The two astronauts who will spend additional time aboard the International Space Station are Navy test pilots who have already flown long missions.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been holed up on the space station with seven others since early June, awaiting a verdict on how — and when — they will return to Earth.
NASA decided Saturday not to return its troubled Boeing capsule, but to wait for a flight with SpaceX in late February, which would push its mission duration to more than eight months. The original route for the test flight was eight days.
Butch Wilmore
Wilmore, 61, grew up in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, where he played football for his high school team and later for Tennessee Tech. He joined the Navy, became a test pilot and logged more than 8,000 flight hours and 663 carrier landings. He flew combat missions in the first Gulf War in 1991 and was a flight instructor when NASA selected him as an astronaut in 2000.
In 2009, Wilmore flew to the International Space Station as a pilot of the shuttle Atlantis, where he delivered tons of spare parts. Five years later, he joined the orbiting lab for six months, launching aboard a Russian Soyuz from Kazakhstan and completing four spacewalks.
Married with two daughters, Wilmore is a minister at his Houston-area Baptist church. He has participated in prayer services with the congregation while in orbit.
His family is accustomed to the uncertainty and stress of his profession. He met his wife Deanna during tours of duty in the Navy, and their daughters were born in Houston, the astronauts’ home base.
“That’s all they know,” Wilmore said before the flight.
NASA’s six astronauts aboard the International Space Station celebrated the start of the Paris Olympics with a zero-gravity reenactment of the torch relay and some of their favorite Olympic sports.
Sunny Williams
Williams, 58, is the first woman to serve as a test pilot for a new spacecraft. She grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children, born to an Indian brain researcher and a Slovenian-American health care worker. She thought she would go into science like them and planned to become a veterinarian. But she ended up attending the Naval Academy, eager to fly, and served in a Navy helicopter squadron overseas during the Gulf War buildup.
NASA selected her as an astronaut in 1998. Because of her diverse background, she jumped at the chance to go to Russia to help behind the scenes on the brand-new International Space Station. In 2006, she flew aboard the shuttle Discovery on her own long-duration mission. She had to stay longer than expected—6 1/2 months—after her return flight, Atlantis, was damaged by hail on the Florida platform. She returned to the space station in 2012, this time as commander.
She performed seven spacewalks during her two missions and even ran the Boston Marathon on a station treadmill and participated in a triathlon, replacing the swimming event with an exercise machine.
Her husband, Michael Williams, a retired U.S. marshal and former Navy aviator, cares for their dogs in Houston. It’s her widowed mother who worries.
“I’m her little girl, so I think she’s always worried,” Williams said before launching into the conversation.
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