NASA and Boeing are still working on the thruster issues that Starliner experienced on its first crewed flight last year, and the spacecraft's next mission will likely launch without astronauts.
The hunt for potentially habitable rocky planets in our galaxy has been the holy grail of exoplanet studies for decades. While the discovery of over 5,900 exoplanets in over 4.400 planetary systems has been a remarkable achievement, only a small fraction (217) have been confirmed as terrestrial - aka. rocky or "Earth-like." Furthermore, obtaining accurate information on a rocky exoplanet's atmosphere is very difficult, since potentially habitable rocky planets are much smaller and tend to orbit closer to their stars.

