It’s official: Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams will remain aboard the International Space Station until at least February. While it’s a major setback for Boeing’s Starliner, the plane that carried them there, it doesn’t spell doom for the U.S. space program. Rather, it highlights the success of the transition from the government providing the sole rocket to space to a proliferation of commercial spaceflight options.

This is exactly the contingency that NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which transports astronauts to the ISS using spacecraft built by private companies, was designed to handle. “The Commercial Crew Program deliberately selected two providers for redundancy in preparation for exactly this situation,” he said. Laura Forzigan independent space industry consultant. The two NASA astronauts were originally scheduled to arrive at the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 5 and return to Earth about a week later. However, issues with the spacecraft resulted in them staying for an extended mission before returning home aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft instead of the Starliner.

“If they had only picked one provider, it would have been Boeing because SpaceX was a riskier proposition at the time,” Forczyk said, “so in some sense, this is a win for the Commercial Crew program.”

The mission was Starliner’s first manned test flight, and it was rocky from the start: valve leaks and thruster failures on the journey into space forced NASA and Boeing to reconsider whether the spacecraft could safely return astronauts to Earth. Tests of the thrusters on the ground were inconclusive, and there was still a risk of the thrusters failing during the return journey.

The safest alternative would be for astronauts to remain on the ISS until SpaceX’s proven Crew Dragon spacecraft has room to return, which could happen in early 2025. In the meantime, Starliner will autonomously detach from the ISS in September and return to Earth without a crew member while Boeing engineers continue to troubleshoot.

“This was a test mission, but sometimes testing gives you answers that tell you there are things that need to be fixed,” said former NASA astronaut Michael Fossum. statement“Testing doesn’t necessarily prove that everything worked perfectly.”

At a press conference on August 24, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson Though Boeing has been adamant that Starliner will get another chance to carry crew to the ISS, some aren’t so convinced. Boeing’s contract requires that the vehicle isn’t certified for use in real missions until it completes a successful test flight, which it didn’t this time. If NASA requires Starliner to undergo another test flight, Forchik says, the first operational flight could be delayed until 2026 at the earliest. With the ISS scheduled to close around 2030, keeping Starliner ready for active duty may not be worth it.

Without redundancy in the commercial crew program, the failure of Starliner could have left the U.S. without a launch provider entirely. As it stands, SpaceX will continue to shuttle astronauts to and from the ISS. Although Wilmore and Williams will need to stay aboard the ISS for a little longer, they are veteran astronauts with the experience and equipment to quickly jump into daily life in space before returning safely to Earth.

For Wilmore and Williams, the challenges and inconveniences of a long-term stay may not outweigh the excitement of life in orbit. “I know them really well, and I think in some ways they were a little disappointed to be up there in such a short amount of time,” Fossum said. “They both have been on long-term missions aboard the space station before… and they both enjoyed it.”