NASA said Saturday it will ask SpaceX to bring home two astronauts who have been stuck on the International Space Station since early June after their Boeing spacecraft encountered a series of problems during flight.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams' decision to return to Earth on SpaceX's Crew Dragon rather than the Boeing Starliner spacecraft they launched into orbit on is being called into question months of speculation and tension at the space agency about how — and when — the two crew members could return safely. The mission was planned to last about eight days.
“Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and most routine, and a test flight is by its very nature neither safe nor routine, so the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and return Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a commitment to safety,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a news conference Saturday.
The Starliner drama has become a major setback for Boeing’s space ambitions, adding to a years-long struggle to get a capsule airborne and keep pace with rival SpaceX. Even before Wilmore and Williams launched in June, the Starliner program was more than $1.5 billion over budget and years behind schedule.
Top NASA officials, including Nelson, gathered Saturday at Johnson Space Center in Houston for a formal review of the findings. tests conducted in orbit and on the ground.
While the agency has finally decided how to bring the astronauts back, their return will not be immediate. Instead, Wilmore and Williams will remain on the space station for about six months before returning home in February.
NASA said it would free up two seats on an upcoming SpaceX launch, known as Crew-9, that will carry a new rotation of space station crew members to the orbiting station. By carrying two astronauts instead of the planned four, Wilmore and Williams will be able to return in the empty seats at the end of the Crew-9 mission in February.
The Crew-9 crew is currently scheduled to launch on September 24 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Meanwhile, the beleaguered Starliner capsule will head back to Earth without a crew, likely sometime in early September, according to NASA.
Boeing the statement says after the announcement: “We continue to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and the spacecraft. We are executing the mission defined by NASA and preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful return without a crew.”
Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program, said that while Boeing executives expressed confidence in their spacecraft, the decision to choose SpaceX was unanimous among NASA's leadership.
“There was too much uncertainty in the engine forecast,” Stich said. “If we had a model, [if] “We had a way to predict exactly how the engines would perform during undocking and throughout the deorbit process, throughout the separation sequence. I think we would have done things differently.”
NASA's uncertainty in recent weeks has stood in stark contrast to Boeing's public messaging. The aerospace company has said that tests conducted in orbit and on the ground have shown that the Starliner capsule is safe to bring astronauts home.
Boeing representatives have not participated in news briefings hosted by NASA to discuss the Starliner mission over the past month. Boeing has posted details about the flight status on the company's website, but no mission updates have been posted since Aug. 2. That statement from the beginning of this monthBoeing said it “remains confident in the Starliner spacecraft and its ability to safely return with crew.”
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the space station on June 6. As they approached the orbital outpost, Five Starliner engines failedwhich led to a nearly hour-long delay in the docking process. Separately, mission managers also discovered a helium leak from the capsule's propulsion system — a problem that was known before the spacecraft's launch but appeared to have worsened during the flight.
Engineers from NASA and Boeing spent weeks analyzing problems with the use of a test engine built for future Starliner flights. Mission managers also conducted two “hot fire tests” in space, which involved firing the capsule’s engines in short bursts while it remained docked to the space station.
Wilmore and Williams launched to the International Space Station on June 5 on the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule. The mission, scheduled to last just over a week, was a critical test flight for Boeing, serving as the last major step before NASA can certify the Starliner spacecraft to regularly ferry astronauts to and from the space station.
It's unclear how NASA will conduct the certification process, including how the space agency will evaluate Starliner's performance during a crewed test flight.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has been transporting NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station since 2020.
Boeing and SpaceX developed their space capsules as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, an initiative launched in 2011 to support private companies in building new spacecraft to carry astronauts to low Earth orbit after the agency's space shuttles are retired.
Jim Free, NASA's deputy administrator, praised the NASA and Boeing teams and said the work done over the past few months will be taken into account in the design of future missions.
“We are a learning organization,” he said. “We will learn from these efforts so that our crews who are at the top of the pyramid on these missions and their families can continue to know that we did it, and we will always do our best.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com