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Brenna Cooper
A retired astronaut has explained why NASA's Barry 'Butch' Wilmore and Sunita 'Suni' Williams were never stranded on the International Space Station, despite reports stating the contrary.
After a long and highly-anticipated eight months orbiting Earth on the ISS, astronauts Butch and Suni will be splashing down off the coast of Florida later today (18 March) and beginning the process of readjusting to a life with gravity.
As NASA scrambled to work out how to bring the pair safely home, reports that Butch and Suni were essentially stranded alone in space began to circulate online.
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However, one retired astronaut has now explained why this isn't actually the case.
Speaking to LADbible to answer questions about Butch and Suni's return to Earth is former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who completed three missions to space and has now authored a series of books — including his upcoming novel Final Orbit.
"People said they were stranded on the space... they were never stranded," he explained. "They were where they wanted to be, and they could come home if they needed to, every single day that they were there. Nobody's stranded."
Chris isn't the only person to dispel the idea that Butch and Suni are floating around in the middle of nowhere and surviving on basic rations either, with Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, saying last August: "I want to make it very clear that Butch and Suni are not stranded in space."
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So, why has NASA waited for nearly nine months before bringing the pair home?
According to Hadfield, this was all to do how staffing on the ISS works.
"The vehicle that they're riding home in has been there since September," he explained. "They could have come home in it any day, if they needed to. But of course, that then there wouldn't have been the right people on Space Station, and so they wouldn't have done that."
Which makes sense, although it's less dramatic than a story than two people living out the plot of The Martian in real time.
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"That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it. We both get it," Butch explained to CNN in February. "But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded."
In Hadfield's mind, it's not the astronauts working on the ISS who are 'trapped' but people who live out their entire lives on Earth who are.
"Astronauts think people on Earth are stranded because they don't get to leave," he added.
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"They don't get to go into the third dimension. They don't get to go around the world 16 times a day they don't get to fly weightless."
Chris Hadfield's latest novel, Final Orbit, will be released in October and is available to pre-order here.