Boeing Starliner astronauts may be stranded in space until 2025 – National & International News – WED 7Aug2024

Boeing Starliner astronauts may be stranded in space until 2025.

WHO to send 1.2 million polio vaccines to Gaza amid outbreak fears.

NATIONAL NEWS

Boeing Starliner astronauts may be stranded in space until 2025 

Over 60 days ago, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams embarked on the first crewed flight of the Boeing Starliner crew capsule. The plan was for Wilmore and Williams to stay aboard the International Space Station for eight days and return to Earth on Starliner. During the flight, helium leaks were detected in the capsule’s propulsion module and a handful of the capsule’s docking thrusters failed.

NASA and Boeing announced that Wilmore and Williams’ stay on the ISS would be extended by a few days so that tests could be performed to diagnose the source of the problem. Those few days turned into a few more days and then weeks. All the while, Boeing and NASA insisted that Wilmore and Williams were “not stranded” aboard ISS and that they would be able to return safely on Starliner. They claimed that the delay was only necessary because the propulsion section would be jettisoned and burn up in the atmosphere upon return to Earth, depriving engineers of their best opportunity to understand the problem.

After having downplayed safety concerns for weeks, NASA has now admitted that in fact there is disagreement among engineers about whether Starliner is spaceworthy. Wilmore and Williams return may be postponed still further, possibly until February 2025, if they have to arrange alternate transportation aboard a Space-X crew ship. That would make their 8-day mission into an 8-month mission.

Boeing still insists that Starliner is safe but a spokesperson says they are can return the vessel to Earth uncrewed if NASA remains unconvinced.

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INTERNATIONAL NEWS

WHO to send 1.2 million polio vaccines to Gaza amid outbreak fears

Even as Israel awaits a possible large-scale, multi-front retaliation from Iran and its allies, Israel is intensifying its bombing campaign in Gaza. Each day, strikes on schools, refugee camps and tent encampments continue taking dozens of lives each day. The casualties are disproportionately children. Gaza’s health system is still hanging by a thread, it’s ever decreasing capacity stretched to the limit to treat the wounded. Outbreaks of disease, complicated by a spreading famine, threaten to eclipse the toll of even Israel’s relentless bombing campaign.

Sanitation conditions in Gaza are also desperate. Recently, testing showed that polio was present in Gaza’s wastewater. Once a feared childhood scourge causing paralysis and death, polio was very nearly eradicated worldwide until very recently. In recent years, there has been a resurgence in various countries across the world.

The World Health Organization is planning to bring 1.2 million polio vaccines into Gaza in hopes of heading off a potentially catastrophic outbreak. However, as with the distribution of food and medical supplies (much of which Israel is actively blocking from entering Gaza), the conditions in the Strip make timely distribution of the vaccine all but impossible.

The WHO has called for a ceasefire to allow distribution of the drug, but Israel has rejected calls for a humanitarian ceasefire innumerable times in the past 10 months. Israel began vaccinating its own soldiers operating in Gaza against polio back in July.

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