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Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — two veteran NASA astronauts piloting the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft — have now been in space for 63 days, roughly seven weeks longer than initially expected.
There is still no clear return date in sight.
CNN confirmed on Tuesday that NASA has not yet started a “flight readiness review” for the Starliner crew’s return from the International Space Station. The agency had said on July 26 that it would begin that process in the first couple days of August.
But Boeing and NASA teams appear to be working still on a return date as officials evaluate testing data and conduct analyses about the propulsion issues and helium leaks that hampered the first leg of the Starliner capsule’s flight.
The delay of the flight readiness review process indicates that Starliner’s return remains uncertain as officials work to come to an agreement on how the rest of the mission that had launched June 5 should play out.
NASA will host a briefing about the mission’s status at 12:30 p.m. ET Wednesday.
The US space agency is set to face a flurry of questions about recent reporting from media outlets suggesting the space agency is considering returning Wilmore and Williams on a SpaceX vehicle instead.
NASA has always had such a scenario in place as a mission contingency, but the primary goal is to bring the two astronauts home on Starliner. Boeing maintains that its spacecraft is safe for astronauts.
However, the space agency announced Tuesday that it was delaying the launch of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission, a routine flight slated to fly with four astronauts to replace the Crew-8 mission on board the International Space Station.
Crew-9 had been slated to take off as soon as August 18 — with the expectation that the Starliner capsule would have returned home with its astronauts before then. Now, Crew-9 will not take off before September 24, NASA said.
“This adjustment allows more time for mission managers to finalize return planning for the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test,” NASA said in a Tuesday news release.
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