Suni Williams, one of two Nasa astronauts whose 10-day test flight mission turned into a nine-month odyssey on the International Space Station (ISS), has retired from the US space agency.
The 60-year-old former navy captain left in December after 27 years with Nasa, according to a press release from the agency on Tuesday. Jared Isaacman, the agency’s new administrator, praised her as “a trailblazer in human spaceflight”.
She retires holding the record for the most accumulated spacewalk time by a woman – more than 62 hours in nine separate operations. But she will be best remembered for the ill-fated first crewed flight of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule in June 2024, when Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore launched on what should have been a short test mission to the ISS, but ended up staying 286 days after technical problems with the spacecraft.
Their extended stay caused a political firestorm on Earth, with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the SpaceX chief, insisting the pair were “stuck” in space, having been “abandoned” by the Biden administration. They returned home last March on board a SpaceX Dragon capsule, an uneventful mission framed by Trump as “a rescue” by Musk, his then friend and ally.
Williams and Wilmore, who retired last summer, were reluctant to step into the politics of their prolonged adventure, denying at a post-landing press conference that they ever felt marooned or abandoned.
Wilmore conceded that “in certain respects, maybe we were stuck”, while Williams chose a more diplomatic pathway. “We were just really focused on what we were doing and trying to be part of the team. Of course, we heard some things …” she said.
In all, Williams launched into space three times, in December 2006 onboard the US space shuttle Discovery; in July 2012 on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft; and the Starliner mission in 2024.
Her combined 608 days in space are the second most of any Nasa astronaut, behind Peggy Whitson’s 695. She was also the first astronaut to run a marathon in orbit, pounding a treadmill in April 2007 as an official entrant in the Boston marathon taking place simultaneously 250 miles below.
“Over the course of Suni’s impressive career trajectory, she has been a pioneering leader,” Vanessa Wyche, director of the Johnson space center, Houston, said in the Nasa statement. “Her exceptional dedication to the mission will inspire the future generations of explorers.”
In many ways, Williams’s retirement, announced on Tuesday on the 96th birthday of Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, marks a generational passing of the torch. It came three days after Nasa moved Artemis II, the rocket set to take humans around the moon this year for the first time since 1972, to its launchpad at Florida’s Kennedy space center.
Isaacman noted the transition in his own tribute to Williams. “Her work advancing science and technology has laid the foundation for Artemis missions to the moon and advancing toward Mars, and her extraordinary achievements will continue to inspire generations to dream big and push the boundaries of what’s possible,” he said.
The launch window for Artemis will open on 6 February. It will carry a crew of four, Nasa astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen. Nasa will soon conduct a “wet test” dress rehearsal to assess the rocket’s readiness.
According to the space agency, more than 2.5 million people have claimed their own “boarding pass” for the flight, an educational initiative in which names will be stored digitally on an SD card that will fly around the moon in Orion, the Artemis crew capsule.
A successful 10-day mission will advance plans for Artemis III and the first human lunar landing in more than half a century, currently scheduled for next year.
Williams said the ISS and its “awe-inspiring people, engineering and science”, had opened a pathway to new exploration of the moon and Mars.
