Two US astronauts who arrived at the International Space Station aboard Boeing’s Starliner will have to stay for another six months and then return home with competitor SpaceX, NASA announced on Saturday. This was another PR blow for the crisis-ridden aviation giant.

The return of Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams had already been delayed for weeks due to engine problems on the Boeing spacecraft, and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that they will return to Earth in February, while the Starliner will return unmanned.

“Space flights are risky even in their safest and most routine forms,” ​​Nelson told reporters. “A test flight is inherently neither safe nor routine.”

He said the decision to keep the astronauts on the ISS and return the Starliner unmanned was “the result of our commitment to safety,” adding: “Our core value is safety.”

The new approach will allow the space agency and Boeing to continue collecting data on the Starliner during its return flight in early September “without taking more risks to the crew than necessary,” NASA said in a statement.

SpaceX repeated this sentence in a post by its president Gwynne Shotwell on the social media platform X.

The development is causing Boeing further headaches, as the two astronauts will have to spend a total of eight months in orbit, not just eight days as originally planned.

According to official information, the astronauts on the ISS have plenty of supplies and are trained for longer stays.

However, Nelson said NASA has not lost confidence in Boeing and wants to continue working with the company so that the space agency has two vehicles that can transport astronauts to the ISS and back.

He said he was “100 percent confident that Boeing will launch the Starliner again with a crew on board.”

Return in the queue

After years of delays, the Starliner finally launched on June 5 and brought the two experienced astronauts to the ISS.

But a day later, as the Starliner approached the space station, “NASA and Boeing discovered helium leaks and experienced problems with the spacecraft’s reaction control thrusters,” the space agency said.

During intensive efforts to diagnose the problem and find a possible solution, NASA had to postpone the return of the astronauts indefinitely.

The big concern was that the Starliner might not have the propulsion power to deorbit and begin its descent to Earth.

Before their announcement on Saturday, NASA officials met with Nelson and finally agreed on the highly unusual option of bringing the astronauts back from the flying laboratory not in their own spacecraft, but aboard a SpaceX vehicle already planned for February.

“The risk with the crew was just too great,” said Steve Stich, a senior NASA official. Norm Knight, another NASA official, added that the astronauts “fully support the agency’s decision.”

According to the new plan, the SpaceX Crew-9 mission is scheduled to launch in late September – after the Starliner has flown towards Earth and cleared a docking site at the ISS. However, it will only carry two passengers instead of the originally planned four.

NASA and SpaceX are working to reconfigure the seats on the Crew-9 Dragon “and adjust the passenger list to accommodate additional cargo, personal items and Dragon-specific spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams,” the space agency said.

The SpaceX vehicle will bring back its own crew members as well as their two stranded colleagues in February.

Boeing vs. SpaceX

This action is a further blow to the already battered image of the US giant Boeing, whose aircraft division has been repeatedly plagued by safety and quality control problems in recent years.

Ten years ago, after the Space Shuttle was retired, NASA ordered new space shuttles from Boeing and SpaceX that could transport astronauts to the ISS and back.

If two such vehicles were available, NASA concluded, a backup vehicle would always be available.

But Elon Musk’s SpaceX got there before Boeing and was the only vehicle used to transport astronauts for the past four years.

This year’s manned Starliner flight, which followed years of delays during the spacecraft’s development, was intended to be a final test of the vehicle before it begins regular operations.

© Agence France-Presse