From Launch to Crisis: The Mission That Left Astronauts Stuck in Orbit

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We have to dock because the situation we're in. I'm not sure we can get back to Earth. That was retired naval aviator in NASA astronaut Captain Booch Wilmore. Talking about being stuck in space for nearly a year after a spacecraft malfunctioned in orbit. In this episode, we sit down in studio with Captain Wilmore to discuss his famous trip

into space. What went wrong, what it was like being stranded in space, and how his experience and faith turned a near disaster into a true space Odyssey. I'm daily wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Hall. This is a weekend edition of Morningwire. Our sponsor, Delete Me, makes it easy quick and safe to remove your personal data

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Barry, thank you so much for coming and joining us. Wonderful to be with you. Thank you for the opportunity. So we covered it at the time, but you were stuck up in space for 300 days.

“How much that was last year? How much longer than expected was that?”

It was a few months.

We originally planned it was a test flight, the crew flight test CFT mission for the first.

It was the first crew flight of the Boeing Starliner. You know, in the history of human space flight, there's been six first flights. Mercury, Gemini Apollo, Space Shuttle, the SpaceX Dragon, and then this one was the Starliner. So it was a six first flight of a crewed spacecraft and, like I said, a US history, human space flight history. And so it was a test flight.

And we had a full gamut of tests that we were doing on the way up, then run to Boondock. And then a bunch of tests while we were attached to the space station. And then a whole litany of tests on the way back before we get the deal of it burning in the atmosphere. And of course, parachutes, and then we're supposed to touch down in white sands in Mexico. So that was the plan.

And then day one was great. The launch, the first day of test went wonderfully well. Day two was the issue when we ran into some, some issues that we didn't expect. That created the scenario where we wound up staying for those extended period of time. So how long was the original plan to be up there?

You know, they say eight days, but it was really, it was two-ish weeks. You know, we've heard eight was a number that was put out way before we launch. And that's kind of what the media glummed onto. And that's fine. But it was, it was going to be two weeks or less.

That was the original plan because we wanted to have a time to be attached to the space station. Do some quiet and test with the spacecraft.

Have been never been in that environment for that long of period of time.

And then, of course, climb back aboard and do all our tests coming back. So I would say two weeks would have been important. So there were some flexibility at the beginning, which surprises me actually. But not, you weren't prepared for months, obviously.

A couple of weeks and turns into a month, two months, et cetera.

“Can you kind of walk us through, what was that like for you?”

Did you know immediately that this was going to be much longer? Or was it, that's a continual surprise. That's a very, very, very good question. The process would did not, you know, go long, long, long for me for me or Sonny. We were in the spacecraft, obviously, when we had our problems.

And we will go in the, maybe we'll go in the problems in a little bit. But basically, the situation we were in, we lost the ability to fully control the space station. We had fully control the spacecraft. And I'm on the controls manually and doing my best to maintain control. Trying to see if we could get in a process where we could dock.

So the thought process was this, we have to dock. Because the situation we're in, I'm not sure we can get back to Earth. We didn't know why we were losing thrusters. We dropped four thrusters, which affected our ability to fully control the spacecraft. Six degree of freedom control.

You got pitch, roll, yaw, that's attitude. And then you've got translation four and a half to up and down left and right. So that's three and three, that's six degrees of freedom.

And we lost the ability to never happen before in human spaceflight to fully control the spacecraft.

And so in that scenario, we have to dock. I'm not sure we can make it back to Earth like this. I don't, I'm not sure we can control it enough to do a de-orbit burning.

“All those things you have to do to make it back to Earth.”

And so the next thought beyond that was, if we dock, I'm not sure we're coming back in this spacecraft. So normally, I understand people would think, you know, the process goes on. Are you coming back, are you not coming back, are you not? I mean, before we ever docked, we knew the chances were slim. Yeah.

We were being able to climb back aboard and come back. If we were able to dock at all. Was the docking process hazardous? In the situation we were in, yes, it was. I've seen a lot of sci-fi movies.

Right? Which makes you think the very precarious. So it was, without you taking a big spacecraft, the space station, the passive space craft is just traveling around the planet,

17,000, 500 miles an hour, five miles a second.

So you're orbiting every 90 minutes. You got the active space craft, which is us, working to get in position to connect, right? And so with the graded thrusters, that active connection is degraded, obviously. And the situation we were in, it would have been very difficult to dock. Having four thrusters down.

But us on board and the ground teams came up with a plan very quickly. And we were go through the process of trying to see if we could get these thrusters back. Because basically the thrusters don't just quit. I mean, it's the computer system. It says, "Okay, I'm taking analysis from all these parameters from these various thrusters as they fire.

Oh, you're not performing up to up to standards. I'm failing you off. You're done." And then that's basically what the computer did. So to get the thrusters back, we had to send signals to the thrusters to fire them and only them. So I had to be hands off on the controls, which was not optimal.

Because, again, I'll get into that in a second. But I had to be hands off of controls. So I could send the signal to that thruster. I gave them thruster to fire, assess how much did it fire enough to pull it back into the set. And then this fault detection indication response.

