There was something a little unusual about the name that flashed up on Billy Adkison’s cellphone, heralding an incoming caller with stellar credentials. In this case his friend Barry “Butch” Wilmore, ringing to check in.
“I answered and I said, ‘Is this Barry?’ and there he was. Same old Barry, just calling from up there in space like it’s all perfectly normal,” says Adkison, 91, one of several parishioners at Wilmore’s church to whom the astronaut has been quietly continuing to lend pastoral support from beyond Earth.
“I asked him, ‘Where in the world are you?’ and he said, ‘Let me look … Oh, we’re flying over the Philippines right now’ … 250 miles up. I thought that was pretty cool,” adds Adkison, who tracks the International Space Station (ISS) — Wilmore’s present home — on his tablet and goes outside on nights when it’s passing over to see it glide across the night sky like a “shiny star”.
Having launched in June on what was anticipated to be an eight-day test flight of Boeing’s fledgling Starliner, Wilmore, 61, and his crewmate, Suni Williams, 59, are still in orbit six months later, after the spacecraft developed technical issues that Nasa feared might put them in danger.
Wilson and Wilmore making pizza aboard the ISS earlier this year. They are hoping to have a cookie-decorating competition with Nasa ground staff on Christmas Day
NASA/AP
Instead of returning to Earth on Starliner, the spacecraft came home empty and Nasa switched the pair on to the crew of the ISS, from where they were to get a lift home with colleagues on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in February.
Now their homecoming has again been postponed because the new ISS crew due to take over from them will not arrive until late March at the earliest because of construction delays at SpaceX.
Already facing an unexpected Christmas in orbit, Wilmore and Williams will be lucky to be back by Easter. “I asked Barry what his status is right now and he said, ‘Well, it doesn’t look like I’m coming home till April’,” reveals Adkison. “I asked how he was doing … tried to get him to talk about it. He said, ‘Well, I’m doing OK’.”
“Barry’s a big believer in sovereign grace. Whatever the Lord God planned for him, he’ll follow through on … he’s got a good head on him. He wouldn’t have lasted this long in the game if he didn’t.”
So how will they be spending the holidays up there? Last month a SpaceX Cargo Dragon delivered 6,000lbs of scientific equipment and supplies for the seven crew, which includes the Americans Nick Hague, 49, and Don Pettit, 69, who is Nasa’s oldest serving astronaut, along with the Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin, 53, Ivan Vagner, 39, and Aleksandr Gorbunov, 34. The delivery also included cards and Christmas gifts from family members.
The Starliner spacecraft in which Wilmore and Wilson travelled to the ISS developed technical problems and returned to Earth without them
NASA/AP
To astronauts, bonus time in space is a blessing and a curse. “The astronauts get the glory, but the families pay the price,” says Terry Virts, a former commander of the ISS, who conducted three spacewalks with Wilmore in 2015. “Christmas in space is fun, but it’s also a little sad.”
There is a tinsel Christmas tree on the station, but the zero-gravity environment means there won’t be presents sitting under it; in space, there is no up, no down, and everything floats — including the tree.
Decorating needs innovation; on Christmas Eve in 2014 Virts, who was then the ISS commander, turned the ISS airlock into a festive grotto, propping up empty spacesuits wearing Santa and elf hats, hanging Christmas stockings and leaving out a packet of powdered milk and freeze-dried cookies addressed to Santa. “You have to get creative, for entertainment … there’s no door to open and go for a walk,” says Virts, who took chocolate and beef jerky to give to crewmates and received a gift of a harmonica.
It will not be Wilmore’s first Christmas in space. In 2014 he and his fellow astronauts Samantha Cristoforetti and Terry Virts decorated the ISS to send greetings to Earth
Christmas dinner this year will include smoked oysters, crab, duck foie gras, pâté, cranberry sauce, Atlantic lobster, croquettes and smoked salmon. The Americans have opted to take Christmas Day off work, releasing them from the usually intensive schedule of science, research and maintenance activities, though they are required to still fulfil their fitness routine on the treadmill and resistance machine to maintain bone and muscle strength.
Mission controllers at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, have lined up a Christmas Day cookie-decorating contest in which the astronauts will judge the ground team’s efforts and vice versa. The ISS crew have access to a collection of movies and recorded television shows and a screen or computers on which to watch them.
Gerald Carr, William Pogue and Edward Gibson on Skylab, the first US space station, in 1973. They constructed their tree from leftover food containers
NASA
“They’ll have the day off to talk to family, send emails, they can use the IP phone [internet phone],” says Chloe Mehring, a flight director at Nasa. “We totally understand the challenges of being isolated up there with only each other … yes, it does maybe take a bit of a toll, but they have been very professional and are handling it really well.”
From the station’s cupola — a seven-window observation area — the view includes 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets a day, as the ISS orbits Earth once every 90 minutes at 17,500mph.
If they can manage to sync their schedules, Nasa livestreams some special events for the astronauts, including Hague’s son’s school marching band competition. Wilmore links in to his church’s livestreamed services and records devotionals for the congregation. Williams, who is married to a federal marshal, Michael Williams, dotes on her chickens and three dogs, Gunner, Bailey and Rotor; she has paw prints tattooed on her left forearm.
Kayla Barron uses the ISS’s zero gravity to “juggle” presents in 2021
NASA
Adkison, a retired farmer, underwent heart surgery over the summer, prompting a call from Wilmore on the ISS offering prayers and comfort. Wilmore is a volunteer elder at Providence Baptist Church in Pasadena, Texas, and ministered at the funeral of Adkison’s wife of 64 years, who died in 2020.
“He did a super job of that so I told him ‘You’ve got to come back soon, I’ve been sick – you might have to get back here and do mine,” joked Adkison. “I can see he’s going to make me hold on a bit longer.”
When Adkison’s wife’s health went into decline before her death, Wilmore made a video for her from the cupola, where he prayed for her with their home planet as the backdrop. Adkison has since accidentally deleted the video from his tablet.
Don Pettit, back row, far left, in 2011, when the ISS crew comprised two US astronauts, three Russian cosmonauts and an astronaut from the European Space Agency. Pettit is in space again this year
ALAMY
The church’s lead pastor, Tommy Dahn, whose 93-year-old mother-in-law also got a surprise call from Wilmore last week to wish her a happy Christmas, says: “Barry’s Type A all the way, but he keeps a level head about him. We do miss him. He’s a force and there’s no wasted time with him. He’s a get-it-done kind of a fella.”
Wilmore didn’t sign up for this Christmas in space, but astronauts generally expect the unexpected. “He’s been deployed since he and his wife married — aircraft carriers, fighting in a couple of wars, then as an astronaut a lot of travel — so contingencies are part of what they’ve always known,” Dahn added. Wilmore has two daughters — Daryn, who is in college, and Logan, who is in her final year of school. “Deanna [Wilmore’s wife] and the girls can take care of themselves, they’re used to it. They knew something could happen, they had no idea it would be like this.”