NASA still has no return date for astronauts stranded on space station

More than a month late in their return, two astronauts from the POT will remain in the Spacial station International until engineers finish fixing problems plaguing its Boeing capsule, officials said Thursday.

Test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were scheduled to visit the orbiting laboratory for about a week and return in mid-June, but thruster failures and helium leaks on Boeing’s new Starliner capsule prompted NASA and Boeing to keep them on the station longer.

Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said mission managers aren’t ready to announce a return date. The goal is to get Wilmore and Williams back aboard Starliner, he said.

“We will come home when we are ready,” said Stitch.

Stich acknowledged that other options are already being reviewed. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is another means of transporting NASA astronauts to and from the station.

“NASA always has contingency options”said.

Last week, engineers finished testing a booster in the New Mexico desert and will take it apart to try to understand what went wrong before Starliner docks. Five boosters failed as the capsule approached the space station on June 6, a day after liftoff. Four of them have since been reactivated.

Degraded seals appear to be to blame for the helium leaks and the thruster problems, which are entirely separate issues, but more analysis is needed. The team will test the capsule’s thrusters this weekend while it is docked to the space station to gather more data, Boeing’s Mark Nappi said.

The 28 maneuvering thrusters are small — they fit in a hand and weigh just 1 kilogram (2 pounds) each. The capsule is also equipped with larger engines to deorbit at the end of the flight. They are all part of a segment that is discarded before landing, meaning there is nothing left to study for future flights.

Following the retirement of the space shuttles, NASA contracted with private companies to transport astronauts to the space station, paying billions of dollars to Boeing and SpaceX.

This was Boeing’s first crewed test flight. The initial demonstration flight, conducted in 2019 without a crew, never reached the space station due to faulty software, and Boeing repeated the test in 2022. More problems later emerged.

SpaceX has been carrying astronauts since 2020. The company’s Falcon 9 rockets have been grounded for the past two weeks due to a failure in the upper stage of a satellite delivery mission. The longer the shutdown lasts, the more likely it is that future crewed flights will be delayed.

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