NASA has announced that astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams will return to Earth next February aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.
The announcement at a news conference today ends months of speculation about the best plan to bring astronauts home safely after failures with their vehicle, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, postponed its departure from the International Space Station in June. Now, NASA has decided that Starliner will return home without Wilmore and Williams, who will remain with the station’s existing crew and return on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission next year.
“Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to obtain the data necessary to make this decision,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the briefing. “We want to better understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that Boeing Starliner can serve as an important part of our safe crew access to the ISS.”
Wilmore and Williams lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 5, becoming the first astronauts to conduct a crewed test flight of Starliner, a capsule developed by Boeing to transport people to and from the ISS.
During the approach to the station, five of Starliner’s 28 thrusters stopped working. The crew managed to restore four of them and docked safely with the station, where they discovered that Starliner’s propulsion system was also leaking helium from several places.
Wilmore and Williams were originally scheduled to remain aboard the ISS for a week before returning to Earth on Starliner, but their return has been delayed by more than two months as mission planners have struggled to isolate the cause of the thruster problems and assess the risks of using Starliner for the return flight. NASA’s plan will keep them on the ISS for a total of eight months — longer than the usual six-month stay but not unprecedented.
Instead of sending a four-person crew to the ISS aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule in September as planned, two of the capsule’s seats will be left free for Wilmore and Williams.
NASA has stressed that Wilmore and Williams are not “stranded” or in any danger. The astronauts have also publicly hailed their extended stay as a stroke of luck that will allow them to accumulate more time in space.
“We’re having a great time here on the ISS,” Williams told reporters. in a call from July from the ISS. “Butch and I have been here before and it feels like coming home. It feels good to float. It feels good to be in space and work here with the International Space Station team.”
Cargo ships regularly dock at the ISS, providing enough supplies for all crew members on board, and NASA considers Starliner safe enough for astronauts to use in the event of an emergency evacuation from the ISS.
Starliner has flown twice before without astronauts; it failed to reach the station during its first uncrewed test flight in 2019, but successfully passed a second test in 2022 by docking with the ISS and landing again at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. It is the second vehicle, after SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, to carry astronauts to the space station as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which seeks to develop commercially operated spacecraft to ferry crews to and from the ISS.
