NEW: Family Of Stranded Astronaut Appears To Point Blame For Father’s Delayed Return

The daughter of astronaut Butch Wilmore didn’t hold back her frustration over her father’s extended stay in space, suggesting NASA’s handling of the situation was to blame. Daryn, 19, the daughter of astronaut Butch Wilmore, seemed to let her frustration slip in a comment on one of her TikTok videos back in January.

In another post from February, she suggested that “politics” and “negligence” played a role in the months-long delay that kept her father in space far longer than planned.

Her comments have resurfaced just as Wilmore, 62, and fellow astronaut Suni Williams, 59, finally returned to Earth on Tuesday evening, ending a mission that was originally scheduled to last just over a week but stretched into a grueling nine-month stay aboard the ISS.

The two U.S. astronauts splashed down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at 6 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, marking the end of a prolonged saga that left them stranded in space for 286 days.

Now that her father is safely back on Earth, Daryn acknowledged to DailyMail that there were “definitely some mess-ups” that contributed to the situation.

Referring to her earlier remarks, she clarified, “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.”

via DailyMail

“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. 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 added.

“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.”

“Butch, Suni, on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home,” a Mission Control dispatcher radioed after the “Dragon Freedom” capsule made a safe water landing. Less than an hour later, Wilmore and Williams—along with American astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov—were extracted from the capsule by a recovery team.

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Despite the ordeal, both astronauts appeared in good spirits, smiling and pumping their fists as they were helped onto their feet and transported away in wheelchairs.

NASA has praised the astronauts for their work during the extended mission, highlighting that they conducted more than 150 experiments aboard the ISS, contributing critical research for future space travel.

“The work we do on the International Space Station benefits the nation, benefits people on Earth and are the building blocks for going back to the moon and to Mars,” said Joel Montalbano, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for space operations.

The mission, which originally launched in June, was only supposed to last eight days. But technical failures with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft made a timely return impossible.

Reports later surfaced that the Biden administration was wary of authorizing an earlier rescue attempt over fears that a botched mission could create negative political optics. Instead, multiple delays kept Wilmore and Williams stranded in orbit for nearly 10 months.

The long wait clearly took a toll on Wilmore’s family, with his daughter voicing her frustrations online.

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