Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore Blame NASA For Delayed Rescue on Elon Musk's SpaceX Craft

Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore hold the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) accountable for their delayed rescue from the International Space Station. In their first interview with Fox News after their comeback to the mortal world, the astronauts who spent over nine months in space said while they did not feel “abandoned” or “stuck” at the ISS, they knew they were there because NASA could not find a solution sooner.

“Is NASA to blame? Are they culpable? Sure!” said Wilmore while replying to Fox News' co-anchor Bill Hemmer's question about how the astronauts felt about being “marooned” in space. “There [are] 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." 

Williams' 62-year-old co-astronaut also said he feels even Boeing, which initially commissioned a Starliner spacecraft to bring back the astronauts, is responsible for what happened. “Is Boeing to blame? Are they culpable? Sure,” he told Hemmer, as he urged people to look forward and let bygones be bygones. “I don't want to point fingers. I hope nobody wants to point fingers. We don't want to look back and say shame, shame, shame," he added, asking the nation to do the same. “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.”

"Pivot"

When Hemmer asked Williams what she felt after finding out she was not going home, she replied with “pivot," hinting at the astronauts who immediately switched up their plan to adjust to the extended stay.

“My first thought was we just gotta pivot,” she said. “If this was the destiny, our spacecraft is going to go home based on decisions made here, we are going to be up there until February. I was like okay let's make the best of it. We planned, we trained we would be there for some part of [the] time. So we were ready to jump into it and take on the tasks that were given to us."

A long odyssey

Sent to the ISS in June last year, the NASA astronauts were initially expected to return after a week through a planned mission involving the use of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. However, the spacecraft's malfunction derailed the plan, leaving the pair stranded in space for 286 days. Williams and Wilmore were rescued on March 19 on Elon Musk-owned SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

Read more: Sunita Williams Joins Elite Club of NASA Astronauts with Most Time Spent in Space