Tuesday, August 27

We apologize that Upcoming Events was not published in yesterday's daily update. It has now been added, and you can view the updated article here.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams are staying on the International Space Station until 2025 after issues with Boeing's Starliner, and they will return on SpaceX's Crew Dragon instead.

Wilmore and Williams initially flew to the ISS aboard Boeing's Starliner on June 6, marking the aviation company's first-ever crewed spaceflight. The pair was only supposed to stay aboard the ISS for nine days, but it has been almost three months since their original departure aboard the Starliner on its initial test flight. After approching the ISS, things went downhill from there, with various helium leaks occurring as it approached and thruster issues affecting the spacecraft during docking. The thrusters have not been able to function properly since then.

Then, Boeing recently announced that the Starliner would be coming back to Earth uncrewed, as the risks of something going wrong were just too big. Any company launching missions into space needs their astronauts to be their primary priority, and in this case, Boeing is not risking losing the lives of the two astronauts. While Boeing and NASA were eager to bring Wilmore and Williams home aboard their spacecraft as soon as possible, continuous thruster issues have troubled Starliner ever since the initial helium leak started to spark worries of a delayed return. While Starliner will definitely return to space with crew again sometime in the future, NASA's assessments have concluded that it is safer to bring it back uncrewed. They will be the ones to decide when it is safe for Starliner to return to Earth without causing any severe impacts on land or in the oceans, but until then, it will stay hooked up to the ISS.

Meanwhile, Wilmore and Williams will return to Earth in 2025 aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon. The mission, also called Crew-9, will be SpaceX's first-ever crewed launch from the Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC 40) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, as most launches liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Crew Dragon was originally planned to launch with a crew of four and return with those same four, but the plan has changed due to the mishap with Starliner. Due to NASA's agreement with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, Russia's Aleksandr Gorbunov is required to be onboard, while US Space Force colonel Nick Hague will fly with him to the ISS. Takeoff is scheduled for September 24 of this year. Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams will then become part of the Crew-9 team, staying onboard the ISS for around six months before returning sometime in February 2025.

Fact of the Day (Reader's Digest): The most common street name in the United States is 2nd Street. Since many roads named 1st Street were renamed to Main Street but others weren't, 2nd Street ranks higher on the list of most common street names.

Quote of the Day (Gracious Quotes): It is the struggle itself that is most important. We must strive to be more than we are. (Gene Roddenberry)

Word of the Day (Merriam-Webster): Fallacious (adj)- Fallacious is a formal word that typically describes something, such as an argument or assumption, that is false or inaccurate and that tends to mislead or deceive others.

In a Sentence: The notion that disease is caused by malign spirits was known to be fallacious long before the advent of germ theory.