By NASA officials on Saturday may finally reveal how the crew from the Boeing Starliner rocket will return to earth.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson is scheduled to appear for a live news conference at 1 p.m. EDT Saturday from the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The news conference, which will be televised and livestreamed, will take place about one hour after Nelson will meet behind closed doors with officials at both NASA and Boeing for a flight-readiness review.
That means the public could learn whether the crew of the Boeing Starliner will return to Earth on the spacecraft that brought them into orbit, or wait until February to hitch a ride on a SpaceX Dragon.
You can watch the press conference here:
Starliner timeline: 2 months after Starliner launched, astronauts still haven’t returned
The flight-readiness review is a rare process in the middle of a mission, but it became necessary for flight engineers to determine whether the beleaguered Starliner is capable of safely returning astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams to Earth – or whether the spacecraft will have to undock with no humans aboard.
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Other ways to watch NASA news conference
Unlike more recent Starliner news conferences, which have been geared primarily toward the media, Saturday’s event will be made widely public and will feature the NASA administrator himself.
The conference will be streamed on NASA+ and broadcast on NASA Television, which the agency will soon phase out. It can also be watched on the NASA app, the agency’s website and its YouTube channel.
What happened with the Boeing Starliner?
The beleaguered Starliner was besieged with troubles even before it finally managed to launch June 5 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on its inaugural crewed test flight.
Wilmore and Williams were only meant to be aboard the International Space Station for little more than a week before heading back to Earth. But when they made it to the orbital outpost a day after the launch, engineers discovered a slew of helium leaks and problems with the craft’s propulsion system that have hampered Starliner’s return to Earth.
Amid the scramble to figure out what to do about Starliner, NASA previously made the call to postpone the launch of SpaceX Crew-9.
That mission had been slated to take off earlier in August for the space station in a routine flight to replace the Crew-8 mission that’s been at the outpost since March. But because the four Crew-9 members cannot arrive at the station until the docking port occupied by Starliner is available, that mission won’t happen any sooner than Sept. 24, NASA has said.
To stave off any more delays, Starliner will have to undock by then with or without a crew. Whether four astronauts or two astronauts head up to the International Space Station for the six-month Crew-9 rotation depends on whether Wilmore and Williams are on board Starliner when it departs.
In the event that Starliner leaves empty and returns to Earth autonomously, Wilmore and Williams would need to have room to hitch a ride home on Feb. 25 on the Dragon once the Crew-9 team completes its shift.
In the meantime, the astronauts have spent their extended stay working alongside the crew of Expedition 71, performing scientific research and helping to do mainteance on the space station, NASA said.
