The two NASA astronauts stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, won’t be coming home anytime soon. During a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday, Aug. 24, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that the space agency was giving up on the idea of bringing Wilmore and Williams home aboard their balky Boeing Starliner spacecraft—which has been experiencing thruster problems since its launch on June 5. Instead, the Starliner will be flown home uncrewed, and Wilmore and Williams will hitch a ride back to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will launch to the ISS in September for a five-month station stay, returning in February. This extends what was supposed to be an eight-day ISS rotation for Wilmore and Williams to a whopping eight months.
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NewsTranscript
00:00And liftoff of Starliner and Atlas V, carrying two American heroes, drawing a line to the
00:21stars for all of us.
00:22Commander Butch Wilmer there, calling down to Mission Control.
00:44NASA has decided that Butch and Sonny will return with Crew 9 next February, and that
00:54Starliner will return uncrewed, and the specifics in the schedule will be discussed momentarily.
01:04I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data
01:12to make this decision.
01:15We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so
01:22that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access
01:30to the ISS.
01:33Space flight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine.
01:45And a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine.
01:54And so the decision to keep Butch and Sonny aboard the International Space Station and
02:00bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety.
02:09Our core value is safety, and it is our North Star.
02:16The bottom line relative to bringing Starliner back is there was just too much uncertainty
02:21in the prediction of the thrusters.
02:22If we had a model, if we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do for the
02:28undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence,
02:34I think we would have taken a different course of action.
02:37But when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for thruster failures with
02:40a crew on board and then getting into this very tight sequence of finishing the deorbit
02:46burn, which puts the vehicle on an entry, and then immediately maneuvering from that
02:51into a SEP sequence to separate the service module and crew module, it was just too much
02:56risk with the crew.
02:57And so we decided to pursue the uncrewed test flight.