NASA officials gave an update Friday on the status of Boeing’s Starliner docked at the International Space Station and when astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams would get the OK to come home.

“I want to make it very clear that Butch and Suni are not stranded in space,” said NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich on a media call. “I want to make it real clear that we’re not in a rush to come home.”

Wilmore and Williams arrived to the space station on June 6, a day after launching atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. They were supposed to spend about a week on board the International Space Station on the Crew Flight Test mission for the spacecraft, which was making its first flight with humans onboard.

Issues with helium leaks and thrusters on the spacecraft’s attached propulsion module, though, showed up on the trip up to the ISS,. Those issues have continued to push back any planned a return date as NASA and Boeing pore over data and potential dangers before the flight home.

Stich reiterated, though, that the spacecraft is considered safe, and even OK for its two astronauts to ride home in in case of an emergency. In fact, a Russian-operated satellite breakup at a lower altitude than the ISS on Wednesday forced all nine of the crew on board to temporarily go into their respective spacecraft acting as “lifeboats” as a precaution. They climbed into the Soyuz, the SpaceX Crew Dragon and the Starliner in case the debris field from the satellite became a threat.

“There’s no new issues to report today. We don’t have any new problems,” Stich said. “The vehicle at station is in good shape.”

That said, since the propulsion module will separate from the spacecraft and burn up on reentry, teams want to work through the issues as much as possible before they lose the hardware on the trip home. In tandem, teams at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico will go through a rigorous test regimen of a test thruster to replicate the flight up and test what’s expected on the flight back.

“We’ll recreate that profile, then we’ll put a pretty aggressive profile in the thruster for the downhill phase,” Stich said. “Then we’ll give engineers a chance to go look at that thruster and take a look at it and make sure that there’s nothing that’s unusual about the thruster.”

That means there’s no return date target yet, but Stich noted that before launch the spacecraft had a 45-day upper limit planned because of crew module battery life. Teams, though, are working to get that limit expanded up to 90 days. Ultimately, Starliner is designed to be docked to the ISS for half a year if and when it gets approved for regular missions.

“We’re not going to target a specific [return] date until we get that testing completed, we look at the fault tree and then we understand the path for it,” Stich said. “Then [we will] have an agency-level review and then we’ll lay out the rest of the plan from undock to landing. I think we’re on a good path.”

Stich said that while NASA is comfortable with the safety of Starliner, its two crew could always fly home on another spacecraft in the event further testing reveals something more negative.

Boeing’s vice president Mark Nappi bemoaned some of the media coverage of the test mission.

“Every morning I sit and I read them and I’ll tell you from being a representative Boeing and a representative of the Starliner program is pretty painful to read,” he said. “The things that are out there — we’ve gotten a really good test flight that’s been accomplished so far, and it’s been viewed rather negatively.”

He explained that the situation allowing for more time on the station from his perspective is a win-win, and he has no regrets flying the mission.

“We don’t understand these issues well enough to fix them permanently,” Nappi said. “The only way that we can do that is take the time in this unique environment and go and get more data, run more tests.”

Plans to certify Starliner will take longer than expected, so Starliner-1, the first operational flight, will have to possibly slip past the early plans as soon as February 2025, Stich said. That means SpaceX would have to move forward with a Crew-10 mission instead for early 2025, but that NASA had been preparing both crews already.

Boeing has six operational missions contracted as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program before the ISS is decommissioned after 2030, and Nappi said that despite the delays, Boeing is not changing its stance on the program.

“We’re not going to back out,” he said. “This is our job and this is what we’re going to continue to do to meet our commitments.”