Billy Adkison, 91, spent his life farming in East Texas; he never wanted to go to outer space.
“I don’t want to be higher than pulling corn and lower than digging taters,” he told CT.
All the same, he has watched the skies from his yard to catch a glimpse of the International Space Station passing by—“like a big old star,” he said.
Adkison wanted to keep an eye on one of his church elders, astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore, whose weeklong trip to space has been extended to eight months.
Wilmore and his fellow astronaut Suni Williams left Earth in June as the first humans to ride a Boeing Starliner spacecraft, but the craft had helium leaks and thruster problems during the launch. NASA decided to return Starliner to Earth without its human passengers for safety, leaving the two astronauts for a much longer mission than they anticipated.
NASA recently launched a SpaceX Dragon capsule to the International Space Station with two empty seats. It will bring Wilmore and Williams home in February.
This is Wilmore’s third expedition to space. Adkison has tracked him in space on his iPad since that became possible, knowing where Wilmore was any time of the day or night.
What Adkison didn’t know was that Wilmore, who is one of his elders at Providence Baptist Church in Pasadena, Texas, was keeping an eye on him too.
While Wilmore was in space this summer, Adkison was admitted to the hospital with a serious heart problem. Wilmore heard the news from his wife, Deanna Wilmore, and called Adkison to check on him from the space station.
“It surprised me, but it made me feel very good,” said Adkison, who is now out of the hospital and back at his assisted living facility, although he has struggled with other ailments lately.
In the 17 years that Adkison has known him through church, Wilmore has never acted “high class” as an astronaut, he said. “He’d find people like us that were having trouble.” Adkison said. He’s not sure why, but Wilmore always calls him “Mr. Billy.”
Over the years, the Wilmores have visited Adkison regularly and made him birthday cakes. Adkison said Wilmore would drive him home from visits, knowing Adkison didn’t like to drive at night. When Adkison’s wife of 64 years died in 2020, Wilmore gave a sermon at her funeral.
“I plan on him doing mine,” Adkison said, but since Wilmore is stuck on the space station, “I’m going to have to hold off for a bit.”
That wasn’t the only pastoral call Wilmore made from space. Providence Baptist pastor Tommy Dahn’s mother-in-law, Suda Smith, lives with him and his wife. Smith turned 93 this summer, and Wilmore called her on her birthday. Wilmore called her again at the end of August. She is blind and had just gotten out of the hospital.
“Her countenance of course lifted, her eyes sparkled, and that’s all I can say,” said Dahn. “She was just thrilled.”
She tells everyone she meets, “I got a call on my birthday from space,”he said.
NASA astronauts have access to the internet to make calls when they’re off duty. Dahn said other than calling the older invalids, Wilmore mostly stays in touch with his wife.
“That’s the epitome of Barry’s personal ministry—he looks for those who are down and outers,” said Dahn. “He could not have loved my mother-in-law and Billy any more than a simple phone call. … It’s more almost than him coming to see them in one sense, when he’s here.”
Other NASA employees go to Providence Baptist, a church of about 250 attendees. Astronaut Tracy Dyson, who just returned from the space station on a Soyuz capsule after six months in outer space, is a member there.
Wilmore and his family have been at Providence for 17 years, Dahn said.
“He’s really put his life into the church. … For us as a church, we miss him,” added Dahn. “All the glory goes to God. He does not take the glory to himself.”
The church had considered cutting the livestream of its services since the pandemic ended because leadership didn’t want people to stay home instead of coming to church. But they decided to keep it for the people like Adkison who were homebound and couldn’t attend. And now Wilmore is streaming the services from space.
Dahn said NASA allowed the church to be linked into the space station at one point for Wilmore to do a devotional, and the congregation on Earth sang songs like “Amazing Grace” with the astronauts at the station.
When Wilmore was last on the space station in 2014, he sent Adkison’s wife a video of him praying for her from the station’s cupola. Adkison said he accidentally erased the video from the iPad at some point.
“I thought I would send Barry back up there to get another ,” Adkison quipped.
In a NASA press conference after the announcement that the astronauts would be stranded for additional months, Wilmore and Williams remained upbeat about their extended stay. Wilmore, 60, said the gravity-free environment would give him relief from his aches and pains.
Retired astronaut Terry Virts, who commanded the space station in 2014–2015, was stranded on the station in 2015 for an extra month after a cargo capsule blew up. He saw that as “bonus space time.” But he said an eight-month extension was a long trip.
“There’s been astronauts that got stuck or delayed—never as dramatically as the two Boeing astronauts,” he said in an interview with broadcaster Pablo Torre. He added that the families of stranded astronauts are the ones who bear the brunt of the extension, often with spouses having to care for children on their own.
On a personal level, Wilmore is missing the bulk of his youngest daughter’s senior year of high school. In his press conference from the space station, Wilmore said astronauts train for the unexpected.
“It’s a very risky business,” he said. A reporter asked him about his faith sustaining him, and he said he didn’t want to speak outside of his role as an astronaut but said anyone interested could look at 2 Corinthians 12:9–10.
Those verses say in part, “‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ … for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
He added: “You’ve got to be resilient and go with whatever the good Lord gives.”
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