Coming Back Empty

Making a new post to this journal can get me looking back at the other entries still visible near the bottom of its front page. Sometimes, too, I just go to the front page and check down this. In recent days, though, this has made me a little conscious the posts I made about the Starliner space capsule making to the space station are getting near the bottom and the astronauts who crewed the test flight are still in space. Jokes about “being stranded” (including a merely good-humoured discussion a little while ago on the radio program I listen to driving to work) do get me thinking it would be easy enough to get involved in the time-is-money scheduled work on the space station, but there was something unfortunate about the whole situation.

In any case I checked the official NASA site once more today, and saw a report the capsule is going to try and return to Earth empty with the astronauts staying rather longer until they can come back in a different kind of capsule. It’s still unfortunate, but it’s not quite the same as being “stuck.”