NASA’s Starliner astronauts aren’t ‘disappointed’ by Boeing spacecraft

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore talk about their extended stay aboard the International Space Station. Press conference It opened yesterday. The two are now fully integrated into the ISS crew, as the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that was supposed to take them last week returned to Earth unmanned instead.

The two were initially asked if they felt “let down” by Boeing.

“Absolutely not,” said Wilmore.

“This is not easy. NASA is doing a great job. The people at NASA are doing a great job of making a lot of things look easy. Sending probes beyond the edge of our solar system, going in. [and] “Taking samples from asteroids, humans in space. It’s a very risky business and things don’t always go as planned.”

After discovering the thruster problems and helium leaks on Starliner, NASA decided not to fly the spacecraft again with the two men on board. But Wilmore said that if there had been more time, “we could have gotten to a point where we could have gone back to Starliner. We just didn’t have enough time.” Instead, the two men became ISS crew members.

Williams, who said Willmore will soon be the ISS commander, said the transition to space station crew was “not that hard.” She and Willmore had been preparing for the station for years before their flight earlier this year. She said the end of NASA’s Crew-9 mission and their later return aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule is a unique opportunity for the two test pilots. “We’re excited to fly two different spacecraft. We’re testers, so that’s what we do,” she added.

Neither astronaut expressed any disappointment about staying on the ISS longer. “Space is my happy place,” Williams said. “…I get to ‘work’ every day. I can do it upside down, I can do it sideways, so it adds a little bit of a different perspective.”