Early on a windswept wintry morning in February, after diligently completing her pre-work three-mile swim across a frigid Buzzards Bay, in Massachusetts, Dina Pandya was stripping off her wetsuit when, from the depths of a cloth bag she had discreetly concealed in a clump of faded driftwood on Old Silver Beach, her phone buzzed. It was a message from outer space.
Her sister had news.
The last time Dina had seen her sister, Suni Williams, was about eight months earlier—June 5, 2024—in a white room at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. It’s here, in the snug confines of the Operations and Checkout Building, that astronauts complete their final preparations—putting on their cumbersome suits, then meticulously checking them for leaks—before heading out for the 13-mile drive to Space Launch Complex 41, at Cape Canaveral.
It’s a nervous time, even more so for the families than the astronauts, who can be counted on to focus on the mission at hand. Still, there’s no getting around the discomforting knowledge that goes unspoken by everyone in the room: a rocket launch is an explosion. You’re jolted up toward the heavens by the tremendous force of thousands of pounds of rapidly burning oxidizer and propellant, and the best you can hope for is that a series of careful calculations will prove up to the task of reining in all the dangerous chemistry.
But on this morning there’s an additional worry: this is a test flight, the first crewed mission for the Boeing Starliner space capsule. The two experienced astronauts making the 10-day journey—Williams and Butch Wilmore, both U.S. Navy and NASA veterans—will be the first humans to put the craft through its paces. Yet if the past is any clue to what’s in store, they’d better fasten their seats for a bumpy ride. The operational history of the beleaguered Boeing Starliner was about as discouraging as that of the company’s accident-prone 737 Max passenger jets.
Back in 2019, five long years after Boeing received a $4.2 billion contract from NASA to come up with a reliable craft that could taxi astronauts to and from the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth, the company was at last ready to put an uncrewed capsule to the test.
On the way up, there were glitches after glitches. The NASA engineers on the ground grew so alarmed that they canceled the Starliner from approaching the space station; they didn’t want this unreliable contraption coming anywhere near their $100 billion pride and joy. And on the way down, things only got worse: a software malfunction could have caused the wrong thrusters to fire. “A high-visibility close call” was how the NASA chief of human spaceflight described the incident, his professional exasperation close to bursting.
Four years later, though, all the kinks had been ironed out—or at least enough of them in NASA’s judgment for Williams and Wilmore to take their chances. Yet in the summer of 2023, just weeks before the scheduled crewed test flight, the dismayed Boeing engineers discovered two hair-raising last-minute concerns. The parachute lines that would open to glide the craft in for a landing, if not deployed properly, wouldn’t work. And the tape that enveloped the capsule’s massive tangle of internal wiring—well, it was flammable.
Back to the drawing board went the chagrined Boeing engineering team. It wasn’t a quick fix. Then more stomach-churning anomalies, involving valves and helium leaks, led to more delays. But finally, on this bright morning last June, everything was good to go.
Pandya approaches her sister. At 62, she’s three years older than Williams, but at a glance they might be mistaken for twins. The two women are wiry and whippet thin, both marathon runners. They have the same Medusa tangles of jet-black hair, whispers of gray just starting to appear, the identical café-au-lait-colored skin. But the true tie that binds is the unmistakable look of purpose shining in both women’s dark eyes.
For, as Pandya puts it, their lives have been shaped not so much by decisions as by dharma. And what is dharma? To hear her talk about it, it is not a word that can be neatly defined but, rather, a commitment to duty, to service, to a right way of living.
Their father was an Indian orphan from the dusty, dirt-poor village of Jhulasan, who, against all odds, made his way to medical school and then to America, where he spent a distinguished life delving into the mysteries of the human brain, teaching and researching at the medical schools of Harvard and Boston University.
Their mother, the daughter of Slovene immigrants, grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in a hardscrabble neighborhood where polka music blared from the bars and the first- and second-generation steelworkers’ ties to their ancestral Yugoslavia ran deep. Yet her journey was no less improbable than her husband’s: a marriage to a Hindu doctor, a deep and caring commitment to an eclectic menagerie of animals, and, later in life, a career as an author of children’s books. Williams and Pandya, along with their brother, Jay, were the inheritors of their parents’ ambition, their virtue, their unpredictability, and their spirituality. It is no accident that on her missions, Suni took along a copy of the Bhagavad Gita.
Then there are Pandya’s children, and that, too, was a journey also written in their shared stars. The backstory: Williams met her future husband, Mike, when both were midshipmen at Annapolis. She dreamed of earning a Top Gun fighter pilot’s wings but wound up, like Mike, flying helicopters for the navy. When Williams, to her surprise and elation, was selected for astronaut training, Mike moved on to the U.S. Marshals Service, taking on frontline organized crime and narcotics cases. And as things worked out, children never became a part of their busy, focused lives.
