It's now been more than a month since Boeing publicly acknowledged that they knew that their Starliner spaceship had a helium leak when it was sitting on the launch pad, but they went ahead and sent it up anyway. While the results weren't as disastrous as they might have been in a worst-case scenario, they were bad enough. One leak soon turned into four and then some of the booster rockets failed when they initially attempted to dock with the International Space Station. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stuck on the ISS for more than fifty days now. In their latest press release on the subject, Boeing still sounds like they are trying to paint a sunny picture of the situation, but they admit that they won't be able to attempt to bring them back on Starliner until at least next month. (CNBC)

Boeing's crew spacecraft Starliner will stay docked with the International Space Station into August, NASA confirmed on Thursday, as the mission remains on hold while the company and agency study problems that arose early in the flight.

Starliner capsule "Calypso," which carried NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS, has now been in space 50 days and counting. The Boeing crew flight test has been extended several times while NASA conducted testing back on the ground prior to clearing the spacecraft to carry the pair of astronauts back to Earth.

NASA's Commercial Crew manager Steve Stich said during a press conference Thursday the agency was not prepared to set a return date.

"We're making great progress, but we're just not quite ready to do that," Stich said.

How much "great progress" could they have been making for nearly two months if they still can't say whether or not Starline will be able to safely reenter the Earth's atmosphere yet? The ISS is a technological wonder, but it has limited tools and repair capabilities. Do they have what is required to fix a helium leak on that starship? And what about the faulty thrusters? Boeing claims that they have been test-firing another thruster out at White Sands to see how it performs, which is great. They also said that they will be conducting another static-firing of the previously malfunctioning thrusters on the ship while it's docked to the ISS early next month. But they can't fire it at full power while Starliner is docked.

If there is any good news coming out of this announcement, it's that someone at Boeing finally got around to calling Elon Musk. Nasa is saying that they now have "contingency plans" in place to bring Wilmore and Williams home using SpaceX's Dragon Heavy capsule if the need arises. If I were one of those astronauts, I would probably be lobbying to go with the contingency plan and let Boeing try to bring Starliner back unmanned. Musk has a 100% flawless record for both manned and unmanned missions to and from the ISS. So far, Boeing is batting zero out of one.

For the moment, SpaceX and Boeing are pretty much the only games in town. The Europeans have developed some fairly robust rocket systems, but adapting them to be able to dock with the ISS would likely be very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Of course, the Russians still have the Soyuz that is specifically fitted for the ISS and is used as the astronauts' emergency escape capsules, but they're not really on the best of terms with us at the moment. NASA's Space Launch System rocket (SLS) could probably be adapted to do the job, but they don't have one that will be ready to go up until significantly later this year. Conversely, based on his usual business instincts, I would wager that Elon Musk already has a Falcon Heavy warming up in the hangar in Texas. 

In retrospect, we should probably be asking NASA why Boeing didn't send an uncrewed Starliner up to the ISS on a resupply mission before they tried sending astronauts up there. While it would be an expensive failure, we can afford to lose some food and scientific equipment if a flight totally goes south. But Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams absolutely must be brought home safe and sound. Their lives are the responsibility of Boeing now. That company has run up a far from impressive record in recent years, and their first venture to the ISS hasn't gone much better than many of their recent 737 MAX flights.