NASA's newly returned astronauts say they would fly on Boeing's
Starliner capsule again
[April 01, 2025]
By MARCIA DUNN
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — 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.
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. “We're all in,” she said.
The two will meet with Boeing leadership on Wednesday to provide a
rundown on the flight and its problems.
“It's not for pointing fingers,” Wilmore said. “It's just to make the
path clearer going forward.”
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.
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Astronauts Suni Williams, from left, Nick Hague, and Butch Wilmore
are interviewed at Johnson Space Center on Monday, March 31, 2025,
in Houston. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
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 two weeks ago with a flawless splashdown by
SpaceX off the Florida Panhandle.
“It’s great being back home after being up there,” Williams told The
Associated Press in an interview. She waited until she was steadier
on her feet before reuniting with her two Labrador retrievers the
day after splashdown. "Pure joy.”
Wilmore already has a to-do list. His wife wants to replace all the
shrubs in their yard before summer. “So I’ve got to get my body
ready to dig holes,” he told the AP.
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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AP video journalist Lekan Oyekanmi contributed from Houston.
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