Butch Wilmore

I knew it would be very difficult to control the spacecraft and get it to a position where we could do a deorbit burn and return to Earth.

So that's why the thought was we have to dock.

If we don't dock, I'm not sure what our options are.

And the third thing I thought, this is a sick spacecraft.

If we are able to dock successfully, if we're able to get there, I don't think we'll be able to come back on this spacecraft.

Even then, I knew that.

Because I understand what all goes into trying to bound a problem like this and

and understand it where you would crawl back in and attempt to come back to Earth.

I know how difficult that would be, even in the moments before docking.

So I knew that if we got docked, the chances were slim that we would return on Starliner, even in those moments.

Where is Starliner now?

Starliner, it did come back.

It did have some problems.

We should not have been on it.

There are many others that would say it was fine, but it wasn't.

We lost a pitch thruster, so we would have been coming back into the atmosphere had we been on it.

Zero fault tolerance for maintaining our control of pitch control, so we shouldn't have been on it, and I'm glad we weren't.

But it did make it back successfully.

That one pitch thruster that remained, it did operate successfully, so it made it back.

And now they're refurbishing, going through the whole process of making sure