The pair are asked if it was difficult to see the Starliner leave without them.

Williams replies, saying they were both tasked with ensuring it left the ISS safely.

"We were watching our spaceship fly away," she says, while talking to control team on Earth.

She says as her and Wilmore used to work in the Navy "we're not surprised when deployments get changed" and that their families understand.

"It's risky and that's how it goes in the business," she says.

Georgina Rannard
Science reporter

Now Butch is asked another important question - his view on the Boeing Starliner craft that Nasa decided was not safe enough to take the astronauts home on."We found things we could not get comfortable with," he says.

But he says he believes they could have got to the point where they could have returned on Starliner, but "we simply ran out of time".

Remember they are part of a bigger project on the International Space Station, which has a strict schedule of arrivals, deperatures, and tests.

He then adds "we are fortunate we had the option to come back another way", referring to the SpaceX spacecraft that is scheduled to take them back to Earth next year.

Georgina Rannard
Science reporter

A journalist has just asked the question on everyone's minds - Do Suni and Butch feel let down by Nasa and Boeing?

"Absolutely not," says Butch.

Pointing to Suni's t-shirt with a Nasa logo on it, he says "that represents something that we stand for as an agency - we go beyond, we do things that are out of the ordinary".

"This is not easy," he adds.

He explains that 90% of their astronaut training is preparing for "the unexpected".

We wouldn’t expect Suni and Butch to say anything critical about Nasa, their employer, and the Boeing Starliner capsule that took them to the ISS.

But if you speak to any astronaut, they will say they prepare for the extraordinary and they train for these missions almost their whole lives.

Wilmore and Williams are asked if they will be able to vote for the upcoming US presidential election from space.

Wilmore says he sent down his request for a ballot to vote earlier on Friday.

"They should get it to us in the coming weeks," he says, adding he is excited to cast his vote from the International Space Station.

Williams says being able to "vote from space is pretty cool."

She adds that there are some things on Earth that she misses, like her family, "my two dogs," and "my friends".

"I know they understand. I know it's tough on them as well," Williams says. "But everyone understands and everyone is cheering for us to get back."

Wilmore says that there have been "some trying times" since the start of the mission in space, noting it was difficult to see the Starliner spacecraft leave without them.

But he said he appreciated how much concern people have shown towards his and Williams' well-being.

"I just want everyone to know how much we appreciate that," Wilmore says. "The concern for us specifically is very heart-warming."

Williams, who has just been named the commander of the International Space Station, says that she, too, is in good spirits.

"We're here with our friends, we've got a ride home," she says, adding that she is looking forward to the next couple of months on board the ISS.

Image source, NASA

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have just started their news conference where they are answering questions from the media on Earth from their temporary home in space.

We can see them inside the International Space Station with Wilmore holding the microphone and saying how it's been "quite an evolution over the last three months".

Williams is next to him and her hair is floating around her head in the zero-gravity environment of the ISS.

Nasa astronauts Williams and Wilmore are about to start their news conference about what it's like living on the International Space Station for an extended period after their Starliner spacecraft returned home without them.

As a reminder, you can watch the news conference live at the top of this page.

Stick with us as we bring you all the latest updates and analysis.

The families of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have spoken out about the astronauts’ predicament.

Wilmore’s wife Deanna, with whom he shares two daughters, said they have learned to “roll with it and expect the unexpected”.

"He just takes it knowing the Lord's in control and that since the Lord's in control of it, that he's content where he is,” she added.

Williams’ husband Michael told the Wall Street Journal that he doubted she was bored or unhappy to spend more time at the station, which he described as “her happy place”.

Image source, NASA

The technical problems with the Starliner spacecraft and their impact on the mission have amounted to a public relations fiasco for both Boeing and Nasa.

But both organisations have been keen to emphasise they do not consider Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to be “stranded”.

“The vehicle is in good shape. I want to make it very clear that Butch and Suni are not stranded in space,” Steve Stich, manager of Nasa’s commercial crew program, told reporters in late July.

Stich reiterated the sentiment at a press conference in August alongside Mark Bappi, the commercial crew programme manager at Boeing.

Bappi claimed the delays and unplanned issues were a routine part of space flight, adding that engineers were actively working to resolve them, that crewmembers were never in any danger and that the Starliner could leave the space station at any time in the event of an emergency.

But Bappi acknowledged that the narrative around Wilmore and Williams’ mission has fuelled the belief they are in fact stranded.

Asked if he would do things differently in hindsight, he said: “We would not have been so emphatic about an eight-day mission. It’s my regret that we didn’t just say we’re going to stay up there until we get everything done that we want to go do.”

Here’s a quick timeline of all the developments around the Boeing Starliner’s mission so far:

6 May: The original scheduled date of the Boeing Starliner test mission. Nasa delayed the mission just before launch due to mechanical issues.

5 June: The Boeing Starliner finally launches with crew members onboard, scheduled to return a week later. During the mission, six of the craft’s thrusters stopped working unexpectedly and it experienced helium leaks.

