Starliner astronauts in good spirits, ‘confident’ they’ll return to Earth safely
Global News
Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore hosted a live news conference from space, telling the world they fully expect to get home safely aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.
The astronauts aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft are confident they’ll get back to Earth safely aboard the vessel, despite weeks of malfunctions and glitches that have left them stuck in space much longer than expected.
Test pilots Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore appeared in a NASA-hosted livestream Wednesday from the International Space Station (ISS) looking happy and healthy. They were chipper as they answered reporters’ questions.
“We’ve been through a lot of simulations for this spacecraft to go through all sorts of iterations and failures, and I think where we are right now and what we know right now … I feel confident,” Williams said, next to his crewmate and in front of a U.S. flag.
“I have a real good feeling in my heart that the spacecraft will bring us home, no problem. I feel confident that if we had to — if there was a problem with the International Space Station — we’d get in our spacecraft, undock, talk to our team and figure out the best way to come home,” said Williams, her hair comedically splayed out above her amid the lack of gravity.
It was their first news conference while in orbit, and the pair said they expect to return to Earth once thruster testing is complete, although they did not give a timeline or date.
But they’re not complaining about getting to spend extra time in space, and said they’re having a good time helping the crew aboard the ISS, as well as running science experiments and tests while in orbit.
Wilmore said they went into the mission knowing there would be kinks, saying, “This is the world of test. This is a tough business.”
“Human spaceflight is not easy in any regime, and there have been multiple issues with every spacecraft that’s ever been designed, and that’s just the nature of what we do,” Wilmore said. “You know that mantra, ‘Failure is not an option.'”
