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Comment by kasperni | Hacker News Reader

From the astronauts themselves: "We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.” [1]

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/science/boeing-starliner-...

Saw an interview with one of them on American national TV news. She did not seem the least bit unhappy.

Good for them, but let's be honest: It does not give a great picture that they are still up there after more than half a year.

They've never been "stuck" up there in the sense NASA couldn't get them home asap. NASA just decided to instead use them to do normal ISS duties and put them as part of the standard ISS rotation. It seems they're okay with that.

You do realise they were supposed to return on the next crew rotation in Feb?

Which was on a Crew Dragon that the delivery is late on.

So that's on Musk's company. Now that looks bad. They can't even rescue them because SpaceX are running late.

I am not sure what you are trying to tell me. Do you agree that it does look bad?

I think it was fairly clear. The real issue is somewhere else. Perhaps your perception of bad is wrong.

This is some weird mental gymnastics. They were supposed to be up there 30 days and it’s winding up to be over 280 days due to Boeings failures with starliner. The fact that SpaceX can fill those shoes with a comparatively tiny amount of notice is super embarrassing for Boeing.

Secondly, NASA announced in December that SpaceX will return them in Boeing’s place in late March, which SpaceX is still on-time for. SpaceX is having to shuffle stuff around to accommodate this because they didn’t plan for having to pick up Boeing’s slack. Why don’t you go ask Boeing how long they’d take to get another unscheduled Starliner up there. It’d be literally years.

> This is some weird mental gymnastics.

If you would please edit out swipes from your HN posts as the guidelines request (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), we'd appreciate it.

Your comment would be fine without that bit. (Well, the "Why don't you go ask Boeing" is also a little swipey.)

That's fair, sorry dang. I strive to follow the guidelines well and sometimes I slip up. I'll do better.

"Great picture" sounds pretty subjective to me, but Suni Williams served a turn as commander of ISS and performed her eighth (wow) spacewalk while she's been up there. I imagine Wilmore is having fun too.

It sucks for the guys who were scheduled to go up and had their trip postponed (not to mention Boeing shareholders) but otherwise, everything seems cool. You can certainly spin it to look any way you want, but using words like "stranded" and passing political conspiracy theories is lame.

(the difficulty NASA of the Mir-era would have had in adapting to something comparable to this is something to contemplate)

If you planned to visit Antarctica and your return trip got cancelled and your month long trip turned into nearly a year, then yeah I think most anyone would say you were stranded in Antarctica

If you had a month long trip to antartica. Your ship broke and there is others you can take back. But since your ship broke your boss ask if you want to keep doing that for longer since priorities will change. You say you're cool with it and appreciate the opportunity to do something incredibly unique for longer.

Anything goes wrong, you can return at any time. You're not able to stay, there are plans that can bring you earlier, but again, you're cool with it.

The only people not cool with it are political goons and the guy who owns a ship company that would benefit wildly on a "rescue mission". Even if fabricated.

And I believe the astronauts are less stranded than researchers at McMurdo since getting out of Antartica in bad weather is harder than getting down from the station in the standby capsules.

Are they stranded? technically yes. Do they need rescue? no.

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