An Astronaut Tells How He Overcame His Most Terrifying Experience | Ep 45 w/ Captain Butch Wilmore

Captain Barry "Butch" Wilmore has spent 464 days in space — 278 of them unexpected. When the Boeing Starliner he was flight-testing began losing thrusters on its approach to the International Space Station, a mission planned for roughly a week turned into a nine-and-a-half-month stay in orbit and a return to Earth aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule. In this feature-length conversation, Jeremy Boreing sits down with the retired NASA astronaut and U.S. Navy test pilot to talk about fear, faith, family, and what it actually takes to keep your head when the machine you're strapped into starts to fail.

Wilmore's story runs from the hollers of Mount Juliet, Tennessee — where a mischievous Baptist kid was shaped by his parents, his coaches, and a biblical foundation — to the deck of an aircraft carrier, where he logged 663 landings (226 of them at night) and flew the A-7 and the F/A-18 Hornet in combat during the first Gulf War. He walks Jeremy through what it's like to dodge a missile at night with almost no depth perception, how a naval aviator learns to master terror, and why he insists that fear is an opponent, never an ally. He is one of only two people in history to fly five different spacecraft — the Space Shuttle, Soyuz, the ISS, Starliner, and Dragon — and the road there included a nine-and-a-half-year wait after the Columbia tragedy set his astronaut class back years.

The heart of the episode is the Starliner mission. As commander on the spacecraft's first crewed flight, Wilmore watched four of his eight aft-firing thrusters drop offline — then a fifth — losing a full degree of control for the first time in the history of human spaceflight. He describes canceling the software that would have shut the failing thrusters down, flying manually toward the station, and knowing before he ever docked that he and fellow astronaut Sunny Williams would not be coming home on that ship.

What makes this more than a space story is Wilmore's refusal to call himself "stranded." Drawing on the Apostle Paul's contentment in shipwreck and prison, he explains how he stayed at peace living out of a sleeping bag in a Japanese laboratory module, eating food other astronauts had set aside as trash, with no fixed date to come home. Jeremy and Butch go deep on the sovereignty of God, the difference between freedom and law, John Adams' warning that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and why the gospel — not raw human agency — sits at the center of it all.

They also take on the American space program itself: why politics now sits upstream of engineering, how bringing Russia into the International Space Station shaped its 51.6-degree orbit and limited its usefulness for reaching deeper into the solar system, and why Wilmore has become a fierce advocate for keeping manual control in every crewed spacecraft.

Finally, the conversation turns to a generation. Jeremy and Butch talk about Gen Z, the formative years COVID took from young people, and the case for hope over despair — the conviction, as Jeremy puts it, that you can step forward in faith and watch the ground appear beneath your feet. Wilmore closes on his Tennessee roots, the governor's race a residency statute took off the table, and where he believes the Lord may lead him next.

This is a conversation about courage and precision, marriage and fidelity, patriotism and providence — and about a country Wilmore still calls the land of opportunity.

Captain Butch Wilmore's new memoir, Stuck in Space: An Astronaut's Hope Through the Unexpected, is available now.

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