25 July: Nasa holds a press conference and says that they will do tests on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.

24 August: Nasa announces that Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore will have to wait until February 2025 to return home. They will hitch a ride back on spacecraft made by a Boeing rival, Space X.

7 September: The Boeing Starliner space capsule returns to Earth, sans crew. It lands as planned in the state of New Mexico.

On Saturday, the Starliner’ spacecraft returned to Earth, sans crew, after Nasa made the decision to leave Williams and Willmore on the ISS over safety concerns.

The landing was “successful,” according to a Nasa spokesman, but it did experience some errors. One of its 12 thrusters on the crew capsule section did not work.

Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said on Saturday that it would have been a “safe, successful landing” with the astronauts on board but acknowledged they had made the right decision to leave them behind.

An eight-day ISS rotation for Wilmore and Williams has been extended to eight months - in part because Nasa moved slowly in its decision not to bring them home on the Starliner.

The US space agency has been burned by past disasters, from launch pad fires to failed missions, and is said to be fairly risk-averse when astronaut lives are on the line.

For about two months, an expert panel held what is known as a flight readiness review as it considered whether to fly the Starliner home uncrewed and bring the astronauts back with SpaceX’s help.“Nasa has worked very hard with Boeing to reach this decision,” administrator Bill Nelson said last month. “The decision is a result of a commitment to safety.”

But despite Starliner coming home empty, Nasa is trying to spare Boeing from embarrassment and still referring to it as a trusted partner.

“Space flight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine. And a test flight, by nature, is neither safe nor routine,” Nelson said.

Steven Dowling
Deputy Editor, BBC Future

The human body goes through some surprising changes when it's subjected to the rigours of space travel.

Returning astronauts are often lifted out of their capsules because their time in space reduces their muscle mass. The most affected are those muscles that help to maintain our posture in our back, neck, calves and quadriceps – in microgravity they no longer have to work nearly as hard and begin to waste. After missions lasting six months, muscle mass can fall by as much as 30%.

Bone mass, too, can also fall by between 1% and 2% for every month they spend in space.

Read Richard Gray's feature about how astronauts bodies aretransformed during an extended stint in space.

Steven Dowling
Deputy Editor, BBC Future

Starliner has a lot riding on it.

When it launched earlier this summer, it was Nasa's first reusable spacecraft for 13 years, since the end of the Space Shuttle programme in 2011. During that time, Nasa had to buy seats on commercial space flights from the likes of SpaceX or Russia's Soyuz.

Starliner's makers Boeing have promised it is a "next generation space capsule", but its development has been plagued with problems, including hardware issues and a debut uncrewed mission which almost ended in disaster.

Read Richard Hollingham's analysis of what Starliner's launchmeant for the US space programme.

Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent

It’s been a long road for Boeing’s Starliner to the launchpad.

Its first uncrewed test flight in 2019 didn’t make it to the Space Station because a software fault caused the spacecraft’s engines to misfire.

A second attempt in 2022 did make it, but there were issues with some thrusters and the craft's cooling system.

Meanwhile Boeing’s rival, Elon Musk’s Space X, docked its Dragon Spacecraft four years ago and has ferried crews and cargo ever since.

All this while on Earth Boeing was facing growing scrutiny because of faults with some of its aircraft.

Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent

Image source, Reuters

Starliner was sent up with a small helium leak and two further leaks developed on the way to the International Space Station, one about the size of the small leak at launch and the other about five times larger.

Five of its 28 manoeuvring thrusters cut out during the approach to the space station, four of which were restarted. Then two further helium leaks were discovered in the propulsion system.

Ground tests revealed that the likely source of the thruster problems is that their Teflon seals swell when hot, blocking propellant getting into the combustion chamber.

Boeing’s Mark Nappi said that these issues could only have been spotted in a crewed flight test.

But some engineers wonder whether this problem should have been shaken out in the earlier uncrewed test missions – or even at the initial design stage of the spacecraft.

Image source, Getty Images

Sunita Williams is the pilot of the Crew Flight Test for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.

The US Navy-pilot-turned-astronaut had a notable career at Nasa even before this headline-making trip.

A veteran of two previous missions to the International Space Station in 2006-2007 and 2012, she previously held the record for most spacewalks by a woman, and racked up the second highest number of spacewalk hours by any female astronaut.

Though Williams has been in space for over three months now, she long ago proved her endurance: In 2007, she ran the first-ever marathon in space.

Barry“Butch” Willmore is a veteran astronaut who, along with Williams, had spent many long hours on the ISS before getting stuck there this year.

A retired naval officer and aviator, Willmore was landing fighter jets on aircraft carriers and carrying out combat missions during Operation Desert Storm before he joined Nasa in 2000 and started flying a little higher.

He logged multiple spacewalks during his trips to the ISS in 2009 and 2014-2015 and, according to Nasa, has racked up 178 days in space. That number’s going to go up considerably thanks to his current predicament.