Opinion The Third Edit: In the odyssey of Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, a reminder to focus on the big picture

As with all efforts to push boundaries, excursions into the unknown come with caveats. In the case of space flights, it is the tacit understanding that there is little that is routine or safe. But for those who can hang in there, buoyed by curiosity, hope and a generous splash of good fortune, there remains not just the possibility of greater glory but also a deeper understanding of the workings of this fragile cosmos that is the human inheritance. For astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore, it began with a faulty Boeing Starliner test flight in June last year. But when it ended 286 days later — 278 days more than was intended because of the spacecraft’s propulsion failures — it marked not just an expansion of horizons, but also the sheer, amazing potential of human adaptability and endurance.

By the time of their splashdown off the coast of Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle, Williams and Wilmore had orbited the Earth 45,676 times and travelled 195 million kilometres. It did not qualify their mission as the longest — Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days in the Mir space station in 1994, has that honour, followed by Sergei Avdeyev, who spent 379 days in Mir in 1998-1999 after an unexpected mission extension. But Williams surpassed the record of NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson for the most time spent spacewalking by a woman, when she logged 62 hours and six minutes during the mission.

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In the time that the astronauts were away from Earth, the world changed one election at a time. As the second Trump administration took office, a political storm erupted over the delay in their return. Throughout, Williams and Wilmore focused on conducting experiments and fixing equipment, trusting NASA with decisions about their return. Perhaps they knew what many earthlings choose to ignore: That in the larger scheme of things, human beings are consigned to the margins, their journey to the centre dependent on empathy and a scientific temper that allow the light to shine through.