Crew-9 will not take off before September 24, per NASA.
NASA remains unconvinced at this time that Starliner is safe to return. Unless they change their mind, Crew-9 will be reduced by 2, so Butch and Suni can return with them in 2025.
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So NASA is pretty much kicking the can further down the road while Boeing reinstates the autonomous undocking and deorbiting software. Once all the options are on the table, then NASA will make — or, at least, announce — its decision. After this long, I’m not sure what more Boeing can do to convince NASA that it’s safe to bring astronauts down in this Starliner capsule unless the ISS suffers a catastrophic failure (any port in a storm, as the saying goes).
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About every week or so I google “boeing starliner” and am greeted with seemingly new articles from reputable news sources headlining yet again that the two astronauts are “not stranded in space”, or “not stuck in space”, etc. I suppose that started around mid-June (er, 2024, in case that’s not obvious by the time you’re reading this).
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OMG. I’m sure astronauts prep for all kinds of of issues, but can you imagine telling your family you’ll be gone for a week or two, and having that turn into nine months? In space?
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They’re not “stranded in space”. They’re just “space travelers”.
(Which, of course, is short for ‘marooned’.)
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There was a NASA PR article a week or two ago about how they don’t mind being up there because there’s so much to do and the views are amazing and so on.
Sure, they’d much rather be up there than with their families.
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Not the first time it’s happened. Remember when a Soyuz capsule sprang a major leak in a cooling loop? Russia had to bring that back autonomously, and the cosmonauts and astronaut that rode up in it wound up having to stay for an extra six months.
I’d be happy to volunteer to test that hypothesis. 
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provided I get to ride up in a Dragon ↩︎
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Back in my Air Force days, I’d had TDYs grow from 1 week to 2, or 3, even 4weeks once. Such things happen. Space travel is the same, only more so. They aren’t the first to have their mission extended, and won’t be the last.
It’s easy to believe they are not disappointed to spend extra time on the ISS. I’d be excited, too. But a couple months is one thing, 6 months or better is something else.
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They’re gonna be there a while, might as well watch some cheesy movies.
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But how do they eat and breathe? Does the space station keep enough extra food an oxygen on hand for people to totally not be stranded for months?
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Is there by any chance a crate of hamdingers?
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Also, what happens if Joel just refuses to watch the movie?
Wait, what were we talking about?
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Make it two.
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Still waiting on the movie list, but I don’t see MST3K on the list of TV shows available to watch on the station. Not sure whether that’s a bad thing or not.
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I know this was a joke, but I would hope the tolerances on how much they carry against just such a problem as this would be pretty large…
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You’ll remember that the loss of Columbia put a serious kink in the ISS supply chain for a good couple of years while the entire Shuttle fleet was grounded, so there’s considerable buffer against something similar happening again. Plus a fresh Cygnus cargo module just arrived at the station yesterday. And if anyone could rush another, smaller batch, it’d be SpaceX with a cargo Dragon. Heck, at the rate things are going it’s possible Williams and Wilmore might even get a chance to unpack the first Dream Chaser cargo flight.
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I filled in a full page of graph paper, but just can’t solve this logic puzzle!
Do they have enough people up there to perform The Tempest?
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No, they’re four short. They could only put it on during the overlap of simultaneous full crew rotations of both the US and Russian sides of the station (3+3+4+4 = 14 > 13 characters in The Tempest).
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What if someone were to, say, make sure the hatch leading to the Starliner (unoccupied) is sealed, and accidentally jettison it?
“Oops! Guess we can stop doing calculations on that assisted suicide device now. Oh well.”
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