Their craft’s mechanical issues led to a stay in space that was 35 times longer than originally scheduled, an eight-day mission that ultimately clocked in at 286 days. Yet both of NASA’s unlikely celebrity astronauts say they’d go again—on the same Boeing Starliner that failed them once.
“We’re going to rectify all the issues that we encountered. We’re going to make it work,” astronaut Butch Wilmore said on Monday at a news briefing held at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “Boeing’s completely committed. NASA is completely committed. And with that, I’d get on in a heartbeat.”
During a wide-ranging news conference, Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams disclosed that they will meet with Boeing officials on Wednesday to review their issue-plagued Starliner flight. But Williams echoed Wilmore’s sentiment about being willing to go up in the craft again.
“The spacecraft is really capable,” Williams said. “There were a couple of things that need to be fixed, like Butch mentioned, and folks are actively working on that. But it is a great spacecraft, and it has a lot of capability that other spacecrafts don’t have.”
The Wednesday meeting is the latest and perhaps most important step in determining why the Starliner experienced thruster failures and helium leaks last June on its maiden voyage to the International Space Station. Those issues, some of which had been observed during previous launch attempts, prompted NASA officials to keep the astronauts at the ISS and, after weeks of delay, to return Starliner to Earth without crew members aboard.
Wilmore and Williams instead splashed down off the Florida panhandle in a SpaceX craft on March 18, more than nine months past their initial return date, after putting in extended crew time at the ISS. They were joined on the flight home by NASA astronaut Nick Hague, who commanded the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Wilmore, who commanded Starliner’s test flight, attempted to absorb blame for its failures, saying, “I’ll start with me” and noting that he did not ask certain questions “that I did not, at the time, know I needed to.” The primary issues with the craft, though, land squarely with Boeing, its manufacturer, and with NASA, which bears the final responsibility for every aspect of the U.S. space program.
Williams and Wilmore’s experience cast an unusual spotlight on the astronauts, who became largely known as Butch and Suni by Americans avidly following their story. Their saga became the subject of tense conversations between NASA and Boeing executives about what to do, and President Donald Trump later blamed the Biden administration for leaving the astronauts “abandoned” at the ISS. In a social media post, Trump also implied that SpaceX founder Elon Musk would personally travel to space to retrieve Wilmore and Williams. (He didn’t.)
“The stuck, ‘marooned’ narrative–we heard about that,” Wilmore said. “We had a plan, right? The plan went way off, but because we’re in human space flight, we prepare for any number of contingencies. This is a curvy road—you never know where it’s going to go.”
Hague added that at the International Space Station (ISS), “You don’t feel the politics. You don’t feel any of that. It’s focused strictly on mission.” He said that with the additions of Wilmore and of Williams, who became commander of the ISS in September, “It took everything I had every day to keep up with them…The reality is they are highly skilled, very technically competent.”
The ISS is the site of hundreds of experiments and exercises, many of them tied to longer-term goals of pushing farther out into space and, potentially, remaining there. Suni Williams told Fortune in the months before her Starliner launch that the next frontiers are a sustained presence on the Moon and, in time, on Mars.
She touched on that theme again Monday in answering a reporter’s question about the attention NASA has received—flattering and otherwise—in the time since she and Williams departed last summer.
“It’s an honor that people are paying attention,” Williams said. “Good news, bad news—it’s just news, and it’s good for space exploration, and that’s what we’re all about. Our mission [of] building and working on the International Space Station was just awesome, and we all had the opportunity to do that.
“But we also have bigger goals of exploring our solar system, going back to the Moon, going on to Mars, and to get people understanding that it is hard—it is difficult—and what we do up there is really awesome. And I think at least that we had a little bit of that [understanding] with the interest in this mission. If we can perpetuate that and tell people a little bit more and have the opportunity, the forum to do that, I’m very thankful for that.”
Both Williams and Wilmore credited NASA’s exercise and nutrition experts for keeping their bodies in shape during their space stay, with Williams noting that she peeled off a three-mile run recently, less than two weeks after returning to Earth. Too, the astronauts acknowledged the hardship placed on their families by the extended mission. One of Wilmore’s daughters is a high-school senior; he missed most of her school year.
And both veterans said they remain intrigued by the Starliner’s capabilities, a strong suggestion that NASA, as it has publicly maintained, will continue along its program of using two private companies—Boeing and SpaceX—compete for the contracts to carry astronauts into space. Williams’ and Wilmore’s comments Monday make it even more imperative for Boeing and NASA to answer the continued questions around Starliner’s readiness.
Wilmore said that Starliner has “the most capability” of any available craft, partly because of its easy switch from manual to automatic operation. “And then we have a backup mode where we can go directly from controllers to the reaction control system jets and maneuver the spacecraft,” he added. “There’s no spacecraft that has all of this capability. I mean, I jokingly said a couple of times before we launched that I could literally do a barrel row over the top of the Space Station…If we can figure out a couple of very important primary issues with the thrusters and the helium system, Starliner is ready to go.”
