The two Starliner astronauts said Friday they have no regrets about NASA’s decision to extend their mission and return their spacecraft to Earth without them. They said they have turned the page and are enjoying the transition to full-time astronauts on the space station.
Starliner commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and co-pilot Sunita Williams, both former Navy test pilots and veterans of previous stints aboard the International Space Station, spoke to reporters from space Friday, on the 100th day of a mission originally scheduled to last just over a week.
“There’s one thing I try not to worry about, things I can’t control,” Wilmore said, floating next to Williams in the station’s Destiny lab module. “I’m not going to worry about it. There’s no point in it at all.
“So my transition (psychologically), maybe it wasn’t immediate, but it was close. If I can’t influence it, if there’s nothing we can do, there’s nothing we can do. So we march forward, execute the plan of the day.”
Williams agreed, saying, “That’s what we do. We’re professionals.”
“I have to say, but somewhere in the back of my mind, you know, there are people on the ground who had plans, right? Like my family, to spend some time with my mom, and I think that’s what I was more concerned about, the things that we had all talked about for this fall and this winter,” Williams said.
“But you know what? Everyone is on board and supporting us while we’re here. So I think that concern quickly went away. We’re here and we’re going to be the best crew members we can be for our (space station) crew members here.”
Wilmore and Williams were launched to the station on June 5marking the start of the first manned test flight of the Starliner.
During a meeting with the laboratory the next day, five reaction control system thrusters were found to be malfunctioning and four helium leaks were discovered in the propulsion pressurization system, in addition to a small leak that had been discovered before launch.
Engineers and managers from NASA and Boeing analyzed the problems over the next three months to determine whether the Starliner could safely return Wilmore and Williams to Earth. Boeing claimed that the test data showed it could, but NASA managers were not convinced.
Ultimately, agency managers decided to keep the two astronauts aboard the space station for an extended period of time and bring down the Starlinerwithout a crew on September 7. The re-entry and landing of the spacecraft went smoothly, confirming Boeing’s confidence in the spacecraft.
Wilmore and Williams both said the entire station crew got up early to watch the Starliner return to Earth, and Wilmore said he was excited about the successful landing. But he did not question NASA’s decision.
“It was great that it came back, and the fact that we weren’t on it didn’t cross my mind at all,” Wilmore said. “It was never like, oh, we shouldn’t do that … no, not at all. The decision was made (and) we’re going to move forward with the plan of the day.”
But he said that if NASA had had more time to investigate the helium leaks and the booster problems, he and Williams might have been able to return to the Starliner as originally planned.
“I think the data could have gotten us there,” he said. “We could have gotten to the point, I believe, where we could have gotten back to Starliner.”
But with other spacecraft and crews flying to and from the space station this month, “we just didn’t have enough time to get to the end of the timeline where we could say we were going to come back with it. I think we got there, but we just ran out of time.”
Wilmore and Williams are not the first astronauts to undertake an extended mission.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio faced a similar dilemma in 2022 when his six-month stay aboard the space station was extended to more than a year due to problems with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying him into space.
“I think the transition from six months to 12 months is tough, but it’s not as tough as the transition from eight days to eight months,” Rubio said in an interview with CBS News.
“Of course there’s a little part of you that’s disappointed,” he said. “It’s okay to acknowledge that. But you can’t sulk all the time, right? … You just have to dedicate yourself and rededicate yourself to the mission.”
And that’s exactly what Wilmore and Williams said they were doing.
The Starliner astronauts have joined the space station’s permanent crew and will return home in late February, hitching a ride aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with Crew 9 commander Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov. The Crew 9 flight is scheduled for launch on September 25.
The Crew Dragon normally launches with four station flyers on board, but NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson were pulled from the upcoming flight to give Wilmore and Williams a return seat. When they return to Earth with Hague and Gorbunov in late February, the Starliner astronauts will have been off the planet for 262 days.
“We’re both Marines, we’ve both been on deployments,” Williams said. “We’re not surprised when deployments change. Our families are used to that. So it’s not a huge surprise.”
In this case, NASA “made the right decisions, and we’re here. That’s the way it is in this business. It’s risky, and that’s the way it is in this business.”
On a more positive note, she and Wilmore are “excited to fly in two different spaceships.”
“We’re testers, that’s what we do, we look at different aircraft, spacecraft, whatever. … We wanted to bring Starliner to completion and land it back home on land. But you have to turn the page and look at the next opportunity. We’re coming back with some evaluations of both spacecraft, and I think we’re pretty fortunate to do that.”
And in the meantime, it’s not all work and no play. Williams, who spent 322 days aboard the space station during two previous visits, said life aboard the orbital lab “is my happy place.”
“It’s very peaceful here,” she said. “There’s often a lot of work going on, but it also gives you time to be a little bit introspective, a little bit of a shift (in) your perspective on how we do things on Earth.
“I find it really hard to imagine that people on Earth can’t get along. It’s the only planet we have, and we should all be happy that we’re there together, because that’s what it is. That’s our place. … It just changes your perspective.”
And then there are the sports. Wilmore, who grew up in Mt. Juliet, Tenn., just outside Nashville, is an avid fan of Southeastern Conference football. He told an ESPN reporter, “If you’re looking for a guest voter for ‘College Game Day,’ give me a call. I’ve also been asked a few times, ‘Yeah, I have the SEC Network.'”
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