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The two Boeing Starliner astronauts who have been stranded in space for 80 days will stay in space for another six months, NASA officials announced Saturday. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are now expected to return to Earth in February, while the Starliner will be brought back unmanned. Veteran astronauts Wilmore and Williams launched aboard Boeing’s Starliner back on June 5 — the maiden crewed voyage for the spacecraft — for what was supposed to be an eight-day mission docked to the International Space Station. The test flight, however, encountered thruster failures and helium leaks so serious that NASA...

Boeing Starliner program manager Mark Nappi ... it's no surprise that the company's Starliner crewed flight test is taking longer than expected — so far, almost ten times longer than expected. NASA astronauts Butch Williams and Suni Wilmore are on Day 77 of their eight-day stay aboard the International Space Station. Nappi says he regrets not doing a better job of managing expectations. "I think we all knew that it was going to go longer than that.. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about how much longer, but I think it’s my regret that we didn’t just say...

NASA is grappling with a critical decision regarding the return of astronauts Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams from the International Space Station (ISS) amid concerns over the Boeing Starliner’s autonomous undocking capabilities and the spacecraft’s potential to damage one of only two docking ports on the space station. ... plagued by multiple technical issues, significantly extending the originally planned eight-day mission. As NASA deliberates on the best course of action for bringing the astronauts home, a surprising revelation has emerged regarding the Starliner’s flight software. ... the current flight software onboard the Starliner lacks the ability to perform an automated...

Anyone gonna ask Space Council Chair Kamala Harris about the 2 American astronauts still stranded in space?

SpaceX launched 21 Starlink satellites into orbit from a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday morning in clear skies from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, one day after the mission was scrubbed because of poor booster recovery conditions. The 230-foot rocket lifted off at 8:50 a.m. from pad 40. It was Space X's 52nd launch this year from Florida. Eight minutes later, the booster landed on Read the Instructions offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. That was the 21st time the booster landed on the drone ship and the 88th overall on the droneship. About an hour after liftoff, the satellites went into...

NASA astronauts stranded due to Boeing's faulty Starliner received horrifying news on Wednesday about their return mission to Earth. Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have already been trapped on the International Space Station (ISS) for more than two months, may not come back to Earth until February 2025. The US space agency revealed a contingency plan that would launch a two-person crew on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission in September, but still wouldn't bring the crew home until months later. The announcement is another highly embarrassing blow for the embattled Boeing, which is dealing with a spate of issues plaguing its...

An initial eight-day Boeing Starliner test mission to the International Space Station will be extended indefinitely to test the spacecraft's thrusters. Test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are safely aboard the ISS and are not stranded in space, NASA commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said ... But there is no targeted return date "until we get the testing completed," Stich said. ... The Starliner's service module contains thrusters, helium lines and other systems that NASA officials need to study before discarding the module upon re-entry and allowing it to burn up. Those components require further study to determine...

Editor's note: NASA announced on Friday that Starliner's troubleshooting has been extended for a third time, meaning that the astronauts will stay aboard the International Space Station indefinitely until some time in July. Two NASA astronauts who rode to orbit on Boeing's Starliner are stranded in space aboard the ISS after engineers discovered numerous issues with the Boeing spacecraft. Teams on the ground are now racing to assess Starliner's status. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were originally scheduled to return to Earth on June 13 after a week on the ISS, but their stay has been extended for a...

SpaceX may be forced to come to the rescue of two astronauts stranded at the International Space Station after their Boeing Starliner suffered troubling helium leaks. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams soared into space on the Starliner on June 5 and were only supposed to remain at the ISS for nine days — but issues with their ship have left their return date still up in the air, and NASA is now furiously trying to help solve the problem. Boeing-rival SpaceX could potentially end up being tapped to ultimately bring them home aboard its Crew Dragon spaceship. The outcome...

Astronauts face significant perils while in space. Multiple studies indicate that humans who spend long enough in orbit may experience a range of health maladies that include weight loss, immune system weakening, loss in bone density, vision loss, and even mysterious headaches. However, new research is revealing how an ancient food product used for millennia may help alleviate some of the risks that astronauts face, and it tastes good too. In a joint project between the European Space Agency, the Italian Space Agency, and the Council for Agricultural Research and Analysis of Agricultural Economics, a team of researchers and astronauts...

