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This is Science Friday. I'm Flor Lichtman.

Today in the podcast, after 286 days aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronauts, Fuch Wilmore, and Sunni

Williams finally landed safely back on Earth. They had traveled to the ISS for what was to be

an eight-day trip and ended up staying nine months because their Boeing Starliner capsule was

having thruster issues. Here to tell us about their return and other notable

stories in science this week is Casey Crownheart, senior climate reporter for the MIT Technology

Review. She's based in New York City. Casey, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much for

having me. Always great to be here. So Butch and SUNY are back. Yay. Give us the story.

Yeah. Finally. It's been a long wait for sure. So these two took off on June 25th, 2024, on a mission to test Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft, which is designed to transport crew to and from the ISS. Like you mentioned, technical issues kind of messed with the plans a little bit.

As it was approaching the ISS, the thrusters stopped working. They managed to dock, but they decided

to send Starliner back without crew. And so basically, it's been kind of a waiting game to get,

you know, another spacecraft up there that could take these astronauts home and then crew up to

the space station

so that it wouldn't be kind of short-handed. It's amazing to me that they don't have like a backup,

you know, on the shelf, you know? Yeah. I mean, I think that it's one of those things where we could

have sent an emergency mission, but, you know, they were up there doing work, working on

experiments, doing spacewalks.

Like, they were really okay. It was obviously a delay, but yeah.

Well, what did they do with their extra time up there? Yeah, so they were, you know,

helping out with experiments that were going on at the space station, fixing equipment.

SUNY Williams actually set a new record for most time spent spacewalking

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