Nobody Had Ever Lost Control of a Spacecraft

Butch Wilmore was 300 meters in front of the International Space Station, flying a spacecraft nobody had ever flown with a crew aboard, when the fourth thruster quit. Three had already failed. A fifth would follow. He told Jack Graham and Jeremiah Johnston, PhD what he has said in almost no other interview: at that moment he was not sure the vehicle could be flown far enough away from the station to attempt a deorbit burn at all. Docking was not the mission objective any more. Docking was survival.

He was supposed to be up there eight days. He stayed 284.

What makes this a Hold the Pattern conversation rather than a space story is what Wilmore does with the word preparation. He is a retired Navy captain, a test pilot, and a Sunday school teacher who once realized, mid-career, that he could not have articulated the doctrine of justification if asked. He treats those two failures of readiness as the same category of problem. He describes meeting a rendezvous officer at the simulator at six on Saturday mornings, key in hand, nobody else in the building, and then turns to both hosts and says the same thing is true of a pulpit: you do not walk up there and wing it, because the responsibility is that large. His answer to the question of how anyone endures 284 unplanned days is not resilience. It is Philippians 4, and it is stated flatly: content in whatever might happen, because the Lord is sovereignly in control working out his plan and his purposes, even in the moment.

The conversation ranges wider than the mission. Wilmore takes the flat-earth question directly and tells anyone using Scripture to argue it that they are misreading Scripture, having orbited the planet 4,724 times himself. He takes the moon-landing question with less patience: an unneeded distraction that makes people look foolish. He walks through the Van Allen belts and lands somewhere nobody else has taken this material, calling the aurora a visible representation of God’s protection of this planet, a claim he can make because he watched the largest auroras in the history of human spaceflight from 260 miles up. Asked about life on other planets, he does not hedge and does not overclaim.

The episode closes on the Disputable Matter: whether watching the service on a screen is going to church. Wilmore is the only person on the show’s guest slate who has actually had to live the question, worshipping with Providence Baptist by livestream from the corner of a module for four and a half months. His verdict on it is worth hearing precisely because he is not theorizing.