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NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams shared their thoughts earlier today about Boeing's Starliner spacecraft departing from the space station without them as part of a media conference. The event was the first time the crew spoke to the public after Starliner's departure, with previous NASA releases sharing that they had been involved in the decision to bring the ship home.

During their talk, the astronauts provided details for their new mission on station, with Wilmore sharing that it was quite likely that they would have returned on Starliner if there was more time available to analyze data.

Early during the call, when asked whether they were let down by NASA's decision to bring Starliner back to Earth uncrewed, Wilmore categorically denied any such impressing. "Let down? absolutely not," said the NASA astronaut, adding that it had never "entered my mind. Uh, and I don't, think Suni's either until you mentioned it."

He shared that NASA's activities are extraordinary and part of a "very risky business" where "things do not always turn out the way you want" as every "single test flight, especially a first flight of a spacecraft or an aircraft that has ever occurred, has found issues. That's things that you just cannot think about."

In the case of Starliner, Wilmore revealed that "we found some things that we just could not get comfortable with." He was glad that he and Williams had the space station to stay on and backup spacecraft available to return them to Earth since there had been "many cases in the past where there have not been other options."

Sharing details about the decision making process at NASA that eventually concluded that it was safer to bring Starliner home uncrewed, Williams shared that "There were a lot of opinions. There was a lot data coming in at different times. And a lot of people trying to digest that data, and understand it, and take it forward. Um, I think it was really impressive for our leadership, for our management to take the time and listen to everybody's option and really try to understand where all of that was going."

Wilmore added "I think the data could have gotten there. We could have gotten to the point I believe where we could have returned on Starliner. But we just simply ran out of time. Because there's other tests that need to be done." He believes that if NASA "had a little more time, then we could have done it."

As for how they felt about Starliner safely returning to Earth, Williams shared that she "was so happy it got home with no problems. We, you know, 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." Wilmore recalled a "Cygnus launch out of Wallops island" which "blew up like a couple of seconds after it left the launch pad" when he was previously on the station. His immediate thought after the explosion was about the people working on the program, so the astronaut's "thrill was equally on the opposite side of the spectrum when Starliner landed safely."