The astronauts rescued by Elon Musk after being in space for nine months rebuffed a Fox News reporter’s efforts to mete out blame for their predicament.
“Based on how they were couching this—that we were left and forgotten and all that—we were nowhere near any of that at all,” astronaut Butch Wilmore told host Bill Hemmer on America’s Newsroom Monday. “In the big scheme of things, we weren’t stuck. We were planned, trained.”
Wilmore and Sunita Williams lifted off for an eight-day test flight on Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft in June, but technical issues on the capsule required them to hunker down on the International Space Station until March 18, when a Crew Dragon capsule from Musk’s SpaceX brought them home.
During the ordeal, the trapped astronauts became fodder for President Donald Trump, who claimed former President Joe Biden “abandoned” them in space—a talking point Musk repeated as well.
A gracious Wilmore conceded that all parties involved—including Boeing and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—made mistakes and acknowledged his own failures.
“I’m culpable—I’ll admit that to the nation," he said. “There’s things that I did not ask that I should have asked. I didn’t know at the time I needed to ask them, but in hindsight, some of the signals were there.”
Wilmore insisted that it was more important to learn from the mission’s failures than assign blame.
“I don’t want to point fingers,” Willmore said. “We don’t want to look back and say, ‘shame, shame, shame.’ We want to look forward and say, ‘Let’s rectify what we’ve learned and let’s make the future even more productive and better.‘”