This fitter software that pulled it out of the system. You know, pulled it, felled it off to begin with. We had to cancel that fitter. For each of those thrusters, as we would bring them back. So now you're without that fail safe software to shut the thruster down in many scenarios.

So we had to dock like that with those thrusters that we were able to get back. Fortunately, like I said, we were able to get thrusters back. And as it, during the time we had the four thrusters down, we knew that was really our only option is to get thrusters back. Unfortunately, we were able to do that.

And we wound up docking. We had five thrusters total to fail. Fortunately, we didn't have five failed simultaneously. Four failed. We got two back.

We had to. Then the fifth one failed. So we went back to three.

So basically, I'm kind of skipping ahead.

I know, but fault tolerance is built into all systems. Every system, even the thrusters system, meaning we build dual fault tolerant. I'll have two failures. And I can still maintain whatever this function is. So we lose the first thruster.

It doesn't affect our fault tolerance. We're okay. We lose the second thruster. Now we've, we've, we've, we're now gone from dual fault tolerant to single fault tolerant. We lose the third thruster.

Now we're zero fault tolerant to maintaining six degree of freedom control. And then we lose the fifth, the fourth thruster. We've lost the ability to control at least one axes. And all the other five remaining, you know, axes are degraded because of the thrusters that we lost. How long was the period of time where you and I,

“I, you were with one other astronaut in this craft?”

How long was the period of time where you were trying to figure this out? Where you didn't know how you were going to dock? Was that a period of hours, days, minutes? It was hours. It was initially the first thruster we lost when we,

it's not impacting our, our fault tolerance occurred hours before we wound up docking. When we lost the second thruster is when I came on the controls after that.

I gave control back to the automation system was about an hour and a half. So it was an hour and a half during this evolution and the time that we were down six degree of freedom control was, you know, seem like an eternity. But in the big scheme of things, it wasn't that long, but still the unknown. Sure.

And the space station is a moving target, correct? Was this happening at recordinating with them? Is there anything they can do? There's nothing. No, the space station.

It's fully passive. It's in an attitude. We maintain a certain attitude. And it's just orbiting the planet. Like moving, it's in a stationary orbit at the same altitude.

It's just going around the planet. But so are we. Yeah. We're going at the same speed. And as we maneuver to dock, that's, that's the part where, you know, our speed changes a little bit.

But there's, there's all the mechanics implications.

“What, what happens when two spacecraft fly and close proximity to each other?”

How, how they maneuver based on orbital mechanics. It comes into play. So, and all of that's going through my head is, we're putting these, you know, putting these good things into the rocket surgery. Yeah.

Right. So you, you dock. But you already know we're going to be here for a while. Right. So what, what changes?

The initial conversations. What were you planning on from that moment? How are you preparing for, what's coming? That's, that's a very good question. So we dock.

We finally open the hatches. We do our pancakes, and smiles, and it's all on video, right? Welcome aboard. As soon as that was done, I pulled Matthew Dominica side who was already on space station, another fellow naval aviator.

And we had a discussion about what it transpired. He being a pilot type understood exactly what was going on.

So matter of fact, like, you know, we always think of the next worst failure.

So when we moved down four thrusters, I'm thinking, what if we lose a fifth thruster? What I'll be able to control it all. I have no idea. We've never gone this far. We're never, we're in an untarded territory here.

And I'm also thinking, what if we lose communication? Well, Matthew Dominica pogeos is calls on. He's thinking the same thing. He's already prepared to give me some green lights through a window, and the, in the dragon capsule that's points where we could see it,

to say, come on aboard. If that were to happen. We didn't lose communication. But I'm already thinking, if we do, what am I going to do? And he's already thinking the same.

How are we going to give him a signal that they're clear to come aboard? And so all of these things, we're taking place real time. We have our discussion immediately. I call the senior flight director, Vincent LeCourt,

“because we always train for scenarios where you have to evacuate the space station.”

One of the many scenarios we train for. What if you lose pressure? What if a satellite breaks up and it sends debris? And it impacts the station. You lose pressure.

Why do you have a fire? You know, ammonia leaks. Any number of scenarios where you could have to leave the space station in an emergency? It's never happened. But we train for that.

And we get in our spacecraft and we leave in specific order. We had three crewed spacecraft up at the time of the Soyuz, the SpaceX Dragon, and then us. How do we, we've got a six spacecraft. And I call him and say, what are our options?

What do we do? What do we plan for?

And he says, well, butch, we've never had to evacuate the station.

I'm like, yes, sir. I know that. That's really Starliner's your only option. Because the Soyuz is too small. There's no way we can fit in.

It's very teeny. Dragon has space. But there's no system where we can plug our space suits into their system for the environmental control and get oxygen and all those things that communication all that. There's no, there's no, there's no seats for us.

So the best option for the actually for the first two months was Starliner. If in that scenario, if we had to. And we actually did climb a board. We had a satellite that did break up. They were concerned that debris might come into our orbit.

So we all went to our, in the middle of the night, we all go to our spacecraft. We close the hatch. Oh my goodness. And we did all of that.

