Crew-9 Returns to Earth

   Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
   A tale of a fateful trip,
   That started from this tropic port
   Aboard a Boeing ship

   Two astronauts went up that day,
   They both were brave and true,
   The Starliner delivered them,
   To join ISS crew.

   ...for an eight day station tour.

   The testing on the Starliner,
   Was thoroughly performed.
   Although it probably was safe,
   The NASA team were warned.

   So the Starliner came home to Earth,
   Without its stalwart crew,
   The astronauts would stay in space,
   An extra month or two.

   ...an extra month or two.

   So join us here each week my friend,
   It's such a special place,
   With two (not!) stranded astronauts,
   Here in Gilligan's space!

My second favorite quote from the show.

And if you follow JPL robotic missions that far outlast their mission objectives and keep going like Energizer Bunnies, then is it not sort of amazing that the astronauts really suffered no privations or hardships, in terms of food/shelter/clothing/hygiene, by extending their missions and doing useful things up there?

People watch "The Martian" and "Lost in Space" and they can't seem to grasp the careful pre-planning, incident response, resource allocation, and orcestration that goes into everything that's done by space programs.

Space missions include sprawling, branching flow-charts of every contingency they imagined, and they inform the press of mission objectives and a proposed timeline, and then life happens and when glitches come up, they roll with them because they prepared for them. Apollo 13, for example, is categorically different than a space habitation in Earth orbit; as a lone vehicle with limited resources and an isolated path, that Apollo mission ran out of planned contingencies to the point of improvising so many things and returning to fundamentals, preserving human life.

It's the peril of human life that definitely adds drama for us, and the ISS being influenced by geopolitics is categorically different than the nationalist glories of Mercury-Gemini-Apollo vs. the Soviets. But with ISS in Earth orbit, receiving regular resupply missions, being a habitable outpost, it's far different than sending up a vehicle like the Space Shuttle while everyone speculates whether another Saturn V could be constructed in time to rescue the crew because tiles fell off their heat shield.

Speaking of Saturn, I've been peering into Greek/Roman mythology, and learning what Cronus/Saturn did with his children and how Aphrodite/Venus was born, gives new insight into super heavy-lift launch vehicles named after the deity.