How two astronauts ended up stranded in space

In today’s The Big Story podcast, when two astronauts took Boeing’s Starliner to the International Space Station in June, they were prepared for a quick turnaround. Today, the Starliner comes back to Earth without them, and they’ll have to instead wait until next year to be rescued by Boeing’s biggest rival in the Space Race, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Joey Roulette is the space reporter for Reuters. “When we look at all the problems that Boeing has had on this Starliner program, its not much different than what Boeing has experienced in its commercial airplanes division” says Roulette, “there have been hundreds of lives that have been lost on the airplane side, so it’s not particularly equal, but I think much of the same engineering culture that brought you those airplanes, brought you this Starliner capsule.”

What was supposed to be an eight-day mission for these two astronauts, will take at least eight months. So how did this all go so wrong?