Two astronauts are stuck in space. This NASA veteran knows their pain

Frank Rubio winces when he discusses the emotional hardship of being confined for more than in a year in a vessel orbiting Earth, the slightest of breaks in the composure of someone trained as doctor, Army helicopter pilot and NASA astronaut.

A leaking radiator on the Russian spacecraft that brought him to the International Space Station in 2022 extended Rubio’s time there from a planned six months to more than a year. When his son graduated from high school, and throughout his oldest daughter’s first year at college, he wasn’t on this planet. He had deployed to war zones before, but this felt different.

“There’s a little bit of disappointment in knowing you miss those things as a father,” Rubio said. While constantly battling monotony and the effects of space on his body, he made do around the holidays with NASA’s prepackaged duck confit while his family celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas on Earth.

Rubio’s experience – leave Earth in one vehicle, return much later in another – gives him an intimate understanding of the prolonged ordeal of two other NASA astronauts currently aboard the space station. Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams had the job of testing out Boeing’s Starliner capsule, a new spacecraft that the aerospace company built for NASA. For them, too, technical problems dictated a change of plans.

Starliner successfully delivered them to the space station, but helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters gave NASA pause about using it to bring them home. A planned eight-day mission grew to more than eight months. NASA decided to keep them there until February 2025, when a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft will have two free seats on a return trip.

The agency has so far declined to recertify Starliner for another flight. It is still investigating what caused Starliner’s flight problems, and it plans to later start testing and analyzing “potential upgrades and improvements” to the spacecraft’s systems, including its propulsion system, NASA public affairs officer Jimi Russell said on Nov. 8. At that point the Starliner team will “work to complete its understanding of system certification and later determine the schedule for changes,” Russell said.

Boeing, which has lost more than a billion dollars on the project, is considering selling Starliner, according to people familiar with the matter.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is seen as one possible buyer. (Bezos owns the Washington Post)

Even with the change of plans, Wilmore’s and Williams’s extended time don’t register among the longest stays on the space station. Rubio’s “mission extension,” as NASA prefers to call it, made him the American record-holder for longest spaceflight, at 371 days. His stay pales in comparison to that of Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, who spent 437 days on Russia’s Mir space station in the mid-1990s.

NASA and its astronauts have emphasized that their training programs involve extensively rehearsing ways the mission can go wrong. Many of the astronauts are drawn from the military, and they go in with a realization of the risks involved. But a change of plans can still be hard, Rubio says.

“I think it’s important to acknowledge it’s not the ideal situation,” Rubio said of the Starliner crew’s situation. “We’re all humans, we all have expectations that kind of set the tone for things. So when you’re expecting an eight- to 15-day mission, and you get the news that it’s going to be longer, it’s always going to be a little bit hard, mostly for personal reasons.”

Life in orbit

Space is hard on the body, and hard on the mind. It is, as Rubio puts it, “the most prohibitive environment humans have ever operated in.”

People living in zero-gravity often experience piercing headaches. So-called “fluid shift” within their bodies can bring on congestion and cause some body parts to swell. They exercise at least two hours every day on resistance machines that simulate gravity, and follow a meticulous lifestyle meant to stave off the bodily decline that would otherwise set in during the first months in space.

And then there’s the monotony. Astronauts dwell in what amounts to 13,700 cubic feet of interconnected hallways, typically no more than six feet tall or wide. The breathtaking photography sent back to Earth is mostly from one small room, known as the cupola, and astronauts spend relatively little time there.

“You have the most incredible view of the Earth, and yet you’re still somewhat limited to the same surroundings every day, which is basically walls of computers, walls of cables,” Rubio said. “You only get to look out the cupola for a few minutes a day … so the monotony is something that you fight. You almost just block out the fact that it is repetitive and it is monotonous, because it is your job.”

Rubio, a West Point graduate who served as an Army helicopter pilot before attending medical school and entering NASA’s astronaut training program, said he tried to remind himself of the “incredible privilege” of being in space. The related hardship is not as bad as what many service members experience, he said, citing the example of a military prisoner of war.

“It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself if you think about those situations,” Rubio said.

The 48-year-old is still a NASA astronaut at Johnson Space Center in Houston and has said he hopes to return to space again one day.

Some see a silver lining in keeping the astronauts in space longer. While NASA is prioritizing returning astronauts to the moon, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said he wants to send astronauts to Mars aboard a SpaceX Starship spacecraft in 2028. Such a mission, if it ever took place, would stretch the limits of humans’ time in zero-gravity.

“Longer experience in space is very helpful for finding out what’s going to be involved in potentially a Mars mission, where clearly you’re going to be up there a long time,” said Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who has led three departmentwide evaluations of NASA.

In some ways, the space station is the laboratory for an ongoing, decades-long medical study. Details of an astronaut’s time in space contribute to an understanding of how the human body endures zero-gravity living over long periods. “For the next couple decades each person that goes up there is going to matter towards that data collection,” Rubio said.

Williams and Wilmore have aided in more than 60 scientific studies in their first six months aboard the space station, NASA said. Williams contributed to the first metal 3D print created aboard the space station, and they both worked on a method for watering and aerating plants grown in reduced-gravity, NASA said.

What’s next for human spaceflight?

Without Boeing’s Starliner, NASA has two options for getting its astronauts to and from the space station. They can tag along on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, or rely on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. Analysts say the agency is desperate to have a second American spacecraft to get astronauts to and from the space station, but it’s unclear whether Boeing’s Starliner will ever fully carry out that mission. NASA and Boeing still haven’t released any information on what may have caused the helium leaks and thruster problems.

The International Space Station has already been extended more than 10 years beyond what was initially planned, with hundreds of spare parts operating beyond their usable lifespan and air leaking from the Russian side. Unless it is extended again, it will be decommissioned in 2031, with NASA hoping to move toward a commercially operated space station after that.

Williams and Wilmore, their hair floating upward in a September live stream from the space station, said they don’t blame Boeing for the technical problems that prevented their return on the same spacecraft. Any test flight would be expected to encounter unexpected problems, Wilmore said.

Wilmore will be in space through much of his older daughter’s sophomore year at East Texas Baptist University, as well as most of his youngest daughter’s senior year in high school. Asked about the extra time away from his family, he expressed gratitude that the experience would give them a unique opportunity to grow as people, and answered a Fox News reporter’s question by referring to a Bible verse.

Williams said space is her “happy place.” This is well understood by her husband, mother and close friends, she said. She also misses her two dogs.

As for how family handled the change of plans: “We’re both Navy, we’ve both been on deployments, we’re not surprised when deployments get changed … our families are used to that as well.”