NASA on Wednesday said it plans to decide by the end of the month whether to return astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams—who have been on the International Space Station for more than two months—to Earth using Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
The semireusable space capsule is in the middle of its inaugural crewed flight test (CFT), a test mission that was intended to last around eight days but could be stretched to eight months if NASA decides against flying it home with crew. In that case, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which is scheduled to fly another crew of astronauts to the ISS on September 24, would return Williams and Wilmore in February, the space agency said last week.
