NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore at a press conference. Johnson Space Center, March 31, HoustonPhoto: AP
NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore spoke for the first time since returning to Earth more than 9 months ago. They returned to Earth on March 18. Then, on Monday, they both spoke publicly to reporters for the first time.
This mission of NASA and SpaceX is called ‘Crew-10’. At a press conference organized by NASA at the Johnson Space Center, Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore and their colleague Nick Hague from Crew-10 answered various questions, including Starliner.
Sunita Williams said, ‘We were going to come back, I think people should know that. Finally, we came back. Now we have to tell everyone about this incident… because this is a unique event. We have to learn from this incident.
Sunita admitted that they knew that something different would happen with the Starliner test mission. But neither of them expected that people would have so much expectation for them, that people would pay so much attention to them. She and Butch Wilmore are very honored and humbled by the amount of interest in the trip. “We worked, trained and did amazing scientific experiments on the International Space Station,” she said.
Both Sunita and Butch said that Starliner is “very capable.” Butch said that they would fly it again in the future if given the opportunity.
“We will fix the problems we encountered. We will make it work again. Boeing and NASA are fully committed. We will move forward with sincerity,” Butch said.
Sunita and Wilmore were repeatedly asked about the influence of politics while on the International Space Station. In this regard, Nick Hague said, ‘When we work in space, we don’t feel any politics.’
Last June, two astronauts Butch and Sunita went to the International Space Station on an eight-day mission. Although they were supposed to return to Earth at the end of the mission, they were stuck due to a spacecraft malfunction. Politics also started over their return to Earth. Trump and his advisor and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed without any evidence that former President Joe Biden had left Butch and Sunita on the space station for political reasons.
Finally, on March 14, NASA and billionaire Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX sent a mission called ‘Crew-10’ from the Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida to bring them back. This mission included NASA astronauts Anne McClain, Nicole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Russian space agency Roscosmos astronaut Kirill Peskov. The four astronauts entered Earth’s atmosphere 17 hours after they began their return journey in the Crew Dragon as part of the ‘NASA Crew-9 Mission.’ At 3:57 am on March 18, Bangladesh time, the capsule carrying them landed in the ocean about 50 miles off the coast of Florida, USA, with the help of a special parachute.
