The NASA astronauts who were stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) are speaking at a news conference after returning to Earth.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams splashed down off the coast of Florida earlier this month after more than nine months onboard the ISS.
The two astronauts docked at the ISS on 5 June last year, expecting to be there for just eight days. Instead, issues with Boeing’s long-awaited Starliner meant NASA decided to leave them waiting in orbit for months.
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Splashdown! Butch and Suni’s space saga is over
Speaking at a NASA press conference on Monday evening, Ms Williams said that she was somewhat surprised by the interest in their prolonged space mission.
“Life goes on up there, I mentioned today that we pivoted and became [ISS] crew members,” she said. “You maybe sort of get tunnel visioned into doing your job.
“We were just really focused on what we were doing… ‘the world doesn’t revolve around us but we revolve around it’.”
Ms Williams then said: “I don’t think we were aware to the degree [people were interested], pretty honoured and humbled by the fact of when we came home, it was like ‘wow there are a lot of people’.”
In their first interview since returning to Earth, Mr Wilmore said he was partly “culpable” for the incident that left him and Ms Williams stranded.
He told Fox News: “I’ll admit that to the nation. There’s things that I did not ask that I should have asked.
“I didn’t know at the time that I needed to ask them. But in hindsight, the signals, some of the signals were there.”
During their long wait in space, the two US navy veterans completed spacewalks, experiments and even helped sort out the plumbing onboard the ISS.
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