Eight weeks after the Starliner spacecraft launched, NASA is still looking for possible answers to its technical issues—including the possibility of SpaceX lending a hand.
Yes, these headlines are continuing to say the astronauts are stranded, which really isn’t the case. This vehicle is working well enough to return them at any time.
The thing is, there is something weird going on with some of the thrusters (of which there are many for redundancy) and this is their only chance to investigate the issue. If they were to return with the astronauts now, it would mean leaving the thrust module to burn up in the atmosphere, and then we wouldn’t be able to test the problematic parts. We could still do that (leave now), but we’d miss out on this opportunity to test hardware and understand better why some thrusters failed.
On the other hand, this is still a huge waste of money and it’s one more example of Boeing bungling things. So I’m not saying this is a great situation, just that the astronauts are not actually “stranded”.
Yes, these headlines are continuing to say the astronauts are stranded, which really isn’t the case. This vehicle is working well enough to return them at any time.
The thing is, there is something weird going on with some of the thrusters (of which there are many for redundancy) and this is their only chance to investigate the issue. If they were to return with the astronauts now, it would mean leaving the thrust module to burn up in the atmosphere, and then we wouldn’t be able to test the problematic parts. We could still do that (leave now), but we’d miss out on this opportunity to test hardware and understand better why some thrusters failed.
On the other hand, this is still a huge waste of money and it’s one more example of Boeing bungling things. So I’m not saying this is a great situation, just that the astronauts are not actually “stranded”.