NASA gave new information on when Sunita Williams will return to Earth from space

NASA: Two NASA astronauts (Sunita Williams and her partner Butch Wilmore) are delaying their return from the International Space Station (ISS) by more than a month and will remain on the ISS until an engineer fixes a problem in their Boeing capsule. Both will not be able to return to Earth even in July. Officials gave this information on Thursday.

Test pilots Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams were supposed to stay on the space lab for about a week and return in mid-June, but a thruster malfunction and a helium leak in Boeing's new Starliner capsule forced NASA and Boeing to stay longer. Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager, said the mission manager was not ready to announce a return date.

Engineers completed testing on a spare thruster in the New Mexico desert last week to determine what went wrong during docking and prepare for the return trip to Earth. On June 6, a day after launch, five of the capsule's thrusters malfunctioned as it approached the space station. Four have been restarted.

After the retirement of the space shuttle, NASA has hired private companies to transport astronauts to the space station. For which Boeing and SpaceX have been paid billions of dollars. This was Boeing's first test flight with crew members. SpaceX has been carrying humans to space since 2020.