NASA said Thursday it will decide this weekend whether Boeing’s new capsule is safe enough to return two astronauts from the International Space Station, where they’ve been waiting since June.
Administrator Bill Nelson and other top officials will meet Saturday. An announcement is expected from Houston once the meeting ends.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched aboard Boeing’s Starliner on June 5. The test flight quickly encountered thruster failures and helium leaks so serious that NASA kept the capsule parked at the station as engineers debated what to do.
SpaceX could retrieve the astronauts, but that would keep them up there until next February. They were supposed to return after a week or so at the station.
I actually was sitting here thinking about it from the astronauts’ perspective… I’m sure their mental fortitude is more robust than the average human, but could you imagine being indefinitely stranded in a Pringles can whipping around the planet once every 90 minutes with zero ability to do anything to extricate yourself from the situation? The thought makes my skin crawl… but I don’t fly for the same reasons lol
And people want to colonize mars