Suni Williams, NASA astronaut who stayed in space 9 months after Boeing problem, retires

NASA astronaut Suni Williams, who famously stayed in space for an extended nine-month visit after problems with an experimental capsule, has retired after 27 years, NASA said Tuesday.

Williams retired effective Dec. 27, NASA said in a statement. Williams, a former Navy pilot, joined NASA in 1988.

“Suni Williams has been a trailblazer in human spaceflight, shaping the future of exploration through her leadership aboard the space station and paving the way for commercial missions to low Earth orbit,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the statement.

Williams went on three missions to the International Space Station, the first of which was in 2006 and in which she was carried aboard the space shuttle Discovery, NASA said.

But it was the most recent, in 2024, in which the planned one-week stay stretched from June of that year until March 2025 due to concerns over Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which was on a test mission.

Starliner launched on June 5, 2024, taking Williams and Butch Wilmore to the space station on its first crewed flight. But there were problems with the capsule’s thrusters during the docking process, and eventually, in September, NASA decided to return the capsule with no one on board.

Williams and Wilmore spent 286 days aboard the International Space Station.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule was then sent up to bring the pair, as well as two other astronauts who were wrapping up a six-month mission, back to earth. The Dragon capsule departed the space station on March 18, 2025, and splashed down in the ocean off Florida’s coast.