USA TODAY Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, the two NASA astronauts who rode to the space station months ago on the Boeing Starliner, are slated to come home in late March. Also aboard the station are NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Don Pettit, as well as three Russian Cosmonauts. The four Americans spoke to USA TODAY in a wide-ranging interview about life on the space station, spacewalks and the innovative science research they conduct for future deep-space missions. Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore weren't supposed to be at the International Space Station beyond a few days in June when they reached the orbital outpost on the inaugural crewed flight test for Boeing's Starliner. But NASA decided that the troubled spacecraft wasn't up to the task of reliably transporting them back to Earth, and so the Starliner undocked in September without them, landing in the New Mexico desert. Many have referred to the astronauts as being "stuck" or "stranded." Even President Trump this week said they'd been "abandoned." But in the interview with USA TODAY, the veteran astronauts, who have both now been to space three times, said that their training and experience extensively prepared them for lengthy stays in orbit. “Being deployed for a little while is not unusual for any of us and that’s part of the game," Williams said. "When you come to some place that’s a little bit different from home, you might not come home right away.” The interview took place hours before Trump took to Truth Social to implore SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to "go get" the astronauts. While Musk acknowledged on his social media site X that he had readily agreed to the request, it was not immediately clear if the two had crafted a new plan different from the one put in place months ago. Under the plan NASA announced in August, the astronauts are due to fly back as early as March on a SpaceX Dragon capsule. That spacecraft has been docked at the station since late September and hasn't yet returned for a simple reason: It's passengers, Hague and Gorbunov, are scheduled for a six-month science rotation under the Crew-9 mission. The Starliner and Crew-9 spacefarers are also awaiting the impending arrival of their Crew-10 replacements, who are due to launch on a new Dragon capsule in late March. In the meantime, Williams and Wilmore are making the best of the extra time in the cosmos. “You just need to learn how to adapt and obviously we’ve all done that," Williams said. "We’ve made a great crew up here." 'Miraculous' views of Earth When astronauts don spacesuits and venture outside the space station, it's to spend hours performing station maintenance and other seemingly menial tasks. There are moments during these spacewalks, though, when the spacefarers can't help but take in an astonishing view that few have – or will ever – experience. Hague certainly didn't pass up the opportunity to steal a few glances of Earth and its magnificent sunsets during a Jan. 16 spacewalk with Williams. "The Earth is such a miraculous thing to look down on, and when you're in the spacesuit it's a little different than when you look out the windows inside the space station," Hague said. "Our field of view is so large, for a moment you can just feel like that suit melts away and it’s just you witnessing the marvel that is the Earth." At the time of the interview with USA TODAY, Williams and Wilmore were preparing for another spacewalk that commenced Thursday morning. For about six-and-a-half hours, the Starliner astronauts removed radio communications hardware and swabbed the outpost's exterior to collect potential microbe samples for analysis. Conducting scientific research in space Spacewalks don't occur every day, unlike the science experiments and research the astronauts conduct aboard the station. In its two decades in orbit, the space station has become a critical hub for scientific research aiding spaceflight – much of it to prepare humans for deep-space exploration