An eight-day space flight that turned into a 286-day space odyssey.

The quote-unquote stranded NASA astronauts, Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore, speaking publicly today after the return to Earth on March 18th,

when they splashed down off the Florida coast in a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

A different capsule owned by a different company than the one that carried them to the International Space Station last June.

Human spaceflight is hard, taking people in a spacecraft, taking them to a place they're going to rendezvous and then go work and then bring them back home.

That's difficult. And, you know, we just, we were part of this whole process.

It's not just about Sunny and Butch in a spacecraft.

It's also about our obligations to our international partners on the International Space Station

doing that work.

And so like I, like we all have mentioned, we're happy to be part of that and flow right

into the natural flow of, of crew rotations, and that happened to be with crew nine.

Wilmore and Williams traveled to the ISS in the Starliner capsule, the first people ever to fly Boeing's new spacecraft.

But the Boeing crew flight test did not go, according to plan.

And technical issues triggered a decision by NASA to bring that capsule home empty.

Wilmore and Williams were absorbed into NASA's crew nine astronaut mission.

And along the way, over nine months, talk surfaced of them being, quote, stranded, stuck, abandoned.

And the decision to keep them there for so long, one even rooted in politics.

If you want to start with pointing a finger, you can point it at me.

Because I'm the commander of the spacecraft, I did not ask certain questions about certain systems,

going way back years even, questions that could have maybe turned the tide and stem the tide.

I didn't ask those questions. I didn't really think about needing to ask some of those questions,

but in hindsight, I should have. So I bear part of the blame, if you want to call it blame,

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