The astronauts aboard the International Space Station are ready to break bread for a Thanksgiving Day in orbit.
NASA astronaut Suni Williams said she and her fellow crew members will have the day off to celebrate.
“We have a bunch of food that we’ve packed away that is Thanksgiving-ish,” Williams said Wednesday in an interview with NBC News. “Some smoked turkey, some cranberry, apple cobbler, green beans and mushrooms and mashed potatoes.”
She added that she plans to tune in to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade before feasting with her American and Russian colleagues.
For more of the interview, tune in to NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt at 6:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. CT.
Williams has been living and working at the International Space Station for nearly six months. She and fellow NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore arrived at the orbiting outpost in early June, as test pilots on the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner space capsule.
The pair planned to stay at the ISS for only about a week, then return to Earth aboard the Starliner. But problems with the spacecraft forced the duo to remain in orbit for months longer than anticipated. Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to return home in February in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
The beleaguered Starliner mission was a dramatic, monthslong saga for NASA and Boeing. But Williams said she doesn’t see herself as “stranded” in space.
“Our mission control team and our management has always had an option for us to come home,” she said. “So yeah, we came up here on Starliner. We’re coming back on a Dragon, but there’s always been a plan of how we would get home.”
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In recent weeks, NASA fended off rumors that Williams had been experiencing health problems in space. Several news articles suggested the astronaut had lost a significant amount of weight, but the agency’s chief health and medical officer said on Nov. 14 that Williams and the others aboard the space station remain in good health.
Williams told NBC News that she is enjoying her time in orbit and is in good spirits.
“We’re feeling good, working out, eating right,” she said. “We have a lot of fun up here, too. So, you know, people are worried about us. Really, don’t worry about us.”
Despite the problems that cropped up during the Starliner's journey — primarily with its thrusters and leaking helium — the capsule returned to Earth smoothly without a crew on Sept. 7. Williams said it would have been nice to see the Starliner mission through to completion.
She added that once Boeing and NASA address the things that went wrong on the test flight, she wouldn’t hesitate to fly Starliner into space again.
“Maybe not tomorrow, because we have to incorporate some of the lessons learned,” she said, “but as soon as we see that we’re on the right path and we’ve made some of the fixes to some of the issues that we had — absolutely.”
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