Boeing Starliner astronauts have now spent more than 60 days in space with no end in sight.

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Now, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — two veteran NASA astronauts piloting the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft — have spent 63 days in space, nearly seven weeks longer than initially expected.

But there’s still no clear return date on the horizon, and NASA is now making it clear that astronauts may not return home on the Starliner at all.

SpaceX, Boeing’s competitor under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, may instead be called upon to bring Williams and Wilmore home. That move could extend the astronauts’ stay on the International Space Station by another six months, pushing their return to 2025, agency officials said at a news conference Wednesday.

The comments from NASA leaders mark a striking change in tone from the space agency. Until now, officials have repeatedly indicated that Williams and Wilmore were likely to return home aboard the Starliner, and a backup scenario involving the Crew Dragon was mentioned as a minor possibility. But Wednesday’s update suggests that SpaceX’s vehicle is quickly becoming a serious option.

“I would say our chances of an uncrewed Starliner return have increased a little bit based on what’s happened over the last week or two,” said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Directorate, referring to the internal reviews NASA must complete before deciding when to return Starliner. “But again, as new data comes in, new analysis, different discussions — we may find ourselves turning in another direction.”

Officials said the space agency has until about “mid-August” to make a final decision.

CNN confirmed Tuesday that NASA has not yet begun a “flight readiness review” of the Starliner crew returning from the space station. The agency said on July 26 that it would begin the process in the first two days of August.

But Boeing and NASA teams are still working on a possible return date for the June 5 mission, as officials evaluate test data and conduct analysis on propulsion problems and helium leaks that hampered the first stage of the Starliner capsule’s flight.

Ground tests conducted by mission teams in New Mexico as they worked to understand the problems led to surprising results, Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said Wednesday.

The space agency had previously said it found that excessive heat around some of the Starliner’s thrusters had caused Teflon seals to swell, restricting fuel flow and causing engine problems.

Officials at the press conference revealed that uncertainty over whether these bulging seals are actually the root cause of the problem — and how the problem could affect the Starliner in space — is at the heart of disagreements within NASA about how safe it is for a crew to return aboard the Starliner.

NASA officials “became increasingly uncomfortable with the uncertainty surrounding the motives,” Stitch said.

As NASA works to reach a consensus on the potential root cause of these problems and how much of a risk they might pose to the crewed return of Starliner, the space agency has been looking more seriously at alternative ways to get Williams and Wilmore home.

Boeing and SpaceX officials were not immediately available for comment during Wednesday’s briefing. Maintains Boeing said in a statement Friday that it believes the Starliner program is safe for astronauts to return to Earth.

Officials said they are considering several scenarios for returning if the Starliner is deemed unsafe to bring Williams and Wilmore home.

One option is to launch SpaceX’s planned Crew Dragon mission, Crew-9, with two astronauts on board instead of four. That would leave two seats free for Williams and Wilmore to fill on the Crew-9 return trip home, but it would also make the astronauts part of the Crew-9 rotation on the ISS. That would mean Williams and Wilmore would stay on the station for an additional six months — the length of a routine mission to the ISS. Postpone their return until at least February 2025.

In that case, Starliner would be left to return to Earth empty-handed. NASA would then have to decide whether the data collected on that flight was enough to give the space agency the confidence to officially certify Starliner for routine flights into orbit.

However, NASA has indicated that it is not certain whether the space agency will need a contingency plan at all.

“We didn’t approve that plan,” Stich said. “In other words, we did all the work to make sure that plan was in place; we had the suits that Crew 9 would wear (for Williams and Wilmore to wear on the Crew Dragon spacecraft). … But we didn’t officially run that, because that’s the path we were going to take.”

Stitch added that bringing Williams and Wilmore back aboard Starliner remains the “prime” option.

But it’s worth noting that NASA announced Tuesday that it will postpone the launch of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission.

The Crew-9 spacecraft was scheduled to launch on Aug. 18, with the Starliner capsule expected to return to Earth with the astronauts before that date. Now, Crew-9 will not launch until Sept. 24, NASA said, giving the agency more flexibility to decide whether to use a Starliner contingency plan.

“This adjustment allows more time for mission managers to complete return planning for the agency’s Boeing crewed flight test,” NASA said in a statement Tuesday. New release.

However, there are still some complications regarding whether or not NASA will choose to send Williams and Wilmore home on Crew Dragon.

“Stopping our primary mission of bringing Butch and Sonny home on Starliner takes on additional risks in the rest of our mission profile — so we have to weigh all of those risks,” Bowersox said.

For example, if Starliner is built to return to Earth empty, the spacecraft would need a software update to configure the vehicle for the autonomous return trip. That would essentially reboot Starliner’s computers on code the company originally wrote for an uncrewed test flight in 2022 — and NASA and Boeing haven’t revisited such software changes in two years, according to Stich.

Engineers will then need to run the software update through extensive testing at what’s called an “integrated test facility” on Earth, Stitch added.

“That’s what’s really going to take time if we want to transition” to bringing Williams and Wilmore home on SpaceX’s Crew 9 mission, he said.

It is not yet clear whether NASA is inclined to return astronauts to the Starliner or take advantage of its contingency plan.

When asked, Bowersox said Wednesday he couldn’t provide a sense of the likelihood of either scenario occurring.

“It could change dramatically one way or another, depending on new data,” he added.