NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced today that U.S. astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore will be returned from the International Space Station (ISS) by SpaceX. The mission is scheduled for February next year as part of Crew-9.

According to NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich, “As we got more and more data over the summer and understood the uncertainty of that data, it became very clear to us that the best course of action was to return Starliner uncrewed.” He said NASA found “there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters.”

“If we had a way to actually predict what the thrusters would do, for the undock, and all the way through the de-orbit burn, and through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action. But when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for thruster failures with the crew on board … it was just too much of a risk for the crew, and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed testflight.”

Williams and Wilmore, sent on Boeing’s Starliner, were only supposed to spend eight days on the ISS. However, after Starliner’s thruster failures, helium leaks, and valve issues, they have already been there for 80 days.

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