The trouble started on the way up. Helium leaked from the propulsion system and five of the small thrusters that steer the capsule quit during the approach to the station. Wilmore flew it in by hand and docked. Over the summer that followed, engineers on the ground fired thrusters in the New Mexico desert and argued about the numbers. In August the agency made its call. Starliner would fly home empty. It landed in the desert in September without a scratch, which settled nothing.

The two astronauts had packed for a week. They were now in orbit indefinitely, with no ride booked, and the newspapers took to calling them stranded. Neither of them cared for the word. Williams took command of the station. Wilmore ran experiments and fixed what broke. Between them they walked outside the station on repairs, and Williams passed every other woman on the list for hours spent in a spacesuit in open space. They celebrated Christmas in zero gravity in Santa hats and answered schoolchildren’s questions from three hundred miles up.

Their seats came at last on a different company’s capsule, which had flown up in September with two empty places and waited at the station all winter. On the eighteenth of March, 2025, it splashed down off the Florida coast with a pod of dolphins circling the bobbing craft. The crew had been in space two hundred and eighty-six days, thirty-five times longer than planned. Both walked off the recovery ship on their own feet a day later.

Asked afterward whose fault it was, Wilmore said everyone’s, himself included, and that blame was not a useful place to stand. Then he said he would fly the same ship again.

Nobody plans for the eight-day job that turns into nine months. The plan is not the point. The point is what you do on the ninth day, when the ride has gone home without you and the work is still there. The pilots did what test pilots do. They went to work.