The twist and turns of Pandya’s life, too, left her childless and single. Yet she was determined to adopt a daughter. Williams initiated a conversation with the sister of Kalpana Chawla, the Indian-born astronaut who had died in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during its re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere. It was this sister who led Pandya to the orphanage in India where she made a heartfelt connection to a bright-eyed five-year-old girl. But Panchei had an impish younger brother, Tilu. And dharma again set the course: siblings should not be separated.
Pandya returned home to Cape Cod with a daughter and a son. And Williams’s niece and nephew would, over the years, grow to have the pull on her emotions of surrogate children. It is appropriate, then, that Panchei and Tilu, now teenagers, are also there in the room to see their aunt off.
Soon it is time for the sisters to say good-bye. They hug, but it has a finite quality; they don’t want to make too big a deal of things.
“Well, now’s your last chance,” Williams teases. “You’ve got four minutes to tell me everything.”
“What’s there to tell?,” Pandya parries. Then, in earnest, “See you soon.”
“Before you know it,” Williams says. “Hardly more than a week.”
Pandya nods. She knows the value of a good silence. And after all, it’s just a 10-day mission.
Then Williams leaves. Just like that, she’s making her way out of the white room, walking side by side with Wilmore. The last time Pandya sees the two astronauts, they’re heading down the short ramp in their blue space suits to the waiting Boeing Airstream Astrovan II like any two people catching a ride to work.
A Plum Mission
Yet if things had gone as originally planned, Wilmore would never have been on the van at all. When NASA made the crew assignments back in the fall of 2018 for the Starliner test missions, he hadn’t made the cut (and Williams, in fact, was only named to the capsule’s second flight). But during the six years Boeing struggled to get its act together, the three designated astronauts either retired or moved on. Only then was Wilmore plucked for this plum mission.
Wilmore’s life, in fact, had in many ways been a series of unanticipated triumphs, or at least unanticipated by those who failed at first to take full measure of his scrappy, resilient ambition and his lionhearted courage. Time after time, people had a tendency to underestimate him. On his first day at football practice as a walk-on at Tennessee Tech, the five-foot-nine-inch, 175-pound freshman (“small, slow, and weak,” he would concede) was greeted with indifference by the coaches. But by his senior year, bulked up and a few inches taller, Wilmore was the starting outside linebacker; his 21-tackle game against Austin Peay is still celebrated by Tech fans.
Wilmore joined the U.S. Navy with his heart set on flying fighter jets. But, according to the bemused stories making the rounds today, his instructors pegged him as not the type. He didn’t have the cocky Right Stuff swagger that the fun-loving flyboys eager to pull the stick back and put their F/A-18 Hornets through the paces at over 1,000 miles an hour seemed to delight in possessing. But Butch fooled them all.
His career as a naval aviator had him zooming off carrier decks and heading off into combat missions in the skies above Bosnia and Iraq. “Have gun....Will travel” was the proud motto of his “Blue Blasters” Strike Fighter Squadron 34. He was so good at his dangerous profession that the air force poached him and made him an instructor at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base. His assignment: teach the best of the best to be even better.
NASA, too, seemed to give him short shrift. When he applied for the astronaut program, he was passed over. Wilmore was all set to move on from Edwards to his next carrier deployment when, to his surprise, the agency accepted him in July 2000. Nevertheless, the opportunity to travel into space seemed to elude him. He had to wait nine years before he was given the assignment to pilot the space shuttle Atlantis to the space station. Then another five demoralizing years passed until, in 2014, he returned to space as a member of Expedition 41 aboard a Russian Soyuz.
But now he and Williams were headed to the Atlas V Starliner rocket that would propel him back to the space station for a third time. In appearance and manner, the two astronauts could scarcely have been more different. Wilmore was a crew-cut fireplug, with bulging biceps and a Tennessee twang to his commanding military voice. Williams was soft-spoken, dark, and thin, with flowing hair and a speculative, brooding countenance.
But they also shared some internal common ground. Both were people of deep faith. Williams found solace in Hinduism, while Christianity was Wilmore’s cornerstone. “He really put his life into the church,” says his pastor at the Providence Baptist Church not far from the Johnson Space Center, in Houston. Butch agrees. “I need daily, continual encouragement and instruction from the Word,” he confided when he appeared along with his wife, Deanna, on a Christian radio show in 2016. “The most important part of my life is my spiritual journey.”
But now the Astrovan had arrived at Complex 41. An elevator brought the two astronauts up to the small bridge connecting to the Starliner capsule. Entering the vehicle involved a movement that was nearly a body flip. And quickly they were strapped in, almost shoulder to shoulder, the countdown getting closer and closer to liftoff, to one more voyage into the deep, infinite darkness of space.
Earthly Politics
Yet something amazing happened once they were out there. Something for which the two astronauts found themselves unprepared.
It wasn’t that the Starliner proved to be problematic, even potentially dangerous, on the way up. Despite the issues with overheating thrusters and helium leaks, they had managed on the second approach to dock the capsule to the space station. And when NASA decided that the recurring malfunctions couldn’t be corrected for the trip back home and sent the capsule back to Earth without them, it was a disappointment with which they could easily cope. “Space is my happy place,” Williams, with convincing sincerity, announced to the world in a broadcast from space. Wilmore, in turn, said he found the equilibrium necessary to deal with the unexpected in 2 Corinthians.
