Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stayed on the International Space Station for nine months in what was originally expected to be a weeklong mission.
And earlier in March, the pair, aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule, splashed into the ocean off the coast of Florida.
“I wanted to hug my husband and hug my dogs — and I’ll say in that order,” Williams said, laughing. She also revealed she ate a grilled cheese sandwich after getting home, and it reminded her of her vegetarian father.
The two astronauts patiently waited to return home, staying busy with day-to-day research and space life. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a blame game ensued about who should be held responsible for their abandonment, despite Williams and Wilmore saying they weren’t stranded to begin with.
So, what happened in space?
Williams and Wilmore opened up about their experiences dealing with the circumstances in their first interview since their return.
“My first thought was, ‘We just gotta pivot,’ you know?” Williams told Fox News when asked her reaction to the news of their extended stay. “If this was the destiny, if our spacecraft was going to go home, based on decisions made here, we were going to be up there ‘til February, I was like, ‘OK, let’s make the best of it.’ ”
She added, “We planned, we trained, that we would be there for some part of a time, so we were ready to just jump into it and take on the tasks that were given to us.”
Wilmore also jumped in, saying, “It’s not about me, it’s not about my feelings. It’s about what this human space flight program is about. It’s our national goals.”
But, Wilmore noted, he was forced to compartmentalize the troubling realities of his family life back on earth.
“Did I think about not being there for my daughter’s high school year? Of course, but compartmentalize. We’ve trained them to be resilient,” he said. His family also discussed the possibility that Wilmore wouldn’t make it back home.
“We talk about the fact that there’s no given this is a test flight. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We might not be back in eight days, or whatever the plan was,” he said.
Why couldn’t Williams and Wilmore return?
As the Deseret News previously reported, NASA made good use of Wilmore’s and Williams’ extended stay on the ISS as the astronauts helped conduct over 150 science experiments and performed various maintenance duties.
They removed a radio frequency group antenna assembly from the station’s truss, collected samples from the station’s external surface for analysis, installed patches to cover damaged areas of light filters on an X-ray telescope, and more, according to NASA.
The Boeing Starliner, which took the crew members to space, experienced issues, including a helium leak and malfunctioning thrusters. In September, the Starliner returned to Earth without the crew members.
At the time, NASA clarified that it’s standard practice for astronauts to spend extra time on the ISS until the vehicle’s issues are resolved, and they are trained for such contingencies.
“We always had a lifeboat, a way for them to come home all the way back to Starliner,” said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. “We always had a way to get the crew home safely should we need to. Then it really became, when is the right time.”
“For me, it’s been the normal kind of planning I do all the time. Looking at all the options working with SpaceX, working with the space station program and finding the right time to bring the crew back.”
Ultimately, a SpaceX vehicle carried out the mission.
Trump says Biden White House at fault for abandoned astronauts
The two veteran NASA astronauts steered away from the politicized claim that they were abandoned.
“Any of those adjectives, they’re very broad in their definition,” Wilmore said. “So in certain respects we were stuck, in certain respects, maybe we were stranded, but based on how they were couching this, that we were left and forgotten in orbit, we were nowhere near any of that at all.”
President Donald Trump first made that claim earlier in January. In a post on Truth Social, he blamed the Biden administration for leaving the astronauts stranded and said he had directed billionaire and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to bring them back.
“Elon will soon be on his way. Hopefully, all will be safe,” Trump said. In turn, Musk furthered this narrative. But Andreas “Andy” Mogensen, who has flown to the ISS twice, thanks to the European Space Agency, shot down Musk’s narrative of the crew members being stranded for political reasons.
“What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media,” Mogensen said in a post on X. Musk pushed back, saying he offered the Biden administration SpaceX’s technology to bring back the astronaut but did not provide details regarding this offer.
Wilmore told Fox News he didn’t “want to point fingers.”
“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,” he said. “That’s that’s the way that I look at it — I think the way the nation should look at it.”