Way Out There

Is there a cure for claustrophobia?

I mean, getting stuck in a small room is bad enough, but when that small room is also known as the International Space Station Boeing Starliner, and you've been on it since early June, and your eight-day mission is now going to run until February... Yikes!

SpaceX will bring them home. Their Boeing space machine is..."having problems," says NASA.

Above all, the return trip for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams must be safe. 

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said this over the weekend: “Spaceflight is risky — even at its safest and even at its most routine — and a test flight, by nature, is neither safe nor routine, and so the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety,” 

This Starliner program, sending people rocketing around who-knows-where, was supposed to be a big deal for Boeing. They have been chasing Elon Musk's SpaceX company, but Starliner is more than $1.5 billion over their budget, and years behind their schedule.

But the eight-day trip is oddly reminiscent of the inane plot of TV's Gilligan's Island, where some people went off on a "three-hour tour," only to find themselves stuck on an island and having to live with Jim Backus and company. That had to be tough, even on Jim Backus!

That was make-believe, and it passed for high comedy in the 1960s, when merry mixups of that sort were considered amusing. This is real life! Wilmore and Williams will miss the baseball playoffs and World Series, college and professional football, the presidential election, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year's Eve, and the fall TV season, which will undoubtedly feature shows with plots about two people stuck in a space capsule, eating freeze-dried Thanksgiving dinners and watching their shoes float in air.

Meanwhile, W&W will hitchhike home on a SpaceX launch (Crew-9) that will be delivering crew members to the Space Station. The Starliner will return to home base empty after dropping off the two stranded flyers.

I have an idea for what they can do while waiting for the X to bring them home (in time for Valentine's Day, we hope). They can get a small piece of paper and write down all the reasons one would ever have for wanting to go explore outer space when they haven't seen everything on Earth yet!