Eight Months Instead of a Week: NASA Won't Return Astronauts from Space Until 2025

eight months instead of a week
NASA Won't Return Astronauts From Space Until 2025

August 24, 2024, 7:50 PM

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This mission is going very differently than planned: The astronauts were originally supposed to spend a week on the ISS — now that will be eight months. NASA won’t bring them back until next February. The reason for this is the Starliner’s problems.

NASA wants two astronauts who have already been aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for much longer than originally planned due to problems with the Starliner, which will now be available in February, and another spacecraft, SpaceX's Crew Dragon, to return to Earth, NASA announced at a press conference.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the decision was made for safety reasons. Under the plan, NASA astronaut Suni Williams and her crewmate Barry Wilmore would return on Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft in February 2025. Crew 9 would launch with Crew Dragon, currently scheduled for September, with just two astronauts instead of four. Williams and Wilmore are expected to be part of that crew and return to Earth with their crewmates in 2025. That would mean the troubled Starliner would return to Earth without a crew.

Williams and Wilmore arrived at the International Space Station in early June on the first crewed test flight of Starliner. The mission was actually planned for only about a week, but then several technical issues emerged on Starliner — including engine failures and helium leaks.

First manned test flight

NASA then pondered for a long time whether it would be better to return the astronauts to Earth in the Starliner spacecraft or – just months later – in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Boeing's Starliner is a partially reusable spacecraft consisting of a three-meter-high capsule for the crew and a service module. Unlike SpaceX's Crew Dragon, it does not land on water, but on land.

The spacecraft launched on its first crewed test flight in early June from Cape Canaveral Spaceport in Florida after years of delays. In May 2022, Starliner completed its first successful unmanned flight to the International Space Station, spending four days there. It will eventually be used as an alternative to the Crew Dragon space capsule to transport astronauts to the ISS.