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Nasa said on Saturday that it would use a spacecraft from billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX rather than Boeing to bring home two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station.

Astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore, who were supposed to return to Earth two months ago, will now come back in February aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon rather than the Boeing CST-100 Starliner they travelled to the space station with that subsequently suffered technical difficulties.

“Space flight is risky,” said Nasa administrator Bill Nelson. “A test flight, by nature, is neither safe nor routine, and so the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety.”

Nasa and Boeing engineers are now reconfiguring the Starliner in order for it to return to Earth in September without a crew. While Nasa officials said they still expected to use the spacecraft on crewed missions, it is another blow to the reputation of a company that has been heavily scrutinised in recent years for engineering and manufacturing failures.

Mark Nappi, the manager at Boeing overseeing Starliner, said in a message to employees on Saturday that he knew this was “not the decision we had hoped for, but we stand ready to carry out the action’s necessary to support Nasa’s decision. The focus remains first and foremost on ensuring the safety of the crew and spacecraft.”

Boeing said it was continuing to focus “on the safety of the crew and spacecraft . . . and we are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return”.

Boeing and SpaceX are part of Nasa’s commercial crew programme, which was developed to encourage private sector suppliers to compete to ferry astronauts to the space station. SpaceX launched its first successful crewed mission in 2020.

When Williams and Wilmore blasted off aboard the Starliner on June 5, the capsule already was billions of dollars over budget and had experienced delays on earlier planned launches.

The mission to test the capabilities of the new spacecraft was scheduled to last eight days. But helium leaked from the spacecraft, and five of its thrusters functioned improperly, causing engineers and scientists at Nasa and Boeing to run tests to determine whether Starliner was the safest option to shuttle the astronauts back to Earth.

There was ultimately “too much uncertainty” around thrusters potentially failing during a tight piloting sequence, said Steve Stich, manager for Nasa’s commercial crew programme.

“It was just too much risk,” he said.

The decision was made in the context of past disasters, Nelson said. The explosions of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles killed a total of 14 astronauts, partly because the agency’s climate prevented engineers from raising “obvious mistakes” with top officials.

Boeing and Nasa viewed the uncertainty of the data differently, said Nasa associate administrator Jim Free. Fellow Nasa colleague Ken Bowersox said there were “tense discussions because the call was close”, adding that the agency was “committed to continuing to work with Boeing”.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top U.S. infectious disease expert, spent time in the hospital after being infected with West Nile virus and is now recovering at home, a spokesperson confirmed Saturday.

Fauci is expected to make a full recovery, the spokesperson said on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

West Nile virus is commonly spread through the bite of an infected mosquito. While most people don’t experience symptoms, about 1 in 5 can develop a fever, headache, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea, or rash, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 1 out of 150 infected people develop a serious, sometimes fatal, illness.

CBS News’ chief medical correspondent, Dr. Jonathan LaPook, wrote in a social media post that he spoke Saturday with Fauci, who said he was likely infected from a mosquito bite that he got in his backyard.

“Dr. Fauci was hospitalized about ten days ago after developing fever, chills, and severe fatigue,” the post on X said. It said Fauci spent a week in the hospital.

As chief White House medical adviser, Fauci was the public face of the U.S. government during the COVID-19 pandemic, a role that made him both a trusted voice to millions and also the target of partisan anger. He left the government in 2022 but was back before Congress in June to testify as part of Republicans’ yearslong investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and the U.S. response to the disease.

Fauci last summer joined the faculty at Georgetown University as a distinguished university professor.

There are no vaccines to prevent West Nile, or medicines to treat it. As of Aug. 20, the CDC had recorded 216 cases in 33 states this year. It’s best prevented by avoiding mosquito bites.

Italian prosecutors are investigating charges of manslaughter and “negligent shipwreck” over the sinking of a superyacht in bad weather in which UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and six others died.

Ambrogio Cartosio, Italian public prosecutor in the Sicilian town of Termini Imerese, told a news conference on Saturday that the investigation was targeting “persons unknown”. But he said that could change to named individuals and would not depend on the recovery of the 540-tonne wreck of the Bayesian from the seabed near Porticello off the coast of Sicily.

“It could be that we add someone to the list of people being investigated even way before the recovery of the boat,” he said. “It seems to me likely that offences of negligent shipwreck and manslaughter have been committed. It’s about establishing who they can be ascribed to.”

Bayesian was anchored off Porticello and sank at about 4am on Monday after being hit by exceptionally violent winds. Of the 22 passengers and crew on board, 15 were rescued by a boat that had been anchored nearby, six died trapped inside the boat and another was found dead in the sea. The last body, that of Lynch’s daughter Hannah, was recovered by divers from a cabin on Friday.

Investigators found “the boat sank stern-first, not bow-first”, Cartosio said. The finding followed analysis of the position of the vessel on the seabed, interviews with survivors and the testimony of skipper Karsten Börner, whose yacht was anchored near Bayesian when the storm hit.

Börner, who rescued Bayesian survivors after they had fired a red distress flare from a life raft, told the Financial Times that he and his passengers saw something in the sea, including what seemed to be a triangle during a flash of lightning, while he worked to keep his boat in position during the storm.

“I think they saw the ship capsize and when I turned around I saw the bow, then it went down,” he said.

The stern-first sinking suggests water may have flooded into the aft, or rear, compartments of the boat, tipping its bow upwards. It is not yet known whether a large hatch in the stern just above the waterline was open and prosecutors did not comment on the issue.

The weather forecast, issued at midnight on Sunday for the 12 hours until noon on Monday, warned of isolated thunderstorms but not of any extreme weather systems, according to Admiral Raffaele Macauda of the Palermo coastguard.

But Raffaele Cammarano, deputy prosecutor, said the storm that struck the boat was “truly rapid, sudden”. He said: “From the information that we have obtained, it is more likely that it was a downburst.’’

Borner said the wind was “violent, very violent” and estimated it reached force 12 on the Beaufort scale — hurricane strength. “It was tonnes of water coming down. I never saw that before, there was a water tornado,” he added.

The prosecutors said the first five bodies to be extracted from the wreck, recovered on Wednesday and Thursday, were found in one cabin on the port side. Hannah Lynch’s body was found in another cabin on the same side.

Cammarano said the gathering of the bodies in one cabin did not necessarily indicate that the passengers were trying to escape, as they could have been pushed there by the inrushing water. “Probably they were asleep,” Cammarano commented.

Investigators said the luxury yacht gave its last position electronically at 4.06am, suggesting this was when it finally sank beneath the waves, while the survivors fired their flare from the life raft at 4.38am. Prosecutors are examining how all the crew except the chef managed to escape while all six victims whose bodies were found in the hull were passengers.

A coastguard official said a timeline for extracting the diesel from Bayesian’s fuel tanks — it can carry up to 50 tonnes — had not yet been decided. However, he said recovering the vessel from the seabed was a priority, because it would help the investigation and make the bay safer for the local community.

The vessel now lies 49 meters below the surface. Its owner will cover the costs of its recovery, according to Macuada. Records indicate that Lynch’s family owned the yacht.