NASA Releases Urgent Update About Boeing Astronauts Still Stuck in Space

This stunning revelation comes after the astronauts have been stuck on the ISS for more than a month now. Their mission was initially only supposed to have them stay on the ISS for about a week.

Much of the country has been anticipating the astronauts’ return, as their stay on the ISS has become national news thanks to the many Boeing problems that have occurred.

However, now NASA nor Boeing is releasing any type of return date for the duo. Instead, they will continue to stay on the ISS for an indefinite period of time.

It appears NASA and Boeing still need to complete work and tests to ensure the Boeing capsule will safely return Williams and Wilmore to Earth.

However, Stich did admit that NASA is also looking at other options they may have to safely return the astronauts to Earth. This could include bringing them home on another spacecraft.

It is now past that 45-day period. However, now NASA has claimed that the astronauts can stay in space with the capsule for twice as long as this initial period.

These tests were supposed to further help engineers understand what went wrong when the Starliner went up into space and initially docked on the ISS. These tests were also supposed to eventually lead to the all-clear to allow Wilmore and Williams to return home.

This time, the agency hasn’t given a reason as to why they’ve delayed this return yet again. They’ve simply stated they’re running more tests.

After launch, when the Starliner was attempting to dock with the ISS, even more problems appeared when five thrusters failed.

These thruster issues remain ongoing for Boeing engineers, even though they have claimed that there are many other thrusters the Starliner can rely on, if needed.

However, these many issues may complicate things. Boeing has been in the news for months now, thanks to their airplane issues — and now their spacecraft issues.

Some analysts are even calling for more transparency about this entire situation, as they believe that Americans deserve to know more about what’s really going on.

In the press briefing on July 25, Stich said “We have two different systems that we’re flying,” referring to Boeing Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.

This spaceship has a successful track record of flying astronauts back and forth at the International Space Station for several years.

This SpaceX spaceship has since completed seven successful ISS missions for NASA and four private missions.

“Although Boeing got $4.2 billion to develop an astronaut capsule and SpaceX only got $2.6 billion, SpaceX finished 4 years sooner.  Note, the crew capsule design of Dragon 2 has almost nothing in common with Dragon 1. Too many non-technical managers at Boeing,” Musk wrote in an X post.

“We kept saying ‘eight-day minimum mission.’ I think we all knew that it was going to go longer than that. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about how much longer,” Mark Nappi, the vice president and program manager of Commercial Crew Program efforts at Boeing, said in a July 25 briefing.

“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,'” Nappi said.

However, as of Monday, the crew has been stranded in space for 54 total days.

“We don’t have a major announcement today relative to a return date. We’re making great progress, but we’re just not quite ready to do that,” Stich said.

According to Eric Berger, senior Space editor for Ars Technica, “Boeing decisively lost the commercial crew space race, and it proved to be a very costly affair.”

Contrast this with SpaceX, which Berger asserts was “in its natural environment.”

“The difference between the two company’s cultures, design philosophies, and decision-making structures allowed SpaceX to excel in a fixed-price environment, where Boeing stumbled, even after receiving significantly more funding,” said Garver in an interview.

“Challenges arise when the fixed price acquisition approach is applied to serious technology development requirements, or when the requirements are not firmly and specifically defined resulting in trades that continue back and forth before a final design baseline is established,” the spokesperson said. “A fixed price contract offers little flexibility for solving hard problems that are common in new product and capability development,”