The eight-day stay at the space station stretched into astral weeks, then months, but they didn’t complain. They performed valuable scientific experiments; successfully executed a tethered walk outside the space station to collect swabs that might reveal if Earth microbes could survive, and perhaps even thrive, in space; exercised for hours on end to help prevent the loss of bone and muscle density; and sang karaoke at night along with the other astronauts on board.
But what they weren’t prepared for, what they hadn’t trained for, and what they had never expected was the raw, vituperative political tumult caused by their predicament. Or that the conspiracy theorists would have a ball at their expense.
Just a week after his inauguration, Donald Trump posted on X that he’d instructed Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX (and “First Buddy”) to bring back “the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden administration.”
Which didn’t seem at all like the situation to Williams and Wilmore. In September, a SpaceX Dragon capsule on a long-scheduled mission to the space station had arrived. But instead of the customary crew of four, there were two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams to occupy on the craft’s return trip.
In the meantime, the Dragon remained docked, ready to use in case of emergency. NASA, however, was in no special hurry; there was plenty of science to do on the space station. The agency’s practical plan was to wait until spring, when, traveling in a newly constructed SpaceX Dragon, the next four-member crew was scheduled to arrive.
The only problem was, SpaceX kept delaying the delivery of its new craft to the launch pad. Which left the two “stranded” astronauts more or less patiently biding their time. The Biden administration had as much to do with how things worked out as it had with the asteroid reportedly zeroing in for a future crash landing on Earth.
Musk, one would suspect, knew this only too well; it was his company’s unfinished capsule that the launch crew was waiting for. But he swiftly doubled down on the president’s complaint. “SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago,” he charged on X. “I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused.”
“What a lie,” responded a Danish astronaut who had flown two missions to the space station.
The world’s richest man, though, insisted on having the last word. He called the astronaut “fully retarded.”
A perplexed NASA chimed in, too. Bill Nelson, who was the head of the agency during the Biden administration, said that NASA had never heard about Musk’s offer. “On the basis that there was no contact with NASA, there was no political consideration from NASA’s point of view,” he firmly stated.
And, inevitably, the two astronauts were dragged into the fray. Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper from space, Wilmore tried to set the record straight. “That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck—and I get it,” he agreed. But, he told Cooper, “we don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.”
Williams agreed. “Butch and I knew this was a test flight. We knew that we would probably find some things [wrong with Starliner] and we found some stuff, and so that was not a surprise.”
Yet as Trump and Musk continued pointing accusatory fingers at Biden, it seemed as if Wilmore began to grow anxious about what he’d gotten into. Perhaps it was a longtime military veteran’s reluctance to contradict a superior officer, especially when that officer was the commander in chief and his adjunct. Or maybe he’d simply begun to see things in a new way.
“I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says is absolutely factual.... I believe him,” he declared without further explanation during a new in-orbit press conference.
In short, there was enough for everyone, of every political allegiance, to sink their teeth into.
The Countdown Begins
Meanwhile, on that early February morning on the beach beside a frosty Buzzards Bay, Pandya opened the message from space that had made its way to her phone.
“The countdown begins!,” Williams announced.
And on the evening of March 14, one of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rockets, a spaceship as tall as a 20-story building, lifted off. It was carrying a Dragon capsule, not the new craft that SpaceX had hoped to deliver but, to save time, one that had been used on previous missions. It was crewed by four astronauts who would assume command of the space station. With their arrival, Williams and Wilmore could at last return home.
Coming home is the riskiest part of the journey. There is so much that can go wrong on re-entry as the capsule decelerates from 17,500 miles per hour to 16 m.p.h. at splashdown. If the heat shield doesn’t fall properly into place, the craft will burn up; the temperature of the atmosphere as it’s coming down is more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s also always the fear that engines will get tricky and the four SuperDraco thrusters will cause the capsule to roll about as it travels at hypersonic speed; it would be a tumult that no passenger would survive. And the parachutes were a worry, too: Would the drogue and main chutes deploy as programmed?
But the greatest of all the anxieties—at least to the mission-control team that was directing the 17-hour descent from the SpaceX headquarters in a glass-walled room in Hawthorne, California—was the seven-minute or so loss-of-signal period. Just before the capsule enters the atmosphere and becomes visible to the naked eye, it goes silent. The superhot plasma hurling around the craft makes communication with the ground controllers impossible.
Yet on Wednesday at 5:57 p.m. E.D.T., the capsule carrying Wilmore and Williams (along with the two other astronauts who had gone up in September) splashed down in calm blue waters off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida. A pod of dolphins circled their bobbing capsule as if in greeting. The 10-day mission had stretched to 286 days. And if they had any doubts about whether the world had changed in their absence, all they had to do was read the official NASA transcript detailing their return: they had splashed down in the Gulf of America.
Howard Blum is the author of several best-selling books, including the Edgar Award–winning American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century. His latest, When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders, is available now
