What goes up doesn't always come down — at least, not right away. Boeing's Starliner mission to the International Space Station won't return to Earth until sometime in August, CNBC said, while engineers troubleshoot the craft's helium thruster system. 

Just don't say the two-person crew that launched in June is "stranded in space." Yes, the capsule has spent nearly two months on what was originally intended to last a bit more than a week. But NASA "always has contingency options," said one official.

Boeing has had a "long, difficult road" getting the capsule into space, said The New York Times. Back in 2019, it appeared the company could beat Elon Musk's SpaceX to space. But an uncrewed launch that year went awry, upended by software errors that were caused by "multiple failures in Boeing's processes." The second launch, two years later, was also plagued by faulty thrusters. Some observers say that trial and error is part of the game.

What did the commentators say?
Starliner is "clearly a problem-prone, clunky spacecraft," Mark R. Whittington said at The Hill. The question now is whether it's worth the time and money to overhaul the program or if NASA should just stick to letting SpaceX ferry astronauts to the space station. 

It's not even clear if Boeing is capable of fixing the problems. Maybe it's time to look at other options like the Gaganyaan spacecraft from India or the Dream Chaser space plane currently in development. 

Starliner's latest problems are a "misadventure the company's space division could ill afford," Thomas Black said at Bloomberg. The company is already suffering from a "tarnished reputation" thanks to a series of problems with its 734 Max airliner. That's why Boeing should spin off the space division into a "nimble," standalone company that can focus on NASA's needs. The space unit is a "distraction for Boeing's main mission: making safe and reliable commercial aircraft."

What next?
Boeing might be looking for an exit. Just 10% of its revenues come from the spaceflight business, Marketplace said. And the industry is increasingly crowded with competitors like BlueOrigin and SpaceX that weren't around when Boeing originally got into the business. 

In the meantime, there are still two astronauts — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — to bring home. NASA isn't ready to announce a return date. "We'll come home," said NASA's Steve Stich, "when we're ready."

The debate over artificial intelligence, especially over the last couple of years, "usually goes one of two ways," said Vox: AI is "either the beginning of the end of human civilization or a shortcut to utopia." The truth, as is so often the case with new technology, may lie somewhere in between.

Utopia
AI-powered assistants already promise a "workplace utopia, making employees more productive, improving workflows and helping share knowledge across an organization," said Fortune. In his latest book, "Deep Utopia," Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford in the U.K., imagines AI technology progressing to the point at which it can "do all economically valuable work at near-zero cost," said The Economist. Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted a future in which new scientific and cultural knowledge will be "widely open-sourced and available to everybody."

Dystopia
In a widely read op-ed at Time last year, AI pioneer Eliezer Yudkowsky warned that the most likely outcome of "building a superhumanly smart AI" is that "literally everyone on Earth will die." AI skeptics like Yudkowsky "envision a future in which amoral AI continues on its path of increasing intelligence to a tipping point beyond which their intelligence will be so far beyond us that we can't stop them from inadvertently destroying us," said Skeptic. 

Somewhere in between
Most AI scientists believe the way forward is moderation, making machines "incrementally smarter and our lives gradually better." Technology historian Kevin Kelly compares this pathway for AI to the evolution of automobiles: We may not have flying cars, but vehicles have become faster, safer and more efficient over the past 50 years. 

Who knows which of the two extreme scenarios is nearer the truth, said Vox. But the "polarized nature of the AI discourse is itself interesting." In a period of rapid technological growth and political disruption, there are "many reasons to worry about the course we're on," added Vox. And that at least is something "almost everyone can agree with."