The return of veteran astronauts is complicated.

The Starliner is the protagonist again, although SpaceX is the protagonist involuntarily since NASA has finally decided to bring the Starliner spacecraft back to earth, but without a crew, the Starliner is basically from Boeing, which is a prestigious company Boeing is a company that has been making airplanes for more than a century, it was created by one of the Pioneers of aviation and it has been making spacecraft since the first ships were sent into space, so it has top-notch engineers and personnel. level, another thing is how things are managed, but you have to take your hat off to Boeing. Both companies, with both projects, the SpaceX dragon and the Boeing starliner, were NASA's proposal to have a ship that would allow astronauts to be taken to the international space station or to low Earth orbit. These types of ships were called space taxis, since their destination is to take and bring Humans to Earth orbit and they are not designed to go very far, for example they could not take a trip to the moon, although well perhaps with some modifications they could carry out transport missions lunar towards lunar orbit. The point is that in 2011 President Obama decided to liquidate the space shuttle program, which were very cool, impressive ships, but at least from my point of view it was a very risky bet by the United States, since they were ships that were intended to be very ahead of their time, the result is that each launch was very expensive, it cost about 1.5 billion to send a shuttle into space and the Columbia and Challenger also suffered horrible accidents, a total of 14 dead.

The problem is that when that program ended, the United States was left without a means of transportation to send astronauts to space and was forced to pay millions of dollars to the Russians so that the Americans, the NASA astronauts, could go to the space station. international aboard Soyuz spacecraft, in addition the American astronauts had to learn Russian, imagining a complete humiliation for the United States space program. NASA tried to solve it by contracting the development of two manned dragon ships or dragon 2, since SpaceX already had a previous dragon ship for transporting goods and Boeing's Starliner, SpaceX fulfilled its part and since May 30 the Dragon ship 2 takes humans to space, but the starliner suffers delays, suffers failures, suffers complications, suffers cost overruns and we arrive at June 5 of this year, when the third test flight was launched, the first manned one, its destination was to reach the space station international, to demonstrate that it could take Humans to the international space station without problems, but there were problems, it came close, it had five helium leaks. Helium is necessary in ships for, among other things, fuel cooling and there were also failures in the propellers, after weeks of statements from NASA and Boeing, like “there are no problems”, “we will fix this”, “ This is doing some tests” and that's it” and in a tone at the end that seemed more and more like “circulate, circulate, there is nothing to see here”, and in the end they have had to recognize reality and what everyone We suspected that the Starliner ship that is currently docked at the international space station is not in a position to guarantee the safe return to earth of the two veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.

This "astronauts lost or stranded in space" is a movie that the media is putting together, it's already been put together several times, in the end they are not lost, they are on the international space station and with other colleagues and they will be doing things, helping with scientific tasks or doing certain tasks, so nothing missing, they are well located. This is not the first time that an astronaut or several have stayed on the space station for a while due to a failure in their ship. The astronauts will return to Earth in February 2025, in a SpaceX dragon ship. This is the time necessary to programming each mission, it is made to measure, according to who is also on the ship, there is a very strict schedule, so leaving two seats free is very complicated since it means canceling other programs that those people who would have to do should do. traveling to space, there are also compatibility problems. The seats are custom made and in this case there is a problem with the spacesuits, it is not only a question of design and colors, the blue one is Boeing's and the white one is SpaceX's, they are not compatible between the ships. Since each suit connects differently to the hits, they have certain plug and connection systems with the ship, so the return becomes "complicated", we will see what happens.