why is shuttle retrieving stranded astronauts not returning until February? SpaceX shuttle launched yesterday. The ISS is close to earth. What will it do for next 5 months?
In: Planetary Science
I’m going to quote from an earlier post I made about them being “stuck”
> They aren’t “stuck”, but yes the plans have changed.
> Crews are usually 4 people who go for 6 month rotations on the ISS. These two astronauts have done those rotations before. This time the idea was to send them up for a quick 8 day test flight to test out the Boeing Starliner. Starliner had some issues, so NASA evaluated all the options on the table.
> NASA could have chosen to send them back in Starliner but deemed it too risky. They could contract SpaceX to send an entire separate Dragon capsule to bring them back to earth, that’s definitely an option that was considered. But the next crew of 4 is due to come up in September for their 6 month rotation, so instead of sending up 4 new crew and paying millions for a separate SpaceX launch to bring down Butch and Sunni now, NASA decided that they will send a 2 person crew that will join with Butch and Sunni and form the crew for the next rotation.
> This means Butch and Sunni will spend 8ish months in space, but that’s not a bad thing. Plenty of folks have stayed longer than that. In the meantime they’ve been doing science and contributing to crew operations on the station.
> They aren’t “stuck” or “stranded” any more than the usual crew. There are two other vessels docked at the ISS right now besides Starliner. There’s the Crew 8 Dragon and a Soyuz. If they needed to abandon station in emergency there are enough spots in those to make it happen. It would be a little more packed than usual but still safe to do.
> So Boeing has a bad day, but we get more science, Butch and Sunni get more time in space (I doubt many astronauts would complain about that!) and everybody is safe.
> Overall I think this was a good call from NASA.
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