How an astronaut’s election ballot makes it from space to Earth

When NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, back in June aboard the debut crewed flight of the Boeing Starliner spaceship, there was no reason to believe they’d be out of pocket for the November election.
But a mission initially expected to last about eight days has been stretched into one now likely to be eight months thanks to problems that beset the Boeing capsule which returned to Earth empty earlier this month.
Williams and Wilmore, however, will still be able to cast a vote in the upcoming election from their temporary home on the International Space Station thanks to a system NASA adopted back in the late ‘90s that established a secure network that accommodates extraterrestrial voting.
“I sent down my request for a ballot today, as a matter of fact, and they should get it to us in a couple of weeks,” said Willmore during a livestreamed press conference from the ISS last week. “It’s a very important role we all play as citizens is to be included in those elections and NASA makes it very easy for us to do that so we’re excited about that opportunity.”
In 1997, the Texas Legislature passed a bill that allowed NASA astronauts to vote from space, according to a report from NASA. That year, NASA astronaut David Wolf became the first American to vote from space on the Mir Space Station.
Electronic ballots for this year’s elections — like most data transmitted between the space station and mission control — will traverse through NASA’s Near Space Network, managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. After Williams and Wilmore complete their specially designed, electronic absentee ballots aboard the ISS, the documents will flow through a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite to a ground antenna at the White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
From New Mexico, NASA will transfer the ballots to the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and then on to the county clerk responsible for counting the ballot. Each ballot is encrypted and only accessible by the astronaut and the clerk to preserve the vote’s integrity.
“It’s a very important duty that we have as citizens and looking forward to being able to vote from space, which is pretty cool,” Williams said during the Sept. 13 press conference.
In late August, NASA decided that sending veteran astronauts and test pilots Williams and Wilmore back to Earth on the problem-plagued Starliner spacecraft was too risky.
Previous reports from NASA and Boeing detailed that five of 28 maneuvering thrusters failed to perform as expected during Starliner’s docking at the International Space Station on June 6. Engineers also identified five small helium leaks, some of which were detected before the spacecraft launched. Helium is used in the capsule’s thruster firing procedure. Before Starliner returned to Earth on Sep. 6, engineering teams had been scrambling to identify the underlying issues with the thrusters, critical for maneuvering and positioning the spacecraft, including reviewing massive amounts of data, conducting flight and ground testing, hosting independent reviews with agency propulsion experts and developing various return contingency plans, NASA said.
But ultimately NASA decided that ongoing uncertainty and a lack of concurrence among engineers and other experts “does not meet the agency’s safety and performance requirements for human spaceflight, thus prompting NASA leadership to move the astronauts to the (SpaceX Dragon) Crew-9 mission.”
“Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and most routine,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in an Aug. 24 press release. “A test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine. The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring Boeing’s Starliner home uncrewed is the result of our commitment to safety: our core value and our North Star. I’m grateful to both the NASA and Boeing teams for all their incredible and detailed work.”
Ahead of the decision to send Starliner back without its crew, NASA had announced the SpaceX Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station, originally scheduled to launch Aug. 18, had been pushed back more than a month to potentially reconfigure that flight to make room for passengers when it returns next winter. Those changes include trimming Crew 9′s original four-astronaut crew to just two to make room for the stranded Starliner crew. The flight will also carry necessary equipment to the ISS, like new spacesuits, for Williams and Wilmore to join the Dragon crew.
According to the latest updates, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov have begun their pre-flight quarantine procedure and are due to launch aboard their SpaceX Dragon capsule on Sept. 26.