Boeing’s Starliner mission, which was scheduled to end in mid-June, could continue much longer. While it was only supposed to last a few days, NASA is announcing a possible return of the astronauts, stuck aboard the ISS, in three months.
A mission that drags on. Having left on June 6th aboard a Boeing ship, two astronauts who were supposed to stay in space for about ten days may not return to Earth for three months.
Since their departure in Boeing’s Starliner capsule bound for the International Space Station (ISS), Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have had to face several unexpected events.
It was a helium leak and subsequent thruster failures that led the two astronauts to make repairs. Steve Stich, head of NASA’s commercial crew program, said the return mission could ultimately take between 45 and 90 days, CNN reports. No specific date has been announced. NASA nevertheless wanted to be reassuring, stating that the astronauts were not “stuck.”
Tests in New Mexico
NASA says the delay is due to tests in New Mexico to understand why the thrusters failed during the mission. “We’re just looking at the timeline for (the New Mexico test) and then looking at the data,” Stich said in a briefing Friday. “And that’s really the unknown in determining a landing date.” The two astronauts have joined the crew of the International Space Station while they wait to return to Earth.
Boeing’s mission is initially intended to experiment with sending astronauts into space. Boeing hopes to eventually compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has been sending astronauts into space since 2020.
