NASA astronaut Suni Williams reveals her Thanksgiving plans from space

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are ready to break Thanksgiving bread in orbit.

NASA astronaut Suni Williams said she and her fellow crew members will be taking the day off to celebrate.

“I’m packing a lot of Thanksgiving-y food,” Williams said Wednesday in an interview with NBC News. “Smoked turkey, cranberries, apple cobbler, green beans and mushrooms, and mashed potatoes.”

She added that she plans to attend the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade before dining with American and Russian colleagues.

Williams has been living and working on the International Space Station for almost six months. She and fellow NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore arrived at the orbiting outpost in early June as test pilots for the first manned flight of Boeing’s Starliner space capsule.

The two were scheduled to stay on the ISS for only about a week, then return to Earth on the Starliner. However, problems with the spacecraft kept them in orbit for months longer than expected. Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to return home in February in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

Starliner’s difficult mission was a dramatic, months-long story for NASA and Boeing. But Williams said she doesn’t feel like she’s “stranded” in space.

“Our control team and management always had the option of us returning home,” she said. “Yes, we came here on the Starliner. We’re coming back on the Dragon, but there was always a plan for how we were going to get home.”

In the last few weeks, NASA dodged the rumors Williams reportedly suffered from health problems while in space. Although some news articles suggested that the astronauts had lost significant weight, the agency’s medical director said on Nov. 14 that the health of Williams and others on board the space station was He said the condition was good.

Williams told NBC News that he is enjoying his time in orbit and is in good spirits.

“We feel good, we exercise and we eat properly,” she said. “We’re having a lot of fun here, too. So people are worried about us. Really, don’t worry about us.”

Despite problems that occurred during Starliner’s voyage (mainly thruster and helium leaks), the capsule returned to Earth without a crew on September 7th. Williams said he wished he had been able to see Starliner’s mission to completion.

She added that Boeing and NASA would not hesitate to send Starliner into space again if they ironed out the problems that arose during the test flight.

“It might not be tomorrow because we need to incorporate some of the lessons we learned,” she said. “But once we knew we were on the right path, we fixed some of the issues we had — absolutely.”