NASA and Boeing plan to spend the next few weeks conducting tests on the ground in order to better understand issues with the Starliner spacecraft’s thrusters before giving its crew the go-ahead to fly back to Earth, officials said in a press conference Friday.
They aren’t stranded because there is the emergency capsule to get them back.
Classic corporate doublespeak and half truths.
They’re not stranded because the part of the capsule that isn’t working has multiple redundancy and is intended to burn up on reentry anyway.
Starliner is perfectly capable of leaving the ISS whenever they want, but they would be unable to continue collecting data on the thruster shutoff (again, because it would burn up in the atmosphere).
Completely untrue. There are currently only 3 human-rated spacecraft docked to the ISS and none of them are set aside as some sort of emergency capsule. There’s no trickery here. The number of astronauts on board is equal to the number of seats available for them to ride back home in. The only reason they aren’t stranded is because Starliner is still fully capable of undocking and taking them home whenever necessary. If it wasn’t, then they would actually be stranded with no alternative way back beyond straping them to the floor of Dragon.
Except the “emergency capsule” is all of them, including Starliner. Because Starliner is perfectly capable of returning to earth safely.
Because every thruster that has shut down has hot fired okay, and the known helium leaks still leave enough margin to cover several multiples of the 5 hours or so of RCS operation that you need to get to landing.