Two American astronauts are stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) and may only be back on Earth next year.
Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams flew to the ISS on 5 June on a mission to a test the Boeing Starliner, and they were expected to spend only a few days on the space station. However, as they approached the station to dock, a number of problems became apparent with the Starliner craft. It has still not been determined whether the Starliner is safe enough to bring Wilmore and Williams home and they may need alternative transport.
The American space agency, NASA, said it’s still considering its options on how to bring the two home. The most likely option is to send them home with a craft from SpaceX which is due to dock with the ISS in September and return to Earth in February 2025.
If that happens, then Wilmore and Williams will have spent eight months in space rather than eight days, as was originally planned.
This will still be far short of the longest time that humans have been in space. Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 consecutive days in space on the Mir space station in the 1990s, the longest unbroken stretch any human has spent in space.