Stuck in Space? Astronaut Butch Wilmore Says It Was God’s Plan

The first time I saw Butch Wilmore, he didn’t see me. He was strapped into the Boeing Starliner and I was across the street.

My son Ryker and I were on vacation in Orlando when he burst into our room early one morning with the kind of excitement only a kid can bring before most adults have even had coffee.

“Dad, they’re about to launch.”

Still half asleep, I did the math. We were about 45 minutes from Kennedy Space Center. I gave him the speech every Florida dad eventually gives.

“Look, a lot of these get scrubbed.”

But we drove out anyway.

Across the street from the launch pad, hundreds of people stood staring at a rocket that looked impossibly tall, impossibly loud, and impossibly powerful. I remember telling Ryker that if we were lucky, we’d see it launch, and then in about ten days we’d watch the astronauts return to Earth.

Just a cool memory.

A great father-son moment.

What I didn’t know was that the story we were watching begin that morning would become one of the most talked-about spaceflight stories in years. And I certainly didn’t know that nearly two years later the astronaut inside that rocket would be sitting across from me in our Nashville studio.

Butch Wilmore doesn’t look like a headline when you meet him. He looks like what he is, a Tennessee guy with a pilot’s calm and the steady tone of someone who has spent a lifetime making high-stakes decisions without panic. When he describes the moment things went wrong aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, he doesn’t dramatize it. He explains it like a pilot.

Calmly. Precisely.

During the spacecraft’s approach to the International Space Station, something unprecedented began happening. Thrusters started failing.

“We’re losing thrusters,” he recalled. “We actually lost the ability to fully control the spacecraft… losing six degree of freedom control.”

For anyone unfamiliar with spacecraft navigation, that’s the kind of phrase that should make your stomach drop. For Wilmore, it triggered something else entirely.

Focus.

“In that situation… I knew that we had to dock,” he told me. “If we don’t dock, I’m not sure we can make it back to Earth.”

Then came the realization that turned what was supposed to be a routine mission into something very different.

“I knew before we docked that we probably weren’t coming back on that spacecraft.”

Imagine that moment. You launch expecting a short mission. Instead, you realize you may be staying in space for months. Maybe longer. Most people hear a story like that and picture panic. Wilmore doesn’t. In fact, he told me something that stuck with me long after the interview ended.

“Fear is not your friend,” he said about flying the spacecraft during those critical stages.

Because when things start going wrong in space, someone still has to fly the ship.

There’s a calm confidence about Wilmore that makes sense when you remember his background. Before NASA, he was a Navy test pilot. High-pressure environments were already part of the job description long before he ever left Earth. But space adds another dimension to that pressure.

Not just because of the risk, but because the whole world is watching. While the technical side of the story dominated headlines, the spiritual side caught many people by surprise. Wilmore didn’t go into orbit planning to talk publicly about his faith. But once reporters started asking questions, he answered honestly. “I can’t separate that from who I am,” he said. “The Lord is working out His plan and His purposes for His glory and our good.”

For Wilmore, the debate people sometimes frame between science and faith doesn’t really exist. “God created everything, including science,” he told me matter-of-factly. From orbit, looking down at Earth, that perspective didn’t create a crisis of belief. If anything, it reinforced what he already believed. Not because space revealed something new about God, but because it reminded him of the scale of creation he already trusted.

Wilmore explains in his new book, Stuck in Space, that during his time in orbit he would sometimes wait for Texas to pass beneath the space station, watching the state his family was living in drift across the planet below. It was a reminder of what was waiting for him back on Earth.

But space missions don’t pause real life.

One of the hardest parts of the extended mission was knowing what he was missing back home.

“I was going to miss my daughter’s senior year of high school,” he said. Her final volleyball season. Moments that don’t come back.

Those are the sacrifices people rarely think about when they picture astronauts floating through space. We see the rocket launches and the heroic returns. We don’t always see the family moments happening without them.

Wilmore’s new book is called Stuck in Space. It’s a title that grabbed headlines, but he laughs a little at the phrase. He didn’t choose it. Publishers love drama. But Wilmore sees the story differently. Was he technically stuck? By the dictionary definition, maybe.

But spiritually? Not really.

If you believe God is sovereign, he told me, then even an unexpected mission in orbit has purpose. The book, he says, was originally written for a much smaller audience. He had begun writing it as something for his daughters, a way of telling them the story of his life and faith. But after the mission captured global attention, the story expanded beyond just his family.

Now it’s something meant for anyone trying to navigate uncertainty. Because while most of us won’t find ourselves orbiting Earth longer than expected, everyone eventually finds themselves facing moments where the plan changes.

That morning on the Florida coast, Ryker and I watched a rocket leave Earth and thought we were witnessing the start of a routine mission. Instead, we were watching the beginning of a story about faith, focus, and the strange reality that sometimes the most unexpected journeys are exactly where you’re meant to be.

And sometimes the guy inside the rocket ends up sitting across from you telling the story himself.

Order Butch Wilmore’s Stuck in Space at ButchWilmore.com.