A recording of the Apollo 8 astronauts reading from the book of Genesis.

Astronaut Frank Rubio harvested one of the first tomatoes ever grown in space. And then misplaced it. He returned to Earth with the precious produce still lost aboard the space station. It remained lost — until now. “I put it in a little bag, and one of my crewmates was doing a (public) event with some schoolkids, and I thought it’d be kind of cool to show the kids — ‘Hey guys, this is the first tomato harvested in space,’” Rubio said during an October media event. “I was pretty confident that I Velcroed it where I was supposed to...

Three Chinese astronauts landed back on earth on Sunday (Dec 4) on board the re-entry capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, state broadcaster CCTV reported, bringing to an end a six-month mission on China's space station. The three astronauts - commander Chen Dong and teammates Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe - who had been overseeing the final, pivotal period of construction at the space station, which was completed in November, all said they were feeling well after landing in audio aired on CCTV. The capsule landed at the Dongfeng site in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous region at 8.09 pm, with...

Navy football players are going to be looking gooooooooood for their game against Army this year -- the school just revealed it'll be wearing NASA-themed uniforms for the classic rivalry ... and they're awesome!! The helmets, jerseys, cleats and gloves will feature nods to astronauts -- as the school looks to pay homage to the 54 Naval Academy graduates who went on to become space explorers. One side of the players' headgear will have a painting of Navy alum Bruce McCandless II, who took the first untethered spacewalk back in 1985. The other side will have NASA's logo on it...

Space can make humans insufferable. Despite humanity's meager history of space travel, over which only a few hundred individuals have ventured beyond the cozy confines of Earth's atmosphere to the great vacuum beyond, we've already had numerous examples of misbehavior. Much lower gravity than we're used to on Earth reshapes the brain, which in turn can worsen our behavior.

A four-member team of astronauts launched to the International Space Station by SpaceX touched back down on Earth in the Gulf of Mexico on May 6.The return via a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule came just one day after the group undocked from the space station following a six-month mission in which they conducted science experiments and did maintenance.Dragon and Crew-3 astronauts consisted of Raja Chari, a U.S. Air Force combat jet and test pilot who served as mission commander, Tom Marshburn, a medical doctor and former NASA flight surgeon, Kayla Barron, a U.S. Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer, and...

The research involved imaging the brains of 15 astronauts before and after extended tours of duty on the International Space Station. Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to measure perivascular space — or the space around blood vessels — in the brains of astronauts prior to their launch and again immediately after their return. They also took MRI measurements again at one, three, and six months after they had returned. Astronauts’ images were compared with those taken of the same perivascular space in the brains of 16 Earth-bound control subjects. In all cases, scientists found no problems with balance or visual...

Astrophotographers often produce breathtaking images of distant galaxies, planets, and moons from Earth. But Dr Sebastain Voltmer captured something very different and yet equally incredible, last week. He photographed the International Space Station (ISS) while astronauts Matthias Maurer and Raja Chari were outside performing a spacewalk. This may be the first ground-based image that has captured two astronauts out on a spacewalk at the same time.

A smoke alarm sounded Thursday in Russia's segment of the International Space Station (ISS) and astronauts smelled "burning" on board, Russia's space agency and NASA said. The incident, which the Russian space agency Roscosmos said happened at 01:55 GMT ahead of a scheduled spacewalk, is the latest in a string of problems to spur safety concerns over conditions on the Russian segment. "A smoke detector was triggered in the Zvezda service module of the Russian segment of the International Space Station during automatic battery charging, and an alarm went off," Roscosmos said in a statement. French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said...

Aliens and flying saucers have long fascinated Americans taken with the possibility that we might not be alone in the universe. Tales abound of UFO sightings, alien encounters, and even extraterrestrial kidnappings and experimentation. Hollywood has been in on the fun for decades, raking in tens of millions of dollars for every alien flick produced. There have always been those who believed the sightings were real, who experienced them firsthand and investigated the phenomena, believing the government was covering up the evidence. Such people are usually derided as nuts and kooks. But now the Pentagon is set to release a...