Everyone has 'responsibility' for Starliner test flight failures, NASA astronaut says
Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams performed the first astronaut-crewed flight of Starliner to the International Space Station (ISS) in June 2024.
However, what was supposed to be a mission lasting about one week turned into a nine-month stay aboard the ISS due to several issues with Starliner before they returned home in mid-March 2024.
MORE: Timeline of Boeing's Starliner mission that left NASA astronauts aboard ISS for 9 months
In response to a question during a press briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday about who is to "blame" for what went wrong, Wilmore said everyone holds some "responsibility."
"I'll start with me," Wilmore said. "There were questions that I, as a commander of the spacecraft, that I should have asked, and I did not. At the time, I didn't know I needed to. And maybe you could call that hindsight. But I'll start and point the finger, and I'll blame me. I could've asked some questions, and the answers to those questions could have turned the tide."
"'Blame' ... I don't like that term, but certainly there's responsibility throughout all the programs, and certainly you can start with me," he continued. "Responsibility with Boeing, yes. Responsibility with NASA, yes, all the way up and down the chain. We all are responsible. We all own this."
Issues with the spacecraft prompted NASA and Boeing to send Starliner back to Earth uncrewed and keep Wilmore and Williams onboard the ISS until early 2025, when they would return home on a SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon spacecraft once Crew-10 arrived at the ISS.
The SpaceX Crew-9 undocked in the early hours of Tuesday, March 18, and deorbited in the afternoon, before returning to Earth Tuesday evening.
Williams said they were "surprised" by the public interest in their mission.
"It's interesting. We go and launch, we knew it was a little bit unique, obviously, first time flying on a new spacecraft," she said. "But, you know, then life goes on up there and … we pivoted, and we were International Space Station crew members, and we're doing what all of our other friends and in the astronaut, office do is go and work and train and do science."
"And so you're not really aware of what else is going on down here. But, I think we were just really focused on what we were doing and trying to be part of the team and making sure we pulled our weight for the team," Williams said. "So no, I don't think we were aware to the degree -- honored and humbled by the fact of when we came home like, 'Wow, there's, there are a lot of people who are interested.'"
The pair were also asked about how they felt about being pulled into the middle of a political battle.
During a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity in February, President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the astronauts has been abandoned in space by then-president Joe Biden.
"They didn't have the go-ahead with Biden," Trump said. "He was going to leave them in space. I think he was going to leave them in space. … He didn't want the publicity. Can you believe it?"
During the Hannity interview, Musk said SpaceX was "accelerating" the return of Wilmore and Williams at Trump's request, adding that "they were left up there for political reasons, which is not good."
These comments were made despite confirmation from NASA in August 2024 that Wilmore and Williams would return on the SpaceX Crew 9 spacecraft in early 2025.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague, who returned with Wilmore and Williams on Crew-9 said the politics "don't make it up" to the ISS, but that there was always a plan to bring the astronauts home.
"We were planning from day one to return toward the end of end of February," he said. "That all predicated on the fact that we would have a replacement crew show up, and we'd have adequate hand over that's important to maintain the mission of the International Space Station, to continue pushing research and exploration, and that was never in question the entire time."
Wilmore said although the Starliner mission did not go as originally planned, there were "contingencies" In place.
"We said this before; we had a plan, right? The plan went way off what we had planned," he said. "But because we're in human spaceflight, we prepare for any number of contingencies, because this is a curvy road. You never know where it's going to go, we prepare for this."
