NASA astronaut Suni Williams shares her Thanksgiving plans in space

The astronauts aboard the International Space Station are ready to break bread for a Thanksgiving Day in orbit.

NASA astronaut Suni Williams said she and her fellow crew members will have a day off to celebrate.

“We have a lot of food that we packed away that is Thanksgiving-like,” Williams said Wednesday in an interview with NBC News. “Some smoked turkey, some cranberry, apple wedges, green beans and mushrooms and mashed potatoes.”

She added that she plans to tune in to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade before celebrating with her American and Russian counterparts.

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

The pair planned to stay at the ISS for only about a week and then return to Earth aboard the Starliner. But problems with the spacecraft forced the duo to remain in orbit for months longer than expected. Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to return home in February in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

The beleaguered Starliner mission was a dramatic, months-long saga for NASA and Boeing. But Williams said she doesn’t see herself as “stranded” in space.

“Our mission control team and our management always had the possibility that we could come home,” she said. “So yeah, we came up here on the Starliner. We’re coming back on a dragon, but there’s always been a plan for how we’d get home.”

In recent weeks have NASA dispelled rumors that Williams had experienced health problems in space. Several news articles suggested the astronaut had lost significant weight, but the agency’s chief of health and medicine said Nov. 14 that Williams and the others aboard the space station remain in good health.

Williams told NBC News that she is enjoying her time in orbit and is in good spirits.

“We feel good, exercise, eat right,” she said. “We also have a lot of fun up here. So, you know, people are worried about us. Really, don’t worry about us.”

Despite the problems that surfaced during the Starliner’s journey — primarily with its thrusters and leaking helium — the capsule returned smoothly to Earth without a crew on September 7. Williams said it would have been nice to see the Starliner mission completed.

She added that once Boeing and NASA deal with the things that went wrong on the test flight, she would not hesitate to fly the Starliner into space again.

“Maybe not tomorrow, because we have to incorporate some of the lessons we’ve learned,” she said, “but as soon as we see that we’re on the right track and we’ve made some of the fixes to some of the issues, which we had – absolutely.”