NASA astronauts reveal who is to blame in first interview after being 'abandoned' on ISS for nine months by Biden

NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams have spoken out for the first time since they returned from their more than nine-month-long space mission. 

The pair sat down for a joint interview on Monday with Fox News, in which they admitted NASA, Boeing and even the astronauts themselves had a role to play in its unexpected outcome. 

Wilmore said that he, who was the commander of crew flight test, was partly  'culpable' for not asking necessary questions for the crew launched on June 5. 

'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,' he added. But in hindsight, the signals, some of the signals were there.'

Wilmore also said that Boeing and NASA were to blame for the 'shortcomings in tests and shortcomings in preparations' that they all did not see.

'Everybody has a piece in this because it did not come off,' he said in the Fox News interview.

Wilmore also made a shocking admission about President Donald Trump's claims that the Biden administration 'abandoned' him and his crewmate in space, saying he had 'no reason not to believe anything they say because they've earned my trust.'

'And for that, I am grateful,' he said, adding that it is 'refreshing,' 'empowering' and 'strengthening' to see national leaders taking an active role in NASA's human spaceflight program, which he described as globally significant. 

Wilmore and Williams were only supposed to spend eight days on the International Space Station (ISS) when they launched aboard Boeing's Starliner last June.

But technical issues with their spacecraft left them stuck up there for more than nine months. 

By the time they returned to Earth on March 18, they had spent 288 days in space.

Williams and Wilmore shared their reactions to learning that they would be in space longer than they had expected.

'My first thought was we just gotta pivot,' Williams told Fox News.

'If this was the destiny, if our spacecraft was gonna go home based on decisions made [by NASA] and we were gonna be up there until February, I was like 'okay, let's make the best of it.''

'We were ready to just jump into it and take on the tasks that were given to us,' she added.

Wilmore admitted he thought about his family the moment he heard about the extended stay.

'It's not about me,' he said. It's about what this human spaceflight program is about. It's our national goals.

'And did I think about not being there for my daughter's high school year? Of course. But compartmentalize. We've trained them to be resilient.' 

But both astronauts have repeatedly said they did not feel stranded, stuck or abandoned on the ISS, and they doubled-down on these statements during the Fox News interview. 

'Any of those adjectives, they're very broad in their definition,' Wilmore said. 

'So okay, in certain respects we were stuck, in certain respects maybe we were stranded, but based on how they were couching this — that we were left and forgotten and all that — we were nowhere near any of that at all. 

'We didn't get to come home the way we planned. So in one definition we're stuck. But in the big scheme of things, we weren't stuck. We were planned, trained.' 

When asked if they felt Boeing had failed them, Williams said: 'I wouldn't really characterize it as that.'

Both astronauts said Starliner uses new, highly-advanced technology, and launching such a complex system into space comes with challenges. 

'The spacecraft is pretty complicated in the way they've integrated all the different types of systems together,' Williams said. 

'This is the most robust spacecraft we have in the inventory. There's nothing that can do everything that Starliner can do,' Wilmore added. 

He said he does not want to 'point fingers' at those who played a role in their significantly delayed return. 

But others have been pointing fingers for the last several months, including Trump and his senior advisor, Elon Musk.  

Trump and Musk alleged in February that the Biden administration left the astronauts on the ISS for 'political reasons.'

Last week, NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens credited the Trump administration with the astronauts' safe return, telling Fox News 'it would not have happened without President Trump's intervention.'

This was not the first time NASA representatives had voiced their gratitude to President Trump.

After Williams and Wilmore splashed down off the coast of Florida inside SpaceX's Crew-9 Dragon capsule, acting NASA administrator Janet Petro released a statement saying that the Trump administration influenced the timing of their return.

'Per President Trump's direction, NASA and SpaceX worked diligently to pull the schedule a month earlier,' Petro said.

'This international crew and our teams on the ground embraced the Trump Administration's challenge of an updated, and somewhat unique, mission plan, to bring our crew home,' she added.

The extended space mission first entered the political spotlight in January, when Trump said he told Musk to 'go get' the astronauts who had been 'virtually abandoned' by the Biden administration. 

Trump and Musk participated in a joint Fox News interview in February, during which the president said he gave the directive to accelerate the Starliner crew's return.

'They didn't have the go-ahead with Biden. 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?' he said.

NASA has not directly commented on Trump or Musk's claims with respect to the Biden administration, but the agency previously denied that politics played any role in their decision-making around the Starliner crew's return.  

During a March 4 press conference, agency officials said safety, budget concerns and the need to make sure the ISS was continuously manned were driving the decision to have Williams and Wilmore return with SpaceX's Crew-9 mission.

The Starliner astronauts have now been back on Earth for almost two weeks.