Butch and Suni will not be coming back on Starliner

On Saturday, NASA announced that it was concerned enough with the problems on the Alabama made Boeing Starliner that when it leaves the International Space Station (ISS) NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore will not be on board.

Instead Butch and Suni will wait for SpaceX to send up one of their Dragon spaceships. Butch and Suni will join that crew and remain at the ISS until their return in February.

The two astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on June 6, expecting to stay for just a week. Unfortunately the inaugural manned flight of the Boeing Starliner was plagued with problems due to helium leaks and poor performance by the ship's thrusters.

Boeing engineers insist that the issues are not serious enough to prevent Starliner from returning Butch and Suni safely to Earth. NASA's engineers on the other hand are not convinced that the Starliner will not experience a catastrophic event so have delayed the return of Starliner by over 60 days. Now that Boeing has successfully uploaded software updates that will allow the stricken spacecraft to return to Earth unpiloted NASA has nixed any further consideration of sending the Starliner back to Earth with Butch and Suni aboard.

The spacecraft has to leave so that the Dragon 9 team can dock with the space station. The ISS has two docking ports. Dragon 8, which will ferry the ISS crew home, is docked to one port. Starliner is docked to the other port. Once Starliner leaves, Space X can launch the delayed Dragon 9 mission. Dragon will ferry up two astronauts instead of four. That will allow Dragon 8 and the ISS team to return to Earth. Butch and Suni will serve for the next six months with the two astronauts on the Dragon 9 team.

Starliner was larger built in Alabama at the United Launch Alliance facility in Athens.

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