There is still no return date for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who remain stranded on the International Space Station due to thruster failures and a helium leak in their Boeing Starliner spacecraft, according to Space.com.
On Thursday, NASA's commercial crew program manager Steve Stich told reporters, "We don't have a major announcement today relative to a return date," adding, "We're making great progress, but we're just not quite ready to do that."
Stich said mission managers have yet to formulate a return date for Starliner. However, he emphasized that the ultimate goal is to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Earth on the spacecraft.
A test-fire of Starliner's 28-thruster reaction control system will be conducted on Saturday or Sunday. The results could determine how the space agency and Boeing should move forward and if the spacecraft is deemed usable or unusable for the return mission.
"We're going to fire all those thrusters to a number of pulses, just to make sure before we undock, that whole system performs the way we expected and the way it did last time we checked it."
"We'll also get a chance to look at the helium system. It's been six weeks since we last checked that helium system; that was on June 15. So we'll pressurize manifold by manifold, and then hot-fire the thrusters, and then we'll get a chance to look at the helium leak rates and verify that the system is stable," Stich told reporters.
Fifty-one days ago, on June 5, Starliner's inaugural crewed flight blasted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The low Earth orbit mission was scheduled for only a week. NASA has rated Starliner for 90 days in space.
Starliner is one of two private spacecraft that ferry astronauts from Earth to the ISS, along with SpaceX's Crew Dragon. Boeing has lagged behind Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon for years. Starliner has faced years of challenges.
Stich admitted that one of the rescue plans under review would be using SpaceX's Dragon capsule to return the astronauts to Earth.
Imagine that headline: 'Elon Musk's SpaceX Rescues Boeing Astronauts From ISS'...
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