And are we leaving our are we not in, in this, we're in the Starliner. So what kind of effects did being up there so long have on your body? So in space without the force of gravity, you extend. And for myself, that extension, the forces are the forces on your joints go away. So really, there's no joint pain.

It's matter of fact, you know, in jet aircraft. We're sitting here right now.

We got one time to pull a gravity 9.8 meters per second square.

32.2 feet per second square to the center of the earth. But in the jet aircraft as you pull, you can increase that fill of the G force. You know, up to whatever the aircraft will pull in my case. F-18's about seven and a half times my body weight. While you're fighting another aircraft and you're turning your head and looking and maintaining sight.

And during all of that over years, my neck is a mess. And even now to turn to the right past this far hurts. I can turn the left further, but it's just my next mess. No pain in space. All that went away.

I can turn my head, no problem. We touched down, we splashed down. Before they pick us up out of the water, my neck is already hurting.

“That's how gravity, gravity is not your friend when you come back to space.”

And there's a process of how, you know, it comes back.

It gives you balance.

They've not been stimulated by gravity.

As a matter of fact, when I was in space towards the end, we had a press conference. And sunny and Nick Hague spun me. I went in a ball. They spun me like for 15 seconds as fast as you could spin. And they spun me and I came out of that and stopped.

Nothing. I was just like I was normal before because my semi-circular canals had gone completely dormant. It was like I hadn't even spun at all. And what does that do make it so you can't hear? No, no, you can still hear.

It's just your balance. They had just gone after 10 months almost. They gone dormant. But when you come back to earth, now all of a sudden they're stimulated by gravity. Your body goes, ooh, I'm not used to this and your whole system.

Your structure is not used to holding up your weight. So there's, you know, muscles that we work out. We work out every single day in space. But there's small muscles throughout your structure that you can't work out well. And now they have to perform.

So they get tense and your whole body gets tense and oh, there's a significant amount of pain. Your body and zero gravity, the blood is floating in your system. So your body says, hey, you got too many red blood cells. So it starts purging red blood cells. You come back from space and you're deficient in red blood cells.

So you're anemic.

“That's what transports the oxygen through your system.”

So your stamina is not what it was. And all that takes time to come back. How anemic would you be when you come back? Well, like I'd say, I go out and I work in the yard for 10 hours. No big deal.

I've got about three in me when I first get back because you just get fatigued. And your body's not used to having enough blood cells to transfer that oxygen to keep you going. So so there's you do recover. Do you recover? Well, that's a good question.

You know, and the second mission I had the first long duration I had in 2014, 2015, I came back.

And there was something in the middle of my back on the right side that never went away.

I mean, constant pain, different levels of pain, depend on my exertion, but 100% of the time it was there. And always has been when I went to space this time, gone. Came back. It's back.

And it's back now worse than like right now, I'm sitting here. It's always there. I don't know what it is. They MRI it looked at it. They can't figure it out.

But there's something going on back here that has stuck with me. No, it's that thorny my side and continues to be there. It has been for over 10 years now. And that's just one of the one of the joys of space flights you carry with you. At least I do.

You mentioned your memoir. And I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah. What is the focus? What would what would readers expect with this?

Well, I tell you the book. You know, the memoir it is that is the story of the life.

And it includes everything from junior high football.

To according my wife combat missions that I flew. Obviously space missions, things that I flew. And I wrote it for my daughters. I started writing for my daughters in before the starliner stuff started. Because my wife and I, we had our daughters.

We were in our 40s. So we lived a life before they were born. And so I wrote it for them. The reason I published it though is because the story we wrapped around the starliner narrative. With kind of flashbacks to life.

“Because I think it gives a message of hope in trying times.”

Hope in the now. And also the story continues. And it gives a message of hope for all eternity. It comes through Jesus Christ our Lord. And so it's I think it's a book of hope.

And it's an intriguing story. I think that people enjoy reading. I think it's an enjoyable read. But with a message that's really has meaning. Especially when you think about, you know, eternal hope.

There's nothing better than that. Nothing more comforting as we said earlier. And dude. And that's why I published it. All right.

Well, Barry, we really appreciate you coming on. And we just remind us what the name of your book is. Yes. Well, I learned when you publish a book. And you go through a publisher.

You don't get to pick the name. So the publisher picks stuck in space. And it does tell that story. And it tells truly where we stuck. And we go through and I won't let it out.

But it'll say exactly what that means. And why the title is that. And you can get it on. You can get it on Amazon. There's Kindle version.

I actually spoke it. So you can get an audio version as well with hearing my voice speak it. Not that that's exciting. But there's that option is out there.

“And like I said, I think I think people enjoy it.”

Just reading it. But I think more so that the message will come out and clear. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming in. Oh, thank you so much.

It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you. That was naval aviator. And NASA astronaut.

Butch will more. And this has been a weekend edition. [MUSIC PLAYING] But what I want to say is that you don't want to get a new studio. The masterwriter has left her book, SoftBeyond, the internet.

So master's really great. I mean, you can say that you can get the back. You mean, you have a story. But you don't understand. egal.

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Save. What is this story? I'm going to give you a story. Now let's go!