CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA’s celebrity astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams said Monday that they hold themselves partly responsible for what went wrong on their space sprint-turned-marathon and would fly on Boeing’s Starliner again.
SpaceX recently ferried the duo home after more than nine months at the International Space Station, filling in for Boeing that returned to Earth without them last year.
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In their first news conference since coming home, the pair said they were taken aback by all the interest and insisted they were only doing their job and putting the mission ahead of themselves and even their families.
Wilmore didn’t shy from accepting some of the blame for Boeing’s bungled test flight.
“I’ll start and point the finger and I’ll blame me. I could have asked some questions and the answers to those questions could have turned the tide,” he told reporters. “All the way up and down the chain. We all are responsible. We all own this.”
Both astronauts said they would strap into Starliner again. “Because we’re going to rectify all the issues that we encountered. We’re going to fix them. We’re going to make it work,” Wilmore said, adding he’d go back up “in a heartbeat.”
Williams noted that Starliner has “a lot of capability” and she wants to see it succeed. The two will meet with Boeing leadership on Wednesday to provide a rundown on the flight and its problems.
The longtime astronauts and retired Navy captains ended up spending 286 days in space — 278 days more than planned when they blasted off on Boeing’s first astronaut flight on June 5. The test pilots had to intervene in order for the Starliner capsule to reach the space station, as thrusters failed and helium leaked.
Their space station stay kept getting extended as engineers debated how to proceed. NASA finally judged Starliner too dangerous to bring Wilmore and Williams back and transferred them to SpaceX. But the launch of their replacements got stalled, stretching their mission beyond nine months.
President Donald Trump urged SpaceX’s Elon Musk to hurry things up, adding politics to the stuck astronauts’ ordeal. The dragged-out drama finally ended March 18 with a flawless splashdown by SpaceX off the Florida Panhandle.
NASA said engineers still do not understand why Starliner’s thrusters malfunctioned; more tests are planned through the summer. If engineers can figure out the thruster and leak issues, “Starliner is ready to go,” Wilmore said.
The space agency may require another test flight — with cargo — before allowing astronauts to climb aboard. That redo could come by year’s end.
Despite Starliner’s rocky road, NASA officials said they stand behind the decision made years ago to have two competing U.S. companies providing taxi service to and from the space station. But time is running out: The space station is set to be abandoned in five years and replaced in orbit by privately operated labs.
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