Friday 16 August 2024

I Can See Your House From Here

As great as it must be to go into space, there’s a lot to worry about but the worst-case scenario has to be getting stuck up there which is exactly what has happened to The Boeing Starliner Test Flight Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore who embarked upon a test flight to the International Space Station on Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft with the plan to come back to Mother Earth eight days later, but technical issues with the Starliner have left them stranded for more than two months, and they might be up there for eight more.
Amazingly, this isn’t the first time Sunita Williams has been stuck 250 miles about the Planet as in 2007, she was on a mission to the ISS that was supposed to end in early July, but damage to a space shuttle meant potentially delaying her return by several weeks.
In 2018, Russian Sergey Prokopyev ended up on the ISS 17 days longer than expected after his return spacecraft failed and then in 2022 the same guy was went on a 6 month tour and ended up staying for just over double that when his capsule was damaged again.
Its not just the International Space Station which collects astronauts, in 1991 Sergei Krikalev went on a routine 150 day expedition to the Soviet space station Mir but while he was up there the Soviet Union collapsed and he was left up there for 311 days while it was sorted out who owned the space station he was now kicking his heels on on and what country he’d be coming home to.
As for the two currently whizzing over our heads at 17,500 mph, NASA has yet to decide how to bring the pair back down again and are saying they could be stranded in space until February 2025 while they sort it out which is a long time to be drinking your own urine, or worse, someone elses but as regular supply packages are received, my request would be bottled water and some clean underwear as i assume they only took enough for 8 days and they must be getting a bit wiffy buy now.

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