NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are to remain stranded in space for several weeks longer after more setbacks have delayed efforts to bring them home.
The two Americans left the International Space Station in June.
They expected to return home just eight days later.
However, their mission grew months longer after NASA decided to send the company’s faulty Starliner capsule back empty in September.
NASA has now announced their mission has been pushed back again.
The relief team has now been delayed another month, meaning they won’t return until March next year.
Their expected return would mark ten months since they left Earth.
The next crew of four was supposed to launch in February.
This would be followed by Wilmore and Williams’ return home at the end of the month alongside two other astronauts.
Following NASA’s failure to bring them home, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has stepped in to take over the mission.
However, the most recent announcement said that SpaceX needs more time to prepare the brand-new capsule for liftoff.
It is now scheduled no earlier than late March.
NASA said that it considered using a different SpaceX capsule to fly up the replacement crew to keep the flights on schedule.
However, NASA then decided to wait for the new capsule.
Earlier this year, at their 60-day mark, many fans reacted to the horror of the situation on social media and described the delay as “torture.”
One commenter wrote: “Stuck in space for 60 days with no known solution is inhumane and torture.
“Why did y’all teams send those astronauts in the first place?
“Where is the Change.Org petition to bring back the astronauts?”
Another worried commenter wrote:
“Hope they come back alive and tell us about it.
“Nightmarish. Only happens in movies.”
The scandal-laden Starliner – which was built and developed using over $4 billion of taxpayer money – had been plagued by helium leaks and thruster issues in the weeks leading up to launch.
It even suffered issues on the day of the launch.
The spacecraft safely delivered Williams and Wilmore to the ISS, but by the time it got there, it had sprung more helium leaks and five of its 28 thrusters had failed.
The decision for their delayed return was humiliating for Boeing.
The embattled company has struggled for years to get its Starliner program off the ground.
Amid the problems, Boeing has now been bailed out at the eleventh hour by its biggest competitor, SpaceX.
“We have had so many embarrassments lately, we’re under a microscope,” one employee anonymously told the New York Post.
“This just made it, like, 100 times worse.”
“We hate SpaceX,” he reportedly added.
“We talk s*** about them all the time, and now they’re bailing us out.”
According to officials, NASA prefers to have overlapping crews at the space station for smoother transitions.
While Wilmore and Williams are used to long-haul missions, most typically last six months with only a few reaching a full year.
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