The daughter of one of the stranded astronauts appeared to let slip that she blames NASA ‘incompetence’ for her father’s space fiasco.
In a newly-unearthed post from January, Daryn Wilmore, 19, seemed to let her frustration out in response to a comment on one of her TikTok videos.
Someone commented, ‘I’m so sorry NASA is actually evil…’ to which Daryn replied: ‘Less evil more… incompetent.’
In another video posted in February, Daryn suggested that ‘politics’ and ‘negligence’ played a role in her dad’s delayed return.
Her father Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and crew member Sunita Williams finally returned to Earth last night after being stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) for nine months due to issues with the Boeing spacecraft that flew them there.
They should be reunited with their families today, who originally thought the duo would only be on the space station for eight days.
Now that her dad is safely back on Earth, Daryn told DailyMail.com there were ‘definitely some mess-ups’ that led to the saga.
Butch Wilmore’s daughter, Daryn (left), told DailyMail.com that she baked a pecan pie for her dad to eat as soon as he gets home
Referring to her past comments, Daryn said: ‘I really just meant that there was different things within the company that led to the decision of them staying, which was a good decision and the safest one.’
‘I don’t know much as I do not actively work at NASA, but the people there work hard and even though there was definitely some mess-ups with this Starliner mission, there was a lot of wins.’
The Boeing Starliner spacecraft experienced thruster failures and helium leaks during its mission to bring Williams and Wilmore to the ISS in June.
Both of them safely made it to the space station, but in August, NASA decided that it would be too risky to let the pair fly home on the faulty spacecraft.
Starliner was sent back to Earth uncrewed in September, leaving the two astronauts behind to wait for a ride home on SpaceX’s Crew-9 return flight.
What was meant to be 8 days on the ISS turned into more than nine months.
Throughout the ordeal, the astronauts repeatedly said they did not feel stranded, and that they were glad to have extra time on the space station.
Their families echoed these sentiments, telling the media that they missed their loved ones, but were not concerned for their wellbeing.
But as the months dragged on, Wilmore’s daughter Daryn began posting increasingly candid videos about her family’s situation.
In her February video, she said: ‘It’s been hard if we’re completely honest’, adding that her frustration about her father’s extended mission was ‘less the fact that he’s up there’ and ‘more the fact of why.’
After a fiery re-entry, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule was slowed by four large parachutes and splashed down safely at 5:57 pm ET (21:57 GMT) on Tuesday
After splashing down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida Williams and Wilmore were helped onto stretchers by NASA’s recovery crew. This is standard practice for astronauts whose muscles have been weakened by their time in microgravity
‘There’s a lot of politics, there’s a lot of things that I’m not at liberty to say, and that I don’t know fully about,’ she said.
‘But there’s been issues. There’s been negligence. And that’s the reason why this has just kept getting delayed. There’s just been issue after issue after issue.’
In January, President Donald Trump claimed he told SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk to ‘go get’ the stranded astronauts who had been ‘virtually abandoned’ by the Biden administration.
This prompted NASA and SpaceX to reschedule the Crew-9 return flight for about two weeks earlier than planned.
The Crew-9 Dragon capsule splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida at 5:57pm ET on Tuesday, carrying Williams, Wilmore and the original Crew-9 astronauts: NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
This finally brought an end to the Starliner crew’s 285-day-long space mission.
One-by-one, the four astronauts emerged from the Dragon capsule and were helped onto stretchers by NASA’s recovery crew.
This is standard practice for astronauts whose muscles have been weakened by their time in microgravity.
The crew then underwent medical tests that assessed them for the effects of microgravity, radiation exposure and other stresses of space travel.
