NASA provides update about troubled Boeing Starliner astronaut mission (audio)

Media Briefing: NASAâ€™s Boeing Crew Flight Test (Aug. 14, 2024) - YouTube

Update for 2 pm ET: NASA's teleconference on the Boeing Starliner astronaut mission has ended. You can listen to the replay above. Read our full wrap story.

NASA will provide an update about the ongoing astronaut mission of Boeing's Starliner capsule today (Aug. 14), and you can listen live.

The teleconference about Starliner's Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission will begin at 1:00 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT). NASA will stream audio of the briefing live, and Space.com will carry the broadcast if the agency makes it available as usual.

CFT launched on June 5, sending NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station (ISS) for a planned weeklong stay. Starliner stayed much longer, however; it remains docked to the orbiting lab while NASA and Boeing troubleshoot issues with the capsule's reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, a handful of which failed during its approach to the ISS on June 6.

NASA has still not announced a target departure date for Starliner, and it's possible the capsule won't end up carrying Williams and Wilmore back to Earth; the duo could come home in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, if Starliner's issues aren't solved to NASA's satisfaction.

We could learn more about that decision during today's briefing. The participants are:

Ken Bowersox, associate administrator, NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate
Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator, NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate
Russ DeLoach, chief, NASA's Office of Safety and Mission Assurance
Joe Acaba, NASA chief astronaut
Emily Nelson, chief flight director, NASA's Flight Operations Directorate

a blue-and-grey cone-shaped spacecraft can be seen above a rapidly rotating earth, which appears blurry in the background — Boeing's Starliner docked at the International Space Station during Crew Flight Test in July 2024. (Image credit: NASA)

— Starliner: Boeing's next-generation spaceship for astronauts

— SpaceX's Crew-9 astronaut launch delayed to Sept. 24 due to Boeing Starliner issues

CFT is Starliner's third spaceflight overall, after uncrewed test missions to the ISS in December 2019 and May 2022. The 2019 effort failed — Starliner got stuck in the wrong orbit for a rendezvous with the orbiting lab — but the 2022 flight was successful.

NASA awarded both Boeing and SpaceX contracts back in September 2014 to ferry agency astronauts to and from the ISS. SpaceX flew its version of CFT back in 2020 and is now in the middle of its eighth operational, long-duration astronaut flight to the station for NASA, known as Crew-8.

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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.