Two astronauts stuck in space for more than nine months are finally on their way back to Earth.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams first blasted off to the ISS on 5 June, expecting to be up there for just eight days.
Read more: Two astronauts stuck in space for more than nine months head back to Earth
However, their problem-plagued Boeing Starliner posed too much of a risk for them to return to Earth, and they’ve been waiting to come home since then.
Although nine months is a long time to be in orbit, the pair aren’t alone in facing extraordinary circumstances in space.
Here are some of the final frontier’s memorable incidents.
The last Soviet citizen
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev is often dubbed the “last Soviet citizen”.
Mr Krikalev, who passed away in 2022, headed up to the Mir space station on 18 May 1991, along with Britain’s first astronaut Helen Sharman.
But three months later back on Earth, tanks rolled into Moscow’s Red Square, beginning a coup that, while unsuccessful, would ultimately cement the end of the Soviet Union.
One after another, former Soviet states declared independence while Mr Krikalev watched from space.
His hometown of Leningrad became St Petersburg and by December, the communist superpower fractured into 15 nations.
“For us, it was totally unexpected,” Mr Krikalev later said, according to Discovery magazine. “We didn’t understand what happened.
“When we discussed all this, we tried to grasp how it would affect the space program.”
The political upheaval back on Earth meant there was little money to bring Mr Krikalev home.
What was supposed to be a five-month mission turned into 311 days aboard Mir, twice as long as planned.
Read more: What can being in space for so long do to your health?
When he finally landed in March 1992, Mr Krikalev was a Russian citizen, having left a member of the USSR.
He continued working as an astronaut and eventually logged more than 800 days in space.
Apollo-13
The most famous space accident, of course, is the Apollo-13 mission of April 1970.
Three astronauts, James Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swiger, were sent on humanity’s third lunar landing mission but found their lives at “real risk” when their ship’s oxygen tank began leaking, according to Dr Teasel Muir-Harmony, head curator of the Smithsonian’s Apollo collection.
“They had to immediately shut down as much power as possible inside the spacecraft,” she said; their fuel cells ran on the escaping oxygen and the astronauts needed them to survive.
“It became clear almost immediately that they were not going to land [on the moon],” said Dr Muir-Harmony.
Instead, they needed to work out how to get home, quickly.
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Back on Earth, their dramatic mission was gripping the globe, with people holding vigils for the astronauts.
The ship’s lunar module, designed to land on the moon’s surface with only two astronauts onboard, became the three-person crew’s best option for returning to Earth.
They climbed into the lander, risking their lives if carbon dioxide built up in the cabin.
One example of the incredible resourcefulness of the astronauts during this mission was their hacking of the lunar module’s air filters, according to Dr Muir-Harmony.
The air filters used in the lander were a different shape from the ones on the main ship, and with three people breathing out carbon dioxide instead of the expected two, the air scrubbers were getting overwhelmed.
NASA’s engineers back on Earth worked out a way of fashioning the air filters with materials the astronauts could find onboard and then had to verbally describe the workaround as no pictures could be beamed to the crew.
“That’s just one small example of the problems they encountered in this unprecedented situation,” said Dr Muir-Harmony.
“But it [shows] the problem-solving involved in addressing that issue and ultimately returning the astronauts safely back to Earth.”
When the Apollo-13 mission landed back on Earth, six dramatic days after it had blasted off, then-President Richard Nixon called it the “most meaningful day” he’d ever experienced.
Using the heat of the sun
Former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman used a stroke of ingenuity while out on a spacewalk in 2010.
“He was trying to fix an antenna that had broken,” said Ed Kellond-Turner from the UK Space Centre.
Mr Reisman needed to connect two power cords in order to warm up the antennae – but while floating out in space, he struck a problem.
Both ends of the cable were the same size – one wouldn’t fit inside the other.
He tried jamming the cables together so hard, he saw “shavings of metal coming off,” said Mr Kellond-Turner, until Mr Reisman noticed the time.
He realised the sun would rise in about ten minutes and hid the male end of the cable in his fist.
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As the sun rose, he held out the female end and waited. In space, direct sunlight can reach around 150 degrees so, quickly, the cable heated up.
“This warmed up the metal just enough that it started to expand,” said Mr Kellond-Turner. The astronaut quickly pulled out the cool male end and managed to plug them together, powering up the antenna.
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There are dozens of stories of astronauts facing extraordinary circumstances in space, from Christina Cook’s extended visit to the ISS giving her the record for the longest woman in space, to astronauts watching as snow-like coolant from their shuttle whipped past the window following a collision with some space debris.
Now, Butch Wilmore and Suni Wilmore join the leagues of astronauts with an incredible story to tell.
