After overcoming in-flight malfunctions aboard Boeing’s commercial spacecraft, NASA astronauts Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore finally reached the safety of the International Space Station on Thursday. A decade in the making, Wednesday’s Cape Canaveral launch was Boeing’s third attempt after two previous launches were aborted, in part because of a helium leak in the service module of its Starliner-series capsule, named Calypso by Williams. Although deft handling and scientific precision prevailed, the astronauts were plagued by additional helium leaks during the flight, including one known pre-launch leak and three discovered after their capsule was already in orbit.
The earth had clung to Calypso. Even attached to the Atlas V’s 90,250 pounds of combined rocket fuel, the Starliner capsule fought hard to break away—igniting its own thrusters in a final burn to stabilize its elliptical orbit. Free from gravity, Williams and Wilmore were about to close their eyes when mission control kicked in.
“Looks like we’ve detected a few more helium leaks,” NASA said from the ground. “Butch, sorry. We’re still piecing together the story.”
“We’re ready,” Wilmore said. “Give it to us.”
Back on the clock with haste, the two veteran astronauts set about plugging two guilty valves spotted by the hawk-eyed community scientists below. Leaks sealed, Boeing stepped in to tell NASA its astronauts were “safe to fly.”
Just when the astronauts were finally within range of the station, NASA engineers monitoring the capsule came to the rescue: something was wrong, five of the Starliner’s 28 thrusters were dead. Since the jets were stopped, it was too dangerous to jump.
Just 850 feet away, the ISS gleamed—a meteor-battered patchwork of radiation-hard space experiments held together by a network of unbreakable Earth geeks 240 miles below. A huge metal canary in the minefield of Russian-American politics, the station was filled with spacewalking scientists from both nations, using the last shreds of international agreement in an attempt to defy the impossible.
Apollo’s Mercury, Gemini, Saturn—since Alan Shepard’s 1961 flight, American manned spacecraft have always turned to guardians of the crossroads when crossing the threshold of the impossible. Then came the Space Shuttle and Dragon — and by NASA’s count, after they were launched into orbit with the deafening roar of the incessant Russian rocket engines, Williams and Wilmore were aboard the sixth inaugural flight of an American spacecraft. Packing a curry stash with her Ganesh statue, veteran space traveler Williams was the first woman to soar to the stars on such a mission. In the 63 years of tangled time-space between Shepard’s Mercury launch and her own journey, and within her 322 days in space—a record that no one but space juggernaut Peggy Whitson could beat—an impossible number of things could have stopped. Williams. With her tin stuck in the dead space between Calypso and the station, they still could.
But not this time. Not today. The two had already switched the capsule’s thrusters to manual control when NASA gave them the go-ahead.
With the manifolds wide open and the helium reserves online, Sunny and Butch hit it off – unleashing a wave of celestial power through the capsule with a hot-fire test that brought four of the dead jets back to life. Dropping the space drift clutch in Tokyo, the intrepid duo shut down the engines and piloted the capsule manually for a second shot at rendezvous with the ISS. With surgical precision, Williams and Wilmore’s Calypso maneuvers became a slow-motion ballet toward the front port of the ISS’s Harmony Dock—where they landed for the first time in history.
With a sigh of relief, NASA and Boeing later confirmed that Calypso was safely docked.
“It’s nice to be attached to the big city in the sky,” Wilmore said.
Suni agreed—jumping out of the pod and straight into a dance party with the international space crew she calls family.
Wilmore and Williams now join members of the Expedition 71 crew aboard the ISS — Roscosmos cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin and Oleg Kononenko and NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Matt Dominique, Tracy Dyson and Jeanette Epps. The intrepid duo is expected to stay aboard the space lab for eight days before returning to earth.
