They should make a movie about this, it was all fun we were going to space for 8 days and stayed for 9 MONTHS STRANDED NO WAY BACK HOME. i felt so bad for them honestly. Glad they’re safe and home now.
Becoming a NASA astronaut is extremely hard. You have to check a ridiculous number of boxes, and you have to really want it. I think anyone who goes through this process would prefer a 6 month stay on the space station over a 2 week stay on the space station, and the 6 month stay is what they got.
NASA kept them safe and fed, I really don't think you can reasonably knock them from this perspective.
Feels like they've been put between a wall and a sword: either they abandon the ISS or come back home. I don't know how I'd feel about that.
As I say, it's amazing how effective lying to people has become that you genuinely bought that total load of crap that they were stranded.
Especially when you’re separated from your family and other loved ones.
This is their life and profession. The job is extremely difficult, dangerous and mega mega expensive. Hence they don't get to do it as much as they love. Now they did.
And if you follow JPL robotic missions that far outlast their mission objectives and keep going like Energizer Bunnies, then is it not sort of amazing that the astronauts really suffered no privations or hardships, in terms of food/shelter/clothing/hygiene, by extending their missions and doing useful things up there?
People watch "The Martian" and "Lost in Space" and they can't seem to grasp the careful pre-planning, incident response, resource allocation, and orcestration that goes into everything that's done by space programs.
Space missions include sprawling, branching flow-charts of every contingency they imagined, and they inform the press of mission objectives and a proposed timeline, and then life happens and when glitches come up, they roll with them because they prepared for them. Apollo 13, for example, is categorically different than a space habitation in Earth orbit; as a lone vehicle with limited resources and an isolated path, that Apollo mission ran out of planned contingencies to the point of improvising so many things and returning to fundamentals, preserving human life.
It's the peril of human life that definitely adds drama for us, and the ISS being influenced by geopolitics is categorically different than the nationalist glories of Mercury-Gemini-Apollo vs. the Soviets. But with ISS in Earth orbit, receiving regular resupply missions, being a habitable outpost, it's far different than sending up a vehicle like the Space Shuttle while everyone speculates whether another Saturn V could be constructed in time to rescue the crew because tiles fell off their heat shield.
Speaking of Saturn, I've been peering into Greek/Roman mythology, and learning what Cronus/Saturn did with his children and how Aphrodite/Venus was born, gives new insight into super heavy-lift launch vehicles named after the deity.
But the only people that can actually say this was bad or good are the astronauts themselves, only they know how much they love their work to turn the word "stranded" into something else positive.
They were not stuck in space
> But the only people that can actually say this was bad or good are the astronauts themselves
Multiple people that actually ran this mission have said multiple times that they were not stuck, and explained all the reasons for the extension. And yet you keep ignoring everything except the narrative of "stuck" and "stranded".
"Another astronaut comments on what the Crew-9 people can expect: "The returning astronauts will "struggle to walk, get dizzy easily, and have bad eyesight", because the "build-up of fluid changes the shape of their eyeballs, and weakens their vision". They may need glasses for the rest of their lives.""
It is, to be fair, part of their job to put on a happy face.
There is always a way home from the ISS. There are always enough spacecraft, including Soyuz, docked to ISS to save the cosmonauts in case of emergency.
See, we can all put stuff in capitals. Doesn't make it true.
Even if you defined "stranded" as being "unable to use the Starliner", then they weren't stranded in September. They could have decided to get in the ship and go home. Not like there's some political officers on board ready to stop them.