“In this situation, we don’t have a sharp cutoff.”

Pushed Back

During a media teleconference today, NASA associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox preempted some tough questions, admitting that the agency had no major updates regarding Boeing’s plagued Starliner, which is now rumored to be returned without a crew on board. Last week, NASA announced that it was now considering having its two stranded astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams return on board SpaceX’s upcoming Crew-9 mission due to ongoing technical issues with Starliner.

At the time, the agency gave itself until “mid-August” to make a decision.

Mid-August is here — and NASA continues to struggle with making a decision. Bowersox said that NASA is considering doing a Flight Readiness Review within the next two weeks, pushing back the date yet again.

“In this situation, we don’t have a sharp cutoff,” Bowersox said during today’s live stream. “We can juggle things and make things work.”

Stuck in Space

By the time SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission makes its return in February, Wilmore and Williams will have spent eight months in space — on a test flight mission that should have taken just two weeks.

“It’s getting harder with the consumables we’re using, and the ports we’re using, those types of things,” Bowersox admitted during today’s call. “We’re reaching a point where that last week in August, we really should be making a call.”

But an eight-month stay at the space station still “falls within our standard long duration mission time frame,” according to a statement given by NASA’s chief astronaut Joe Acaba during today’s teleconference.

To put it lightly, Boeing’s first crewed test flight of its Starliner has been, at best, a fiasco. NASA is clearly playing it safe by buying itself more and more time. The agency and its contractor have poured billions of dollars into the spacecraft’s development and likely will do everything in their might to make it work, despite the risks involved.

When asked if this could be Boeing’s last Starliner flight, Bowersox only had a vague answer.

“All I can say is that our intent is to keep pressing to have two providers,” he said, referring to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which was developed under the same Commercial Crew program as Starliner. “We got very good companies and we wanna develop two strong and capable spacecraft.”

More on Starliner: Boeing’s Starliner Could Spin Out of Control and Crash Into the Space Station, Expert Warns