NASA astronauts say they don't feel 'let down' by not returning on Boeing's Starliner

The NASA astronauts who flew Boeing's Starliner to the International Space Station (ISS) and will now remain there until next year say they don't feel let down by the mission.

Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams, who performed the first crewed test flight of Starliner, have been in space since early June. When they launched, they were only supposed to be on the ISS for about a week.

NASA and Boeing officials decided to send Starliner back to Earth earlier this month after several issues and keep Wilmore and Williams onboard until February. They will be sent home on a SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon spacecraft.

When asked if they felt let down by the way anything during the mission, Wilmore said they didn't.

"Let down? Absolutely not," Wilmore said during a press conference on Friday. "It's never entered my mind. It's a fair question. I can tell you, I thought a lot about this press conference … and what I wanted to say and convey."

He added, "NASA does a great job of making a lot of things look easy. .... That's just the way it goes. sometimes because we are pushing the edges of the envelope in everything that we do."

Williams said she and Wilmore are very knowledgeable about Starliner so the problems with the spacecraft were "obvious" to both of them, but she was happy to see it return to Earth.

"I was so happy it got home with no problems," she said, "We saw it fly away, and then we all got up. The whole crew got up at three in the morning, and we had it up on our iPads, watching it land."

Starliner landed at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in the early hours of Sept. 7.

Despite Starliner's issues, NASA officials said Wilmore and Williams would have been safe onboard Starliner if they returned with the spacecraft.

"If we'd have had a crew on board the spacecraft, we would have followed the same back away sequence from the space station, the same de-orbit burn and executed the same entry and so it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board," Steve Stich, program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said at a post-landing press conference.

Stich told reporters last month that NASA will send Dragon to the ISS in September, with only two of the four astronauts assigned to it.

The spacecraft would carry extra spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams. However, the two would remain on the ISS until February 2025, when Crew-9 is set to return to Earth.

Williams said she and Wilmore both like exercising and they keep active because space can cause astronauts to lose bone density and muscle mass.

"Every day we're on a cardiovascular exercise, either the bike or the treadmill," she said. "Every day we're on the advanced resistive exercise device, called ARED, which allows us to do deadlifts and squats and allows us to keep our bone density im our hips and our feet, but that means we're going to have to do this for a little bit longer time."

She added that she and Wilmore are talking with a strength and conditioning coordinator to add in more exercises now that they will be on the ISS longer than anticipated.