NASA to retrieve stranded astronauts from ISS via SpaceX taxi in February 2025 | ABC News

well let's get more now on that news we've been reporting from NASA that two astronauts who've been stuck in space for over two months will now only be able to return to Earth next February uh Dr Brad Tucker is an astrophysicist with the Australian National University he joins us now from canra very good morning to you Brad how's it going yeah pretty good listen my heart goes out to these two astronauts who packed for like I think it was like a six- day Mission or something like that but they've been stuck there and now they're going to be stuck there until next year how did they come into such a predicament yeah that that 8A Mission has blown out to an eth month Mission which is always um you feel for him um and this all had to do with the faults of the Thruster systems uh on board the Starliner capsule so Starliner is the capsule that Boeing built to essentially taxi these astronauts uh into the space station during launch they had a few issues they thought they solved it after launch as it was headed and docking with the space station uh they had a number of thrusters fail and helium which is kind of the fuel that goes through it leak now there's lots of redundancy thrusters so you know they were always safe but require a lot of re work and configuration as they were trying to Dock and and essentially land the equivalent of on the space station once they got there NASA and Boeing said well look we'll we'll look into this we'll figure out what's going on uh after two months of studying they haven't solved why these thrusters failed so five of them failed um they've gotten a few of those failure ones back online the biggest worry has always been why did these fail and how can they predict and prevent them failing because if they were to come back down and they fail that could be quite literally catastrophic so at the end of the day they've had to choose to have an Extended Stay essentially in space right so now space is coming to their rescue uh next year this must be a reputational blow for Boeing given their recent record on safety look it's an interesting one because you know Boeing and SpaceX were were contracted out by NASA um for this commercial crew program back in 2010 and for years they were they were neck and neck SpaceX was the the newcomer SpaceX was the somewhat untrusted company Boeing had a long history in space all the way back to almost the Apollo days uh so Boeing was a safe bet SpaceX wasn't obviously that has turned um their the original plan for their human test flight the one they're on now Boeing was in 2017 so it's already been massively delayed so yeah the fact that they're not confident going down in Boeing is a bit of a subtle blow obviously NASA's priority was the safety of ashona that's that that's the only thing that mattered consequences to Boe aside that was not what they're worried about um but it does show just how quickly the tides have turned in the way commercial spaces happen um with new companies growing fast uh and doing all sorts of services uh SpaceX has now become the the partner of choice uh for NASA so if this was meant to be an 8-day Mission uh on the ISS it must be a little crowded on the ISS am I right to presume that I mean what what happens with food what happens with space so so there's usually always two missions going on a us-led one that has four and a Russian Le one that has three but there's always an American and Russian on Either Ore to operate their equipment so the space station can house 11 um they've done it in the push when they swap over that crew um but if there was four more crew intended to go up next month on the next SpaceX mission to rotate out it would actually really start to get cramped now NASA always has contingency they had extra supplies when they went up this Boeing crew um maybe not two mon worth but they were able to borrow supplies essentially from the other crew uh and use that uh and then have resupply missions in fact a resupply mission um led by Russia uh just went up to the space station about a week ago to give extra supplies to the space station so they've been able to to work and Shuffle things but there's only a limit to how much shuffling you can do and there's also a practical limit because there's only so many docks on the space station and the Boeing starliners essentially blocking up one of those dos it's like a delayed plane blocking a departure gate well it changes the planes and flights afterward and that's what's happening here so they really need that Boeing capsule to get out of the way so the new one the new SpaceX capsule could arrive and business resume as as normal because there's been a ton of shuffling to get this to work well given as you've explained that these technical problems were only found after the launch what does this then mean for future missions so this is you know quite literally almost the billion dollar question because they have a capsule on the ground that they've been testing um and mimicking The Faults they can't solve it on that either so the question is is this a random fault that has happened or is this almost a more of a system and malfunction requiring a new design now that's going to be the critical case because that's going to determine the pathway forward now they can get the capsule down un crude relatively without risk so this is of that big decisions by not forcing someone to go in there they can get that capsule down to study it more and if something goes wrong which is unlikely but if it still does there's no one on board then they have to figure out well are we going to have to require an entirely you know rework and design that's going to be at least months if not over a year worth of fixes then they'll need some sort of testing and certification that those thrusters work again so they have to somewhat repeat this test flight process which then will draw it out more so you're not looking that of Boeing being able to carry passengers in this at least until towards the end of 2026 if not later and this depends on what NASA decides to do does it want to keep pumping and supporting the program more do they go with another company do they just use SpaceX NASA's always wanted multiple groups uh just in the case of something like this if something goes wrong and there are other competitors out there so there's a lot of then policy decisions that are starting to happen um throughout the year