NASA astronauts who will spend additional months on the space station are experienced Navy pilots

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The two astronauts who will spend additional time on the International Space Station are Navy test pilots who have previously completed long missions.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been trapped in the space station with seven others since early June, waiting for a decision on how and when they will return to Earth.

NASA decided on Saturday that it will not return with its ill-fated Boeing capsule but will wait for a flight with SpaceX in late February, extending its mission to more than eight months. The original schedule for the test flight called for eight days.

Butch Wilmore

Wilmore, 61, grew up in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, and played football for his high school team and later for Tennessee Technological University. He joined the Navy, became a test pilot and amassed more than 8,000 flight hours and landed 663 aircraft carriers. He flew combat missions during the first Gulf War in 1991 and was serving as a flight test instructor when NASA selected him to be an astronaut in 2000.

Wilmore flew to the International Space Station in 2009 as a pilot on the shuttle Atlantis, delivering tons of spare parts. Five years later, he moved to the orbiting laboratory for six months, launched on a Russian Soyuz from Kazakhstan and made four spacewalks.

Wilmore is married and has two daughters. He is an elder at his Baptist church in Houston. While in orbit, he attended the church’s prayer services.

His family is used to the uncertainty and stress of his job. He met his wife, Deanna, during Navy deployments and their daughters were born in Houston, the astronauts’ home base.

“That’s all they know,” Wilmore said before the flight.

Suni Williams

Williams, 58, is the first woman to serve as a test pilot for a new spacecraft. She grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children of an Indian-born brain researcher and a Slovenian-American health worker. She assumed she would go into science like them and considered becoming a veterinarian. But she ended up at the Naval Academy, eager to fly and served in a Navy helicopter squadron overseas during military preparations for the Gulf War.

NASA selected her as an astronaut in 1998. Because of her diverse background, she jumped at the chance to go to Russia to help behind the scenes at the still-new International Space Station. In 2006, she flew on her own lengthy mission aboard the shuttle Discovery. She had to stay longer than planned – 6 1/2 months – after her homeward-bound Atlantis was damaged by hail on the Florida launch pad. She returned to the space station in 2012, this time serving as its commander.

During her two missions, she completed seven spacewalks, even ran the Boston Marathon on a space station treadmill, and competed in a triathlon, completing the swimming event on a training machine.

Her husband, Michael Williams, a retired U.S. Marshal and former naval aviator, cares for the dogs at home in Houston. Her widowed mother is the one who is worried.

“I’m her little daughter, so I think she’s always worried,” Williams said before the start.

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