Everyone has 'responsibility' for Starliner test flight failures, NASA astronaut says originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
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Instead, it might be more akin to when a piece of gravel strikes a car windshield at high speed, meaning solar panels or other delicate satellite parts might be damaged, but the satellite will remain in one piece, Wiegert said. While a temporary loss of communication and navigation from satellites would create widespread difficulties on Earth, Wiegert said he believes the potential impact is something for satellite operators, rather than the public, to worry about. Protecting Earth and the moon Scientists and astronomers around the world are thinking about the possible scenarios since they could not rule out a lunar impact before YR4 disappeared from view, Wiegert said. 'We realize that an impact to the moon could be consequential, so what would we do?' de Wit said. A potential planetary defense plan might be clearer if the asteroid were headed straight for Earth. Rivkin helped test one approach in September 2022 as the principal investigator of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, which intentionally slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022. Dimorphos is a moonlet asteroid that orbits a larger parent asteroid known as Didymos. Neither poses a threat to Earth, but the double-asteroid system was a perfect target to test deflection technology because Dimorphos' size is comparable to asteroids that could harm our planet in the event of an impact. The DART mission crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid at 13,645 miles per hour (6 kilometers per second) to find out whether such a kinetic impact would be enough to change the motion of a celestial object in space. It worked. Since the day of the collision, data from ground-based telescopes has revealed that the DART spacecraft did alter Dimorphos' orbital period — or how long it takes to make a single revolution around Didymos — by about 32 or 33 minutes. And scientists have continued to observe additional changes to the pair, including how the direct hit likely deformed Dimorphos due to the asteroid's composition. Similarly, if YR4 strikes the moon and doesn't result in damaging effects for satellites, it could create a tremendous opportunity for researchers to learn how the lunar surface responds to impacts, Wiegert said. But whether it would make sense to send a DART-like mission to knock YR4 off a collision course with the moon remains to be seen. It will depend on future risk assessments by planetary defense groups when the asteroid comes back into view around 2028, de Wit said. Though defense plans for a potential moon impact still aren't clear, YR4's journey underscores the importance — and the challenges — of tracking objects that are often impossible to see. Hidden threats YR4 was detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS telescope, in Río Hurtado, Chile, two days after the asteroid had already made its closest pass by Earth, hidden by the bright glare of the sun as it approached our planet. The same thing occurred when an asteroid measuring roughly 20 meters (about 65 feet) across hit the atmosphere and exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, on February 15, 2013, damaging thousands of buildings, according to the European Space Agency. While no one died, about 1,500 people were injured when the windows in homes and businesses blew out due to the shock wave. Trying to observe asteroids is challenging for many reasons, Rivkin said. Asteroids are incredibly faint and hard to see because rather than emitting their own light, they only reflect sunlight. And because of their relatively tiny size, interpreting observations is not a clear-cut process like looking through a telescope at a planet such as Mars or Jupiter. 'For asteroids, we only see them as a point of light, and so by measuring how bright they are and measuring their temperature, basically we can get a size based on how big do they have to be in order to be this bright,' Rivkin said. For decades, astronomers have had to search for faint asteroids by night, which means missing any that may be on a path coming from the direction of the sun — creating the world's biggest blind spot for ground-based telescopes that can't block out our star's luminosity. But upcoming telescopes — including NASA's NEO Surveyor expected to launch by the end of 2027 and the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Mission in the InfraRed, or NEOMIR satellite, set for liftoff in the early 2030s — could shrink that blind spot, helping researchers detect asteroids much closer to the sun. 'NEOMIR would have detected asteroid 2024 YR4 about a month earlier than ground-based telescopes did,' said Richard Moissl, head of ESA's Planetary Defence Office, in a statement. 'This would have given astronomers more time to study the asteroid's trajectory and allowed them to much sooner rule out any chance of Earth impact in 2032.' NASA and other space agencies are constantly on the lookout for potentially hazardous asteroids, defined as such based on their distance from Earth and ability to cause significant damage should an impact occur. Asteroids that can't get any closer to our planet than one-twentieth of Earth's distance from the sun are not considered to be potentially hazardous asteroids, according to NASA. When the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in the Andes in Chile, released its first stunning images of the cosmos in June, researchers revealed the discovery of more than 2,100 previously unknown asteroids after seven nights of those newly detected space rocks, seven were near-Earth objects. A near-Earth object is an asteroid or comet on an orbit that brings it within 120 million miles (about 190 million kilometers) of the sun, which means it has the potential to pass near Earth, according to NASA. None of the new ones detected by Rubin were determined to pose a threat to our planet. Rubin will act as a great asteroid hunter, de Wit said, while telescopes such as Webb could be a tracker that follow up on Rubin's discoveries. A proposal by Rivkin and de Wit to use Webb to observe YR4 in the spring of 2026 has just been approved. Webb is the only telescope with a chance of glimpsing the asteroid before 2028. 'This newly approved program will buy decision makers two extra years to prepare — though most likely to relax, as there is an 80% chance of ruling out impact — while providing key experience-based lessons for handling future potential impactors to be discovered by Vera Rubin,' de Wit said. And because of the twists and turns of YR4's tale thus far, asteroids that have potential to affect the moon could become objects of even more intense study in the future. 'If this really is a thing that we only have to worry about every 5,000 years or something, then maybe that's less pressing,' Rivkin said. 'But even just asking what would we do if we did see something that was going to hit the moon is at least something that we can now start thinking about.' Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
