She set the record for most spacewalk time by a woman and spent nine months at the International Space Station
Suni Williams, one of two Nasa astronauts whose 10-day test flight mission turned into a nine-month odyssey on the International Space Station (ISS), has retired from the US space agency.
The 60-year-old former navy captain left in December after 27 years with Nasa, according to a press release from the agency on Tuesday. Jared Isaacman, the agency’s new administrator, praised her as “a trailblazer in human spaceflight”.
She retires holding the record for the most accumulated spacewalk time by a woman – more than 62 hours in nine separate operations. But she will be best remembered for the ill-fated first crewed flight of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule in June 2024, when Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore launched on what should have been a short test mission to the ISS, but ended up staying 286 days after technical problems with the spacecraft.
Their extended stay caused a political firestorm on Earth, with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the SpaceX chief, insisting the pair were “stuck” in space, having been “abandoned” by the Biden administration. They returned home last March on board a SpaceX Dragon capsule, an uneventful mission framed by Trump as “a rescue” by Musk, his then friend and ally.
