NASA’s Starliner Astronauts Take Their First Spacewalk Together After Roughly Eight Months on the ISS

NASA’s two Starliner astronauts—Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, who have spent an unexpected eight months on the International Space Station (ISS)—took their first spacewalk together on Thursday.

“Here we go,” said Wilmore as he emerged into space, reports Marcia Dunn for the Associated Press. The two astronauts performed maintenance work on degraded radio hardware and collected samples from the station’s exterior to test for microbes. The entirety of the spacewalk lasted five hours and 26 minutes, and it was live streamed in an official broadcast from NASA.

The feat was Wilmore’s first spacewalk since the start of the trip. Williams stepped out two weeks ago with another NASA astronaut, Nick Hague. But with their previous experience on spacewalks during other missions, this one was Wilmore’s fifth—and it was the ninth for Williams, who also set a new record with this outing.

Now, Williams is the woman with the most time spent spacewalking in history, with a career total of 62 hours and six minutes. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson set the previous record in 2017, with 60 hours and 21 minutes. Whitson still holds the record for the most spacewalks by a woman, with ten total.

US Spacewalk 92 with Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams (Official NASA Broadcast)

The world has been following the pair since last summer, when the astronauts’ planned eight-day stay on the ISS extended into a months-long space odyssey. The duo flew to the station in early June on the first crewed flight of the Boeing Starliner, but the spacecraft experienced helium leaks and thruster issues in transit. NASA ultimately deemed the vehicle too risky for a regular crewed ride back to Earth, and it returned successfully, but empty of its passengers. Now, Williams and Wilmore are expected to return on a SpaceX Dragon capsule with the Crew-9 astronauts, no earlier than March.

NASA has stressed that the astronauts are not “stranded.” They will return home during a scheduled crew rotation. The Crew-9 capsule is currently docked to the ISS, and NASA is just waiting for the next group of astronauts—Crew-10—to arrive. The agency does this to make sure there’s adequate staffing at the station. In December, NASA announced that Crew-10’s arrival would be pushed back to allow SpaceX more time to ready its new Dragon spacecraft for flight.

“NASA and SpaceX are expeditiously working to safely return the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore as soon as practical, while also preparing for the launch of Crew-10 to complete a handover between expeditions,” NASA says in a statement to CNN’s Ashley Strickland.

The two astronauts tell Eric Lagatta at USA Today that their training prepares them for situations like this. “Being deployed for a little while is not unusual for any of us, and that’s part of the game,” Williams tells the publication. “When you come to some place that’s a little bit different from home, you might not come home right away.”

The astronauts seem to be making the most of their extra time in space. “You just need to learn how to adapt, and obviously we’ve all done that,” adds Williams. “We’ve made a great crew up here.”