For Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the wait for their trip aboard the Boeing Starliner was longer than expected, stretching out to four more days after Saturday's launch was canceled.
On May 1, reporters pointed out that veteran astronauts Wilmore and Williams had trained for the mission longer than Apollo 11 moon landing astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.
“It just doesn't seem real,” Williams replied.
And the wait has now extended by almost a month after the initial launch on May 6 was cancelled due to a malfunction of a valve on the rocket.
Wilmore and Williams initially remained at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, hoping that the valve could be quickly repaired and a second attempt could be made within the next few days.
However, engineers discovered a small helium leak in the Starliner, necessitating some difficult troubleshooting.
The two astronauts returned to their home base at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on May 10 but remained in isolation to minimize contact with others and the chance of contracting the disease.
“They're doing fine,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said at a May 24 press conference.
Wilmore and Williams spent their extra time on the ground in a Starliner spacecraft simulator, practicing what to do if one of the spacecraft's thrusters failed, which could happen if a helium leak worsened during the spaceflight.
“They've flown all the cases in terms of rendezvous, deorbit and re-entry and are ready to go,” Stich said.
Williams was born in Ohio but grew up in Massachusetts. She served as a U.S. Navy test pilot and has logged more than 3,000 flight hours in more than 30 aircraft. She was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1998. She spent 322 days in space and at one time held the record for total spacewalk time by a woman.
The Tennessee native was a Navy test pilot who flew combat missions over Iraq and Bosnia in the 1990s before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 2000. Over his two missions, he's spent a total of 167 days in space.
It's been years since they last got back on track.
Williams has completed two long-term stays aboard the International Space Station, the second of which concluded in November 2012. Wilmore served as a space shuttle mission pilot in 2009 and later spent five and a half months aboard the space station from September 2014 to March 2015.
After a glitch-ridden test flight without a crew in December 2019, delays led to a reassignment of astronauts — in fact, none of the astronauts NASA had picked for the test flight in 2018 ended up taking it.
Wilmore was named test flight commander in 2020, with Williams moving to the test flight role as pilot in 2022. (She was originally scheduled to command flight 2, the first operational flight to send four astronauts to the space station for six months.)