Hephaestus: This is a very nice overview. It's been forwarded to my wife's 80-year-old aunt who asked about this last Sunday. (Clearly, it's being reported on octogenarian news.) As an engineer, I understand and respect what the team is doing here. There is nothing like testing in situ. 1/n

Boeing Starliner astronauts are still at the ISS. There currently is no return date. Are they stranded??? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is more complicated. 🧪🛰️🔭 #scicomm #womeninstem Newsletter @ 11 am et: adastraspace.com youtu.be/rxY5m_paA3o

Are Boeing Starliner astronauts stranded on the ISS?youtu.be There have been a lot of confusing headlines in the wake of the news that Boeing Starliner astronauts don't currently have a return date from the ISS -- and what was scheduled as a 7 or 8 day mission has stretched to a month at this point. What's going on with Boeing Starliner and this first crewed flight test for NASA, and are the astronauts actually stranded? No, but the situation is very complicated. 🔭 SUPPORT AD ASTRA Patreon ➔ https://www.patreon.com/swapnakrishna 💫 FIND ME Ad Astra Newsletter (links + images) ➔ https://www.adastraspace.com Instagram/Threads ➔ https://instagram.com/skrishna TikTok ➔ https://www.tiktok.com/@swapna_krishna Twitter ➔ https://twitter.com/skrishna Mastodon ➔ https://wandering.shop/@skrishna Bluesky ➔ https://bsky.app/profile/swapnakrishna.com ⏱ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - Introduction 00:30 - An overview of Starliner's problems 04:53 - Why they're staying so long 06:44 - Testing on the ground and at the ISS 07:49 - Are the astronauts actually stranded? 10:00 - This is a bizarre situation 🛰️ SUBSCRIBE For more space and STEM videos, subscribe to Ad Astra: @adastraspace

This is a very nice overview. It's been forwarded to my wife's 80-year-old aunt who asked about this last Sunday. (Clearly, it's being reported on octogenarian news.) As an engineer, I understand and respect what the team is doing here. There is nothing like testing in situ. 1/n

The problem is that even discounting the SpaceX fanboi anguish, both NASA and Boeing have completely failed to realize that going dark in the current era of space travel is not an acceptable option. If information isn't being shared with the general public, someone will make it up. 2/n

If they had come right out and said, "We're puzzled by what we saw before docking, so we're going to take as long as we need to do some testing that can really only be done on the actual spacecraft IN SPACE," the whole thing wouldn't have attracted nearly as much noise. 3/n

But when they started with "Everything was perfectly peachy. Nothing to see here." and then kept pushing back the return date, the most reasonable assumption was "They're not telling us something!" At least for a certain measure of reasonable. 4/4

HAHA yes. Exactly this!!!

I think to do anything else would be irresponsible honestly. That being said, NASA has done a very poor job communicating with the public on this one, hence the “stranded” stories

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