Imagine going on a weeklong business trip and not coming home until the following year. That may be the situation for U.S. astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, whose eight-day mission to the International Space Station has already stretched to more than two months and is likely to go even longer.
The pair launched to the space station on a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 5. The plan was for them to come back on the same ship eight days later. But helium leaks and issues with the spacecraft’s thrusters made NASA and Boeing decide to delay the astronauts’ return.
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