Astronauts stranded in space with no end in sight to nightmare 51-day ordeal
The two US astronauts have been stranded in space for 53 days and NASA has said there's no 'return date' as yet.
US astronauts who travelled to space for an eight-day mission have now been stranded orbiting Earth for 53 days over concerns with a Boeing capsule - and NASA say there is still no official return date.
Sunita Williams, 58, and Barry 'Butch' Wilmore, 61, were meant to travel to the International Space Station (ISS) to carry out work on a lab for just over a week.
But problems with the new Boeing manufactured Starliner capsule has caused both NASA and Boeing to put the pick-up of the pair of veteran space travellers on hold until at least August. The capsule has remained docked at the ISS since June 5.
ABC news reports NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said in a latest statement on Friday that "we don't have a major announcement today relative to a return date".
He added: "We're making great progress, but we're just not quite ready to do that.
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"Our focus today is to return Butch and Suni on Starliner. I think we're starting to close in on those final pieces of the flight rationale to make sure we can come home safely and that's our primary focus right now."
The US aviation giant Boeing, which has been plagued by recent civilian commercial aircraft problems, said their engineers had found five "small" helium leaks during testing of the capsule.
Thruster failures were also highlighted during the original mission to the ISS.
But Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of the commercial crew program at Boeing, said the firm should not have been so "empathic", meaing to be able to understand other people's feelings, about it being an eight-day mission.
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"I think the only thing we'd do differently, is we would not have been so empathic about an eight-day mission
"We kept saying 'eight-day minimum mission', I think we all knew it was going to go longer than that, it's my regret that we didn't just say 'we're gonna stay up there until we get everything done we want to go do'."
The Boeing capsule launched from Florida on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on June 5, and within a few hours NASA reported the capsule had suffered two leaks.
Once the space vehicle had docked with the ISS another leak was found on June 6, and more were found on June 10.
It's reported contingecy plans to return both astronauts to Earth after almost a month-and-a-half in space could include using Elon Musk's SpaceX Dragon capsule.
