(HOUSTON) — One of the astronauts who returned to Earth after an unexpected nine months in space said on Monday that everyone holds “responsibility” for what may have gone wrong with Boeing’s Starliner test flight.
Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams performed the first astronaut-crewed flight of Starliner to the International Space Station (ISS) in June 2024.
However, what was supposed to be a mission lasting about one week turned into a nine-month stay aboard the ISS due to several issues with Starliner before they returned home in mid-March 2024.
In response to a question during a press briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday about who is to “blame” for what went wrong, Wilmore said everyone holds some “responsibility.”
“I’ll start with me,” Wilmore said. “There were questions that I, as a commander of the spacecraft, that I should have asked, and I did not. At the time, I didn’t know I needed to. And maybe you could call that hindsight. But I’ll start and point the finger, and I’ll blame me. I could’ve asked some questions, and the answers to those questions could have turned the tide.”
“‘Blame’ … I don’t like that term, but certainly there’s responsibility throughout all the programs, and certainly you can start with me,” he continued. “Responsibility with Boeing, yes. Responsibility with NASA, yes, all the way up and down the chain. We all are responsible. We all own this.”
Issues with the spacecraft prompted NASA and Boeing to send Starliner back to Earth uncrewed and keep Wilmore and Williams onboard the ISS until early 2025, when they would return home on a SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon spacecraft once Crew-10 arrived at the ISS.
The SpaceX Crew-9 undocked in the early hours of Tuesday, March 18, and deorbited in the afternoon, before returning to Earth Tuesday evening.
Williams said they were “surprised” by the public interest in their mission.
“It’s interesting. We go and launch, we knew it was a little bit unique, obviously, first time flying on a new spacecraft,” she said. “But, you know, then life goes on up there and … we pivoted, and we were International Space Station crew members, and we’re doing what all of our other friends and in the astronaut, office do is go and work and train and do science.”
“And so you’re not really aware of what else is going on down here. But, I think we were just really focused on what we were doing and trying to be part of the team and making sure we pulled our weight for the team,” Williams said. “So no, I don’t think we were aware to the degree — honored and humbled by the fact of when we came home like, ‘Wow, there’s, there are a lot of people who are interested.'”
The pair were also asked about how they felt about being pulled into the middle of a political battle.
During a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity in February, President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the astronauts has been abandoned in space by then-president Joe Biden.
“They didn’t have the go-ahead with Biden,” Trump said. “He was going to leave them in space. I think he was going to leave them in space. … He didn’t want the publicity. Can you believe it?”
During the Hannity interview, Musk said SpaceX was “accelerating” the return of Wilmore and Williams at Trump’s request, adding that “they were left up there for political reasons, which is not good.”
These comments were made despite confirmation from NASA in August 2024 that Wilmore and Williams would return on the SpaceX Crew 9 spacecraft in early 2025.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague, who returned with Wilmore and Williams on Crew-9 said the politics “don’t make it up” to the ISS, but that there was always a plan to bring the astronauts home.
“We were planning from day one to return toward the end of end of February,” he said. “That all predicated on the fact that we would have a replacement crew show up, and we’d have adequate hand over that’s important to maintain the mission of the International Space Station, to continue pushing research and exploration, and that was never in question the entire time.”
Wilmore said although the Starliner mission did not go as originally planned, there were “contingencies” In place.
“We said this before; we had a plan, right? The plan went way off what we had planned,” he said. “But because we’re in human spaceflight, we prepare for any number of contingencies, because this is a curvy road. You never know where it’s going to go, we prepare for this.”
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