NASA says it’s far from ‘eliminating Boeing’

SpaceX Launch a rescue mission on Saturday with a reduced crew of two astronauts and two reserved seats Butch Wilmore and Suni WilliamsWho will return next year. The Dragon anchored in darkness as both ships rose to an altitude of 265 miles (426 km) above Botswana.

NASA transferred Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX after concerns about their safety Boeing Starliner aircraft capsule. This was the first crewed Starliner test flight, and NASA decided that the thruster failure and helium leak that occurred after takeoff were too severe and poorly understood to pose a risk to Test pilots return. So the Starliner returned to an empty Earth earlier this month.

The dragon carrying NASA’s Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency’s Alexander Gorbunov will remain at the space station until February, turning what was supposed to be a week-long trip for Wilmore and Williams into a mission lasting more than eight months .

Two NASA astronauts were pulled from the mission to make room for Wilmore and Williams in the return leg.

NASA wants to replace its station employees approximately every six months. SpaceX has been providing taxi services since the company’s first astronaut flight in 2020. NASA has also hired Boeing for ferry flights after the space shuttle was retired, but Starliner’s faulty software and other problems led to years of delays and repair costs of more than $1 billion.

Starliner tests are underway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, with post-flight data evaluation set to begin this week.

“We’re a long way from being able to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to get rid of Boeing,’” Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, said in a press conference before the launch.

The arrival of the two new astronauts means the four who have been up there since March can now return to Earth on their own SpaceX capsule in just over a week. Their stay was extended by a month because of the Starliner’s chaos.

Although Saturday’s launch went well, SpaceX said the rocket’s upper stage ended up outside its target impact zone in the Pacific Ocean due to engine misfiring. The company has paused all Falcon launches until it figures out what went wrong.