After a nearly eight-month space station stay extended by Boeing's Starliner trouble and Hurricane Milton, four astronauts have been returned to Earth just in time for the holidays.
Driving the news: The crew has been replaced by Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the two pilots who manned the Starliner test flight in June and saw their mission go from eight days to eight months after the capsule started to encounter some serious technical issues.
- Along with two astronauts launched by SpaceX, they’ll keep busy until 2025 with zero-gravity exercise, space station housekeeping, and voting in the U.S. election.
- The International Space Station (ISS) is back to its normal crew size of seven after the overflows, which led to accidentally tying the record for most people on the ISS at once.
Why it matters: Persistent issues with the Starliner have set back the time it’ll take for commercial space travel to reach the masses. The program landed a US$4.2 billion NASA contract in 2014 and was aiming to one day compete with SpaceX, the industry leader.
Bottom line: It will be SpaceX, not Boeing, returning the four astronauts to Earth in February. The company says it has lost $1.85 billion on the Starliner program to date.—SB