NASA Astronauts' Future Return Options Boeing's Starliner or SpaceX's Dragon

TapTechNews August 22nd news, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams had a long conversation with the Boeing ground team this week while continuing to work and rest on the International Space Station (ISS). The agency plans to decide later this week whether these two astronauts will return to Earth this year on Boeing's Starliner or in 2025 on SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft.

As part of their work on the space station, the two astronauts are working on the MARES exercise rack on the ISS and collecting water samples for analysis.

TapTechNews noticed that NASA shared the latest details about the astronauts' work on the space station in two updates released on Monday and Tuesday. Among them, the agency outlined that Wilmore and Williams had extensive communication with Boeing's ground flight controllers. NASA said that in the Monday teleconference, the two had a crew meeting that lasted for an hour with the Boeing flight controllers, after they had spent a day performing different tasks on the ISS. After the Monday call, the crew had another follow-up on Tuesday.

According to the original plan, after arriving at the ISS on June 6th, the two astronauts were to return to Earth on June 14th. However, due to the technical problems that the Starliner has been plagued by, more than two months have passed and the two astronauts are still滞留 in space.

NASA presented several options for retrieving the astronauts at a news conference on August 7th, one option is to let them return on the Starliner; another option is to let them stay on the space station for about 7 months and take the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to return.