NASA Cancels Astronauts' Return Aboard Boeing's Starliner Over Safety Concerns | Aug 2024

we are going to interrupt for just a second because we want to take you over to Houston now NASA officials are going to announce what they have decided in terms of whether or not two stranded astronauts Butch Wilmore and sunny Williams they are on board the International Space Station whether they will be able to return to Earth on the Boeing Starliner uh the Starliner you recall brought them to the ISS but had plenty of technical issues both preceding the journey and on the journey itself let's listen in on NASA's plan for the spacecraft and more importantly the crew to administrator Nelson for opening remarks thanks NASA has decided that Butch and sunny will return with crew nine next February uh and that Starliner uh will return uncrewed and the specifics in the schedule will be discussed momentarily uh I I want you to know that Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision we want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS I have just talk to the new Boeing CEO Kelly ortberg uh I have expressed this to the to him I told him uh how well Boeing uh worked with our team to come to this decision and uh he expressed to me uh an intention that uh they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely and uh that we will have our redundancy and our crude access to the space station uh this whole discussion remember is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past we lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward uh we have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection you come forward space flight is risky even at its saf safest and even at its most routine and a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine and so the decision to keep Butch and sunny aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety I core value is safety and it is our North Star and I'm grateful to NASA and to Boeing for their teams for all the incredible and detailed work to get to this decision turn it over to Jim thank you sir um thank you and Deputy Administrator melroy for your support along the way and certainly for being here today it means a lot I'd like to communicate to all of you that we've come to this decision using our our program our mission directorate and our agency level processes that includes the decisions that happen at the commercial crew program at the space operations mission directorate level and the agency level and includes all of our technical authorities from engineering safety medical and flight operations as the administrator said our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different the uncertainty in our margins is where we have gone come to uh make the decision that the administrator laid out that uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters and still we still have some work to go you'll hear more from other on others on the specifics but I'll tell you that the NASA and Boeing team have made incredible technical progress in the model development that has gone on the Thruster testing understanding material properties within the valve and the complicated fluid physics that are happening uh inside we will continue uh to to learn we are a learning organization and I think we've demonstrated that here we'll learn from this effort so that our crews who are at the top of the pyramid on these missions and their families can continue to know we've done that and we'll always do our best for our team our programmatic and Technical teams both NASA and the commercial crew program and the space station program and our Boeing teammates have worked endlessly to get to launch and certainly in the past two months they've done this while the whole world has gone on around them hurricanes a hurricane through Florida a hurricane through here while their homes are damaged and without power they came to work some of them lost family members along the way their kids went back to school and life in general went on but they were here every day working long hours they have persevered and I want them to know how grateful I am that they are on our team this has not been an easy decision but it is absolutely the right one let me turn it over to Ken Bowersox and thank Ken and all the leaders here and the ones that are not here with us today uh for their work thanks jamman thanks to you and the administrator for joining us for this press conference for for our meeting so you guys have been heavily involved and we appreciate that um I also want to thank everybody who's uh here in the room with us and watching online it says a lot that you're with us on a Saturday um and and I want you to know how much we appreciate your support as we work to fly our mission safely um I'm really proud of the NASA team and the Boeing team for all the work they've been doing the last couple of months it's really been impressive to see um how they've uh been very agile in testing um Gathering data and completing analysis um and then having the tough discussions that go along with um processing that data and coming to conclusions um our intent today was to have the first part of a flight Readiness review um the goal of that review was to come up with a NASA recommendation on whether we should proceed with the crude flight test um either crude or uncrewed um our Boeing uh Partners told us that they would be able to execute either option and they thought that the call belonged to NASA because of our wider um view of all the risks involved um uh we conducted a poll um all of the organizations uh on the polling sheet indicated that uh they thought we should proceed uncrewed with the with the flight test um and so uh well we have been watching a very interesting update from NASA officials providing the latest guidance regarding the return of astronauts Butch Williams and uh sorry Butch Wilmore and sunny Williams those two NASA astronauts you see on your screen they went to the International Space Station on the Boeing Starliner Mission and now NASA administrator Bill Nelson says they won't be coming home until February with the crew n uh group they're going to bring the Starliner that's Boeing Starliner that's the sh that's the spacecraft in which they went to the ISS that has been troubled and plagued by so many different technical issues they're going to return that to Earth uncrewed that means the 8-day planned mission for Butch and sunny is now going to be at a minimum 240 days that they're going to spend up there in space and they're going to return on an entirely different spacecraft a lot of this has called into question uh the future of Boeing and their ability to continue to send NASA astronauts up into space on that point NASA administrator Nelson said that he had a conversation with Boeing's new CEO Kelly ortenberg and said that they were going to continue to work together and ultimately Nelson said space flight is risky but it is a result of their commitment to safety their core value their North starving safety they've decided that it is better for Butch and sunny to come back on a different spacecraft we're going to continue monitoring all of this we'll bring you any relevant headlines as they happen for now a quick break I'm Lana Zach you're streaming CBS News always on