Nasa’s newly returned astronauts say they would fly on Boeing’s Starliner capsule again

Nasa’s celebrity astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams said on Monday that they hold themselves partly responsible for what went wrong on their space sprint-turned-marathon and would fly on Boeing’s Starliner again.

SpaceX recently ferried the duo home after more than nine months at the International Space Station (ISS), filling in for Boeing that returned to Earth without them last year.

In their first news conference since coming home, the pair said they were taken aback by all the interest and insisted they were only doing their job and putting the mission ahead of themselves and even their families.

Wilmore did not shy from accepting some of the blame for Boeing’s bungled test flight.

“I’ll start and point the finger and I’ll blame me. I could have asked some questions and the answers to those questions could have turned the tide,” he told reporters. “All the way up and down the chain. We all are responsible. We all own this.”

Both astronauts said they would strap into Starliner again. “Because we’re going to rectify all the issues that we encountered. We’re going to fix them. We’re going to make it work,” Wilmore said, adding he’d go back up “in a heartbeat.”