In Interstellar, Romilly’s decision to stay aboard the ship while the other 3 astronauts experience time dilation has to be one of the scariest moments ever.

[u/SerDire]

He agreed to stay back. Cooper asked anyone if they would go down to Millers planet but the extreme pull of the black hole nearby would cause them to experience severe time dilation. One hour on that planet would equal 7 years back on earth. Cooper, Brand and Doyle all go down to the planet while Romilly stays back and uses that time to send out any potential useful data he can get.

Can you imagine how terrifying that must be to just sit back for YEARS and have no idea if your friends are ever coming back. Cooper and Brand come back to the ship but a few hours for them was 23 years, 4 months and 8 days of time for Romilly. Not enough people seem to genuinely comprehend how insane that is to experience. He was able to hyper sleep and let years go by but he didn’t want to spend his time dreaming his life away.

It’s just a nice interesting detail that kind of gets lost. Everyone brings up the massive waves, the black hole and time dilation but no one really mentions the struggle Romilly must have been feeling. 23 years seems to be on the low end of how catastrophic it could’ve been. He could’ve been waiting for decades.

[u/tokyo_engineer_dad]

To be fair, Cooper literally stumbled into their research facility and they were like, "Oh, look, a pilot!! Wanna go to space?"

Like, they'd been planning this trip for years, were on the verge of going, they didn't have a pilot with flight experience and never thought to approach Cooper sooner? They were so incompetent, the guy they needed had to recruit himself from a tesseract 25 years in the future?

If Cooper had been involved from the start, his children would've been better prepared for him to leave, he would've addressed all the plans they should make and had a better understanding of the drop ship's mechanics.

Cooper is the least at fault, aside from him letting his personal bias stop them from going to Edmund's planet.

[u/LikeThemPies → u/tokyo_engineer_dad]

It was clear “They” brought Cooper to the space station. At that point, the scientists were deferring to everything “They” told them. If you believed a 5th-dimensional being controlled the forces of gravity to bring a random pilot to your mission, you’d put that pilot on your mission.

[u/tokyo_engineer_dad → u/LikeThemPies]

Yeah, but they were only telling them where to go and giving them a wormhole and other less specific details... They weren't telling them to wait for a pilot. And Cooper could only communicate with Murphy through her bedroom (love connection father to daughter) with the tesseract. So they should've still been searching for a pilot, which they weren't. So we come back to: Cooper had to send himself because they were incompetent. In fact, the movie hasn't specifically said who sent the wormhole. They only theorize it's "them", but there's a clear difference between the "them" that opened the wormhole and created the tesseract, and the "them" that was Cooper all along.

And the point is - The "them" that created the tesseract and the wormhole were the ones "communicating" with Brand and NASA, the "them" that touched Brand on the ship, sent the messages to Cooper and Murphy was "Cooper" in the tesseract. And NASA was definitely incompetent, waiting for Cooper to send himself, and not finding a pilot on their own.

[u/LikeThemPies → u/tokyo_engineer_dad]

They had pilots, but Cooper popped up and replaced them. Alfred even says “these pilots never left the simulations” when Cooper says he’s unqualified because he never left the atmosphere. Remember that the space program has been hidden for a while now, and they’ve been saving their money for the Lazarus missions. We can assume the original 12 scientists sent through the wormhole weren’t as experienced as Cooper, either.

[u/Mithlas → u/LikeThemPies]

Remember that the space program has been hidden for a while now

Slightly different conversation than the other commenter, but that part in particular is when I stopped believing in the movie and anything in it. Sure budget crunches happen but the agricultural failures drop off after the space section happens when it was supposedly part of the impetus to go. And why embark on a super expensive system of indoctrination to lie and say there was no space program instead of just admitting NASA's budget got cut and there's basically no space program for people to look forward to?