Clayton Anderson: Former NASA Astronaut on Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams coming back to Earth from ISS after 9 months

After nine months stranded in space, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will be back on Earth today.

Their stay on the International Space Station was only supposed to last eight days but their mission had to be extended after the spacecraft they arrived on experienced technical issues. 

They are coming home this morning - and are expected to splashdown just before 11am New Zealand time. 

Retired NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson told Andrew Dickens on what they should expect after such a long time in space. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This has going to be a movie one day, hasn't it?
After nine months stranded in space, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore
and Sonny Williams will be back on Earth today. Their
stay on the International Space Station was only supposed to
last eight days, but their mission had to be extended
after the spacecraft they arrived on experienced technical issues, so
then it ended out being nine months. We're expecting spashdown

(00:22):
just before eleven o'clock. I'm joined now by retired NASA
or astronaut Clayton Anderson CLA. Clayton, Good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
To well it is it? Good morning, good night, good
day in.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
New Zealand, whatever you like. You're in space, man, every
day was night and every night was day. So you
spend one hundred and sixty six days up there? Could
you have done nine months?

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Good question. My wife and I talked toward the end
of my five months day because there was some uncertainty
going on and between the two of us, given her
role as the general down on Earth with my family,
figured we could go one or two months after but
if we had to go much longer than that, it

(01:05):
would start to strain everything.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Hell, what was the strain I mean, you're up there,
you're having the world's most extraordinary experience, you'd know that
there's a risk of it all. So how does it
strain things?

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Well, you know, if you think about Butch and Sonny,
since that's kind of the topic of the day. You know,
when you don't know the end date, it can make
it harder, it can make it easy if you don't
focus on an end date, which is what I did, right.
I tried not to think about the end because I
didn't know when the end was coming. That would that

(01:37):
made it easier to deal with missing the wife, missing
the kids. But you know, I was counting on my
wife to do a lot for my family, and that
you know, nobody talks about the toll of the wife
and the family down below. Uh, you know, she was
the mom, the dad, the driver, the coach, the nurse,

(01:58):
the she did everything. And my wife was a NASA employee.
She cut her job down. She had to have a
signed agreement with NASA to allow her to reduce her
work week to thirty hours per week so that she
wouldn't get in trouble because she had so much to
do to take care of my kids at the time,
So you know, that's a big sacrifice for the other

(02:20):
half of your family.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
It does kind of show that, Butch and Sonny, if
they've got through it, well have what it takes, the
right stuff, you might want to say. It's also, i mean,
apart from the Boeing ship breaking down, it's also in
my view, American exceptionalism because no one was expecting people
to be there for nine months on the eight days,
and yet you kept them supplied with food, you keep
them supplied with oxygen. It was quite a remarkable thing.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Well, you know, yes it was. But the supply process
was never affected by any of this. So supply ships
are typically cargo only things like a Russian progress that
come up and bring things on a regular basis. An
uncrewed dragon capsule can bring supplies lots of ways to

(03:06):
do it. That was never affected. So even though they
had two extra guests on board, it probably wasn't a
big deal for them to keep them supplied with food, water, oxygen,
and clothing. You know, it might have been a little
tough at first until the first cargo ship came up,
but I'm sure they were scrambling on the ground to
make sure that Sonny and Butch got some stuff of

(03:27):
theirs on that cargo ship to bring it up. So
you know, it's a process that's pretty well understood.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Okay, all right, Clayton, Yes, exactly right, and they showed
the right stuff. And thank you to our listeners who
said the Bone Capsule came back to with without astronauts
about three months after it reached for more familiarly edition
with Ryan Bridge.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
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