because they were trained to move on with solving problems.

“You sort of read each other’s mind and know where we’re going with all the failures,” Ms Williams told the BBC.

“These were not expected,” she admitted. But thoughts quickly turned to solutions: “At the same time, you know, we’re like, what do we have? What can we do?”