Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Indian-origin veteran astronaut Sunita Williams and her fellow NASA colleague Butch Wilmore plan to vote from space to elect the next President of the United States (POTUS) on November 5, 2024.
The two astronauts, who took off aboard Boeing’s Starliner on June 5, 2024, for a week but got stuck in space, may return to Earth with the Crew 9 flight of Elon Musk’s company SpaceX in February 2025.
Addressing a video press conference on Friday from the International Space Station (ISS), where they are ‘staying’ for now, they said they were looking forward to casting their ballot in the 2024 US presidential election from the ISS.
Wilmore said he had sent down his request for a ballot on Friday.
“It is a very important role that we all play as American citizens,” he said. “NASA makes it very easy for us to do that.”
Sunita Williams also said it is a “very important duty.”
“Looking forward to vote from space, which is pretty cool,” she said.
The US elections – a fight between Democrat nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris and her Republican rival former President Donald Trump – will be held on November 5.
Asked about life on the ISS, Sunita said it was her “happy place” and that she “loves” being up there.
The two astronauts had on June 5 taken off aboard the Boeing’s Starliner as part of the vessel’s first crewed mission, in what was originally meant to be eight days in orbit. Their stay, however, has been stretched to eight months after the Starliner ran into several technical issues and returned to Earth without them, last week.
“That’s how things go in this business,” she said on being stuck in the space.
Williams said the transition to station life was “not that hard” since both astronauts had previous stints there.
“We wanted to take Starliner to the completion and land back on land at home, but you know, you have to turn the page and look at the next opportunity,” she added.
She said she was a little nervous that she was not returning home immediately.
“On the back of my mind, there are folks on the ground who have some plans like my family…spending time with my mother. And I think I was fretting more about that. Like the things we had planned for this fall or winter…but everybody was on board and that prepared us,” she said.
Wilmore said he was “absolutely not” let down by the decision to stay in space and indicated there were “disagreements” about how to handle the return.
“We could have gotten to the point, I believe, where we could have returned on Starliner, but we just simply ran out of time,” he said.
“In this case, we found some things that we just could not get comfortable with putting us back in the Starliner when we had other options,” he added.
After years of delays, Boeing’s Starliner finally lifted off on June 5 carrying Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, both former military test pilots, to the ISS. However, a day later, as Starliner was approaching the ISS, NASA and Boeing identified helium leaks and experienced issues with the spacecraft’s reaction control thrusters.
Five of Starliner’s 28 thrusters failed during flight and it sprang several leaks of helium, which is used to pressurize the thrusters. It was still able to dock with the space station, which has housed rotating crews of astronauts for over two decades.
NASA, however, feared the capsule would not be able to achieve the thrust necessary to return to Earth and decided to transfer the two astronauts to a SpaceX mission and return the Starliner empty.