NASA astronauts speak out for the first time following unexpected 9-month mission to space

CNN

By Ashley Strickland and Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — Two astronauts whose planned weeklong stay in low-Earth orbit unexpectedly turned into a more than 9-month mission due to spacecraft problems spoke publicly to reporters Monday for the first time since their return to terra firma on March 18.

NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore garnered worldwide attention when issues with their Boeing Starliner vehicle cropped up during a June test flight to the International Space Station. As they waited for an alternative ride home, the pair faced a stream of rhetoric, bolstered by politicians and media, about being “abandoned,” “stranded,” or “stuck” — descriptors the astronauts themselves have denied.

Williams, Wilmore and fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague — who were all part of the Crew-9 mission that ultimately brought the test flight team back to Earth — addressed questions about the Starliner saga during a NASA news conference.

“We were always coming back, and I think people need to know that,” Williams said. “We’re back to actually, you know, share our story with so many people, because … it’s unique, and there’s some lessons learned to it, and part of that is just resilience and being able to take a turn that was unexpected and make the best of it.”

Williams acknowledged that she and Wilmore knew going into the Starliner test mission that flying a new spacecraft was “unique,” but neither expected all of the attention their extended stay garnered. Once the duo realized they would become part of the space station crew for longer than expected, they “pivoted,” Williams said.

“We are International Space Station crew members, and we’re doing what all of our other friends in the astronaut office do: Go and work and train and and do amazing science experiments up on the International Space Station,” Williams said.

Williams said she and Wilmore were honored and humbled by the amount of interest in their journey.

“When we came home, (it was) like, wow, there are a lot of people who are interested,” she said. “Very thankful, very amazed that we could hopefully be one positive element to bring people together.”

Both Williams and Wilmore said that Starliner is “very capable.” Given the chance, they would fly it again in the future, according to Wilmore.

“We’re going to rectify all the issues that we encountered,” Wilmore said. “We’re going to fix it, we’re going to make it work. Boeing’s completely committed. NASA is completely committed. And with that, I’d get on in a heartbeat.”

The astronauts were repeatedly asked about any politics that came into play during their time on the station.

“When we’re up there operating in space, you don’t feel the politics,” Hague said. “You don’t feel any of that.”

During an interview with Fox News on Monday, Wilmore for the first time said he thought “in certain respects, we were stuck.”

But he continued to refute the broader narrative that he and Williams were abandoned.

“Based on how they were couching this? That we were left and forgotten and all? We were nowhere near any of that,” Wilmore said.

President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, now one of Trump’s top advisers, have repeatedly taken credit for expediting Williams and Wilmore’s return.

Trump and Musk have also accused the Biden Administration of abandoning the astronauts in space for “political reasons,” though there is no publicly available evidence for that assertion.

Wilmore on Monday repeated earlier statements that he “believes” Musk and Trump, though he did not say about what, specifically.

“You’ve given me no reason not to trust you — either one of them,” Wilmore told Fox News when asked what he would say to Trump and Musk. “I am grateful that our national leaders actually are coming in and taking part in our human spaceflight program.”

Reacclimating to life on Earth

Williams and Wilmore were reassigned to the Crew-9 mission during their monthslong stay on the orbiting laboratory, integrating with space station staff. As their stay faced further extensions, the astronauts acknowledged it was difficult to be away from family and friends on Earth.

“Did I think about not being there for my daughter’s high school year? Of course, but (we) compartmentalize. … I can’t let that interfere with what I’m called to do at the moment,” Wilmore told Fox News. “It’s not about me, it’s not about my feelings. It’s about what this human spaceflight program is about: It’s our national goals.”

Despite the controversial rhetoric about the mission, the astronaut duo also relished the time spent in space.

“It’s fantastic up here. I mean, who wouldn’t want to spend time up here with these views and with this company?” Williams told CNN’s Anderson Cooper from the space station in February.

Hague on Monday praised Wilmore and Williams as highly skilled astronauts who were welcomed as they helped the current station crew work through experiments and other tasks — more than “gap fillers on the station,” he said at the news conference.

“They were productive, pushing the station mission forward and Suni was the station commander, so she was calling the shots,” Hague said. “So you get in that environment, that operational environment, the politics, they don’t make it up there. We are working as a part of an international team that spans the globe … and we just figure out how to make it happen. That’s the magic of human spaceflight, is that we can focus on something so positive that pulls people together. And we’ve been doing that for a long time.”

After returning home, Williams said she couldn’t wait to hug her husband and her dogs. She said she’s been feeling good and went for a 3-mile run yesterday — something she says is a testament to the astronauts’ trainers, who are “rocking it” in helping the crew reacclimate to life on Earth again.

“I mean, who would even imagine that you come back from roughly 10 months (in space) and within a week, you run 2 miles at an eight-minute pace,” Wilmore said. “I mean, that’s not even conceivable that the body could handle that. But these folks get us ready to where those type of things happen.”

NASA’s response to the ‘stuck’ narrative

To be clear, NASA officials have consistently denied that Williams and Wilmore were ever “stranded.”

“We always had a lifeboat, a way for them to come home,” said Steve Stich, who heads NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, under which SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and Boeing’s Starliner vehicle operate, on March 18.

NASA officials were asked during news conferences around the astronauts’ March 18 return to Earth about exactly how much credit should be given to Trump and Musk.

For key context: The space agency mapped out Williams and Wilmore’s path home last summer — well before Musk or Trump began talking about it.

For their part, NASA leaders have mostly avoided giving the President or Musk overt credit.

For example, Joel Montalbano, the space agency’s deputy associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate, addressed the matter after Williams and Wilmore splashed down off the coast of Florida.

“I think many of you heard that back in January, the President asked SpaceX what it would take to bring this crew home. And I will tell you that — at the time that that question was asked — we were already looking at options,” he said.

After being questioned by journalists, Montalbano added that NASA “got the input from the White House.”

“But you also have to look at the vehicle readiness,” Montalbano said. “We talked about looking at weather. We talked about recovery team, (crew) handover, the vehicle traffic going to and from the International Space Station. So when you put all that together, we came up with a, I thought, a pretty good plan that the teams executed over the last four or five days.”

“Vehicle readiness” is a key phrase.

During the March 18 news conference, Stich said the next available SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that could bring Williams and Wilmore home was the one that brought them home. The fact that the spacecraft was one and the same suggests SpaceX did not have a different vehicle that could have flown a separate, dedicated mission to return the astronauts sooner.

That would contradict a claim from Musk. He previously indicated SpaceX offered to commission a rescue mission to retrieve the astronauts — perhaps expediting their return by months — to someone within the Biden White House, but his proposal was denied for “political reasons.” Musk said he did not make the offer directly to NASA, though it’s unclear why.

Nor is it clear what the details of that offer may have been and to whom, specifically, it was directed.

A former senior Biden White House official and former senior NASA official previously told CNN they never heard such an offer.

“I’m not aware of any communications that came directly to the White House, whether directly or indirectly, along the way — and there was a close team,” the former Biden White House source said.

Notably, NASA had said in December it was expecting to delay Crew-9’s return because of SpaceX. Specifically, the company was tracking some hangups preparing a new SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for Crew-10 — a mission with a fresh astronaut crew that had to arrive at the space station before Crew-9, carrying Wilmore and Williams, was allowed to disembark.

NASA and SpaceX later opted to use a different capsule for the Crew-10 mission, a preflown Dragon vehicle.

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