NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore spoke about their continued stay aboard the International Space Station during a press conference Both have now fully joined the ISS crew, as the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that was supposed to take them home last week was sent back to Earth unmanned.
At first, both were asked if they felt “disappointed” by Boeing.
“Absolutely not,” Wilmore said:
“This operation is not easy. NASA does a great job – NASA people do a great job – of making a lot of things look easy: sending probes beyond the confines of our solar system, going in and taking samples from asteroids, human beings 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 with the craft on board after encountering thruster problems and helium leaks on Starliner. But Wilmore said that with more time, “I think we could have gotten to the point where we could have come back on Starliner. But we just ran out of time.” Instead, the two have become part of the ISS crew.
Williams, who Wilmore said will soon become ISS commander, said the transition to space station crew “wasn’t that difficult” as she and Wilmore had been preparing to go to the station for years prior to their flight earlier this year. She said their subsequent return in a SpaceX Dragon capsule at the conclusion of NASA’s Crew-9 mission is a unique opportunity for the two test pilots, adding, “We’re excited to fly on two different spacecraft — I mean, we’re testers, that’s what we do.”
None of the astronauts expressed dismay at staying aboard the ISS for longer. “Space is my happy place,” Williams said, “…every day you do something that is ‘work,’ you can do it upside down, you can do it sideways, so it adds a little bit of a different perspective.”
