Wilmore, Williams: We'd Fly on Starliner Again

NASA 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. 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, the AP reports. SpaceX recently ferried the duo home after more 286 days at the International Space Station—278 days more than planned when they blasted off on Boeing's first astronaut flight on June 5.

• Wilmore didn't shy from accepting partial 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 that 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."
• In a Fox News interview, Wilmore pushed back against claims they had been "abandoned" or "marooned" in space, the Guardian reports. "So in certain respects we were stuck, in certain respects, maybe we were stranded, but based on how they were couching this, that we were left and forgotten in orbit, we were nowhere near any of that at all," he said. "Stuck? OK, we didn't get to come home the way we planned. But in the big scheme of things, we weren't stuck. We planned and trained."

• President Trump has taken credit for asking Elon Musk to "go up and get" the astronauts, though the capsule that brought them back to Earth had been attached to the station for months. Wilmore told NBC News he was aware of political rhetoric, but he "didn't think about those type of things" on the ISS. "We were busy. We were we were focused on our mission," he said. Fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague, who returned with Wilmore and Williams, said, "When we're up there operating in space, you don't feel the politics."
• "It's great being back home after being up there," Williams told the AP. 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.

(More Starliner stories.)