NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore spoke about their continued stay on the International Space Station in a press conference held yesterday. The two are now fully incorporated into the ISS crew, as the Boeing Starliner spacecraft meant to bring them home last week returned to Earth without a crew.
Early on, the two were asked if they felt “let down” by Boeing.
“Absolutely not,” Wilmore said:
“This operation is not easy. NASA does a great job – people at Nasa do a great job – of making a lot of things look easy. Sending probes beyond the edge of our solar system; entering (and) retrieving samples from asteroids; people in space. It’s a very risky business and things don’t always go the way you want them to.”
NASA decided not to return the aircraft with the two aboard after finding thruster issues and a helium leak in the Starliner. But Wilmore said that with more time, “we could have gotten to the point, I believe, where we could have returned on Starliner. But we just ran out of time.” Instead, the two became part of the ISS crew.
Williams, who Wilmore said will soon become ISS Commander, said the transition to the space station crew “wasn’t that difficult,” as he and Wilmore prepare to go to the station within several years before their flight earlier this year. He said their return later in a SpaceX Dragon capsule at the end of NASA’s Crew-9 mission was a unique opportunity for the two test pilots, adding, “We’re excited to fly two different spacecraft; I mean, we’re testers, that’s what we do.”
None of the astronauts expressed dismay at being aboard the ISS longer. “Space is my happy place,” says Williams, “…every day you do something ‘work’ — you can do it upside down, you can do it sideways, so it adds a little something different perspective.”
