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Comment by LeroyRaz | Hacker News Reader

To everyone saying "oh, the astronauts like having to be up there. It is an opportunity."

You get that they have no choice, right? And that for multiple reasons they are going to put the best spin on the event. For one, for their own sanity, they are going to be as positive and optimistic as possible. For two, there is likely a huge PR pressure to be as positive and optimistic as possible.

Being in space is a pretty big deal. It comes with lots of health risks, and they are isolated from their loved ones. For example, they might be missing funerals for friends or family members, they might be missing milestones of their children, etc... etc...

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> It comes with lots of health risks

It also means their forward flight time is curtailed. The near future holds manned missions more exciting than the ISS. There is a real possibility someone who might have gone to the Moon or even Mars doesn’t, now, because of Boeing.

Neither Sunita, nor Butch are candidates for Artemis missions. They are both very experienced senior astronauts in their early 60s (kind of why they were chosen to be test pilots). This was likely to be one of their last trips to space as NASA astronauts regardless.

Fair enough. Didn’t look at their profiles. Was generally pushing back on the notion that the ISS is an orbiting beach.

Mars??? That’s more than a bit of a stretch. The astronauts in the ISS right now weren’t up there for a significantly longer period of time compared to their peers. Absolutely no way it would disqualify them from a mission happening a decade from now which is an absolute best case scenario for mars and frankly even the moon the way the current political climate is in the US.

> Absolutely no way it would disqualify them from a mission happening a decade from now

Astronauts have lifetime radiation limits. Crewed Mars missions already push the envelope; the margins are especially meaningful.

Ignoring the fact that, again, the astronauts in question weren’t in space for any appreciably longer time than anyone else on the ISS.

They’ll be too old to participate in the mars mission a minimum of a decade from now.

You have literally no idea what the radiation exposure allowances will be for a manned mission to mars when it happens, or what advancements we’ll make to radiation shielding should we ever actually send a manned mission to mars.

> You have literally no idea what the radiation exposure allowances will be for a manned mission to mars when it happens

These are well known and documented, to the degree we know things about human deep spaceflight.

> what advancements we’ll make to radiation shielding should we ever actually send a manned mission to mars

These are unknown. But they will, barring new technology, require mass. Which means more shielding comes at a cost. Which incentivises low-rad experienced astronauts.

It’s still an opportunity. You can have more kids, but most people probably only get maximum one chance in their life to spend half a year in space, even if they are extremely lucky.

It’s also not like they didn’t know that death or delay or anomalous/inconvenient conditions weren’t possibly on the table. They’re test pilots, after all. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one, even if it takes a year.

Sunita Williams (one of the two stranded) is up there for her fifth(!) trip to the ISS. I can’t speak for her but if I had to guess I don’t think she minds being in space, even if it’s unplanned.

> You can have more kids, but most people probably only get maximum one chance in their life to spend half a year in space

That's not generally how having kids works haha. As you mentioned Sunita Williams has been to space five times. She's also 59 and the only information I found on kids is that she was looking to adopt a kid in 2012. It doesn't sound like she'll be having any more kids.

> Sunita Williams (one of the two stranded) is up there for her fifth(!) trip to the ISS [...] I don’t think she minds being in space, even if it’s unplanned.

Personally, I've been many times to New York. It's a very fun city. But if I booked a weeklong trip that against my will it became a yearlong one, I'd mind it.

I also can't speak for Sunita Williams, just for me in this hypothetical NYC stranding. It could be a very fun year, for sure. I'd certainly try to make the most of it. But I'd mind it.

[1] https://archive.ph/20130126165056/http://articles.timesofind...

> Personally, I've been many times to New York. It's a very fun city. But if I booked a weeklong trip that against my will it became a yearlong one, I'd mind it.

You didn’t spend years of your life and beat out 1,000 other candidates just to earn the opportunity to visit New York. Your full time job does not primarily consist of preparing and training to go to New York. You don’t get up every day and go to a job that earns a federal government salary when you could earn twice as much in the private sector because that’s the only way you can achieve your childhood dream of occasionally visiting New York. You certainly didn’t volunteer to take a test flight on a vehicle that could very plausibly catastrophically fail and kill you because that was the only way you’d ever be able to go to New York again. And if you did get stuck in New York, you probably wouldn’t become mayor.

Millions of people have “become an astronaut” as their childhood dream. Less than one in a thousand people who apply to astronaut selection actually become astronauts. And then they have to wait years to actually go to space. I don’t know why anybody would go through all of that if they didn’t really want to go to space. And while everyone else is either getting full ISS rotations or planned to fly to the moon, Butch and Suni have been assigned to an eight day test flight that’s been repeatedly delayed for years. It’s arguably the worst assignment you can get these days other than no assignment at all (and to be fair, it’s also not the first assignment for either of them). I’m sure they would have preferred if their six month stay on the ISS was planned as such ahead of time, but spending six months on the ISS is the normal mission that everyone else gets anyway—and it’s not like a normal ISS flight is scheduled for the personal convenience of the astronauts assigned to it, either.

Yeah, they don’t have a choice now that they’re in space, but if you’re an astronaut you can also just retire and make a lot more money in the private sector if you don’t really want to go to space again, and I think that it’s a pretty slim chance that a veteran astronaut would stick around and devote years of their career to an eight day flight test but would be really unhappy about being “stuck” on ISS for an otherwise normal rotation period.

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