The agency had insisted for a couple of months that it was confident that Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore would return on Starliner.
For weeks, NASA has downplayed problems experienced by Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that took two astronauts to the International Space Station in June.
But on Wednesday, NASA officials admitted that the issues might be more serious than first thought and that the astronauts might not return on the Boeing vehicle, after all.
The agency is exploring a backup option for the astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, to instead hitch a ride back to Earth on a spacecraft built by Boeing’s competitor SpaceX.
The astronauts’ stay in orbit, which was to be as short as eight days, could be extended into next year.
“We could take either path,” Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for the space operations mission directorate, said during a news conference on Wednesday. “And reasonable people could pick either path.”
The announcement adds more headaches and embarrassment for Boeing, an aerospace giant that has billions of dollars of aerospace contracts with the federal government and builds commercial jets that fly all around the world.
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