I have noticed of course this is no place to run into technical trouble that's exactly what happened to Boeing Starliner 400 kilometers above Earth attached to the International Space Station and stuck there for now and you really don't want things to go wrong uh in that kind of extreme environment Starliner first crew was all smiles when they docked at the space station in early June we're just happy as can be to be up in space but this week NASA announced it's delaying their return to Earth until at least June 26th Starliner has suffered four helium leaks and five failures of its thrusters NASA wants time to figure out what's wrong we want to give our teams a little bit more time to look at the data do some analysis and make sure we're really ready to come home that means Starliner will spend at least 20 days in orbit for what was supposed to be just a 5-day Mission rocketing up the embarrassment for the baguer bo and its troubled Space Program let's get going the launch of this mission was scrubbed multiple times by technical problems in 2019 the first uncrewed Starliner flight failed to reach proper orbit the whole program is over a year behind schedule and $1.5 billion over budget I think what we're really seeing with the difficulties Boeing is having um relative to SpaceX the problem is they've lost a lot of capability PMA 2 into Starliner the good news the problems don't impact the parts of Starliner needed for the perilous re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and the ship could theoretically spend up to 45 days in space if problems persist those delays are really a problem for the engineers back on Earth for the astronauts it means a little more time to sit back and enjoy the view Jackson prco Global News Washington