> 'I'm Back': NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 Astronaut Suni Williams Returns to Earth
'I'm Back': NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 Astronaut Suni Williams Returns to Earth
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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 it. We're going to make it work,” Wilmore said.
Williams noted that Starliner has “a lot of capability” and she wants to see it succeed.
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.
Read more: https://www.9news.com/article/news/nation-world/nasa-astronaut-butch-wilmore-suni-williams-press-conference/507-b266f759-f988-41bf-9eaa-1bd83cc3f9e0
Video source: CNN
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