Barry “Butch” Wilmore says the Boeing Starliner flight he commanded was supposed to last 10 days. Instead, it kept him in space for nearly 10 months after he says five of the spacecraft’s eight aft-pointing thrusters failed during rendezvous, forcing the mission into an unexpected crisis that he has now turned into a new book.
Wilmore’s memoir, Stuck In Space: An Astronaut’s Hope Through the Unexpected, does more than recount a troubled flight. It pulls readers back to Murfreesboro, where he was born while his parents were visiting an aunt, and into the Antioch and Mt. Juliet neighborhoods where he grew up. He said he attended Una Elementary School for first and second grade before his family later moved to the Mt. Juliet area, where he played football at Mt. Juliet Junior High School and Mt. Juliet High School.
That Tennessee upbringing is central to the way Wilmore tells the story of his career. He said he is a seventh-generation Tennessean, that he went to Tennessee Tech and earned master’s degrees from Tennessee Tech and the University of Tennessee, and that his parents took him to church and instilled “truths from God’s word” that stayed with him through the hardest parts of his life. In one passage, he recalls a coach pushing a simple lesson from the field — “You gotta want it” — a line he says helped shape the work ethic that carried him into the astronaut corps.
The book also returns to the moment the mission went sideways. Wilmore said that during the rendezvous, “we lost five of those eight aft pointing thrusters,” and that the experience became, in his words, a place where fear could have been “very, very detrimental.” The Starliner flight was intended to be a short trip to the International Space Station, but the thruster failures left him and the mission dealing with a long and uncertain stretch far from home.
That timing gives the book an added edge now. NASA’s Artemis II astronauts returned to Earth from their lunar mission on April 10, 2026, while Wilmore’s story offers a different kind of spaceflight narrative: not the triumph of a clean landing, but the strain of a mission that went far beyond its plan and the discipline it took to get through it. For Wilmore, the answer to whether the ordeal changed him is already in the pages he has published — the mission did not just test him; it became the story he chose to tell.