ORLANDO, Fla. — The two astronauts branded as “stuck in space” said they were determined to see the Boeing Starliner program through to success, even if that meant riding it up to the International Space Station again, they confirmed during a press conference Monday.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were mostly smiles as they talked about their nine-month mission and compared the Starliner to SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
“More Velcro on SpaceX,” Wilmore noted, going on to say Dragon was more comfortable and had more intuitive display systems, but Starliner was the better capsule to drive and was more maneuverable.
Williams’ opening statement included the fact that she snuck out for a three-mile run the day before, which was a remarkable achievement in adjusting to gravity given she’d only landed two weeks prior.
She said her priorities were greeting her husband and her dog – joking that the order was undetermined – and her first notable meal on earth was a grilled cheese sandwich.
When asked, she said she tuned out the noise about their situation coming from earth and focused on the job at hand.
“We were just part of the team, doing the job, filling in wherever we could, and then knowing that there’s rotational flights, and we will be coming home eventually on a rotational flight,” she said.
Wilmore said attending his weekly church services – from afar – helped him get through.
He put much of the Starliner blame on himself, though said it was hindsight.
“There were questions that I as a commander of the spacecraft, that I should have asked, and I did not at the time, I didn’t know I needed to,” he explained.
Then he turned his focus to the future of Starliner.
“We’re going to rectify all the issues that we that we encounter,” he said, firmly. “We’re going to fix it, we’re going to make it work.”
That meant going back if asked, but he said NASA was training a new crop of astronauts that would be capable of taking on the challenge as well.
As for their time in space, they marveled at how complex the experiments had become since they last flew to the ISS and how much potential the research was having to unlocking new possibilities on earth and toward a future foray to Mars.
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