Boeing says four of the five faulty thrusters are fixed on its spacecraft Starliner, and the helium leaks are 'stable,' but there's still no return date for the astronauts.
There's no race against the clock to get the Starliner flight crew members home from space, according to Boeing. The NASA astronauts are not 'stranded,' and repairs to helium leaks in the propulsion system and the faulty thrusters are nearly complete, Boeing told Fox News Digital in an email. That's good news for astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who were aboard Boeing's spacecraft, as well as the success of the Commercial Crew Program that began in 2010.
Instead of paying the 'hefty price tag' to an adversarial country, NASA turned to private U.S. companies to get people and humans to the space station. 'This is an incredibly important mission,' Young said. 'These delays seem like a bad thing and can erode confidence that you have in the system … but you really want to make sure that there are no questions in the back of your mind when you're saying, ‘OK, yes, this is ready to launch humans.
It's a great point to underscore as well, that these astronauts are not stranded because NASA does have this other system that is reliable and proven,' Young said. 'That's why NASA always has a redundancy, so that if something does go wrong with one program, the other is able to easily step in.'
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