It's an obvious conclusion at this point but there's a lot of pressure to decide otherwise because of the financial and political stakes. The core issue is that NASA and Boeing know this and don't want to sign off on this. But they also don't want to sign of on the failure of the mission just yet; having signed off on the launch already. So, they are a bit stuck here.

Fortunately, running down the clock makes this a foregone conclusion. A lot of the components and systems on this thing have expiry dates. So, they are running down the clock. And of course the longer that lasts, the more potential for new problems there is.

By simply running down the clock, they get to land the thing without passengers and without having to do so because of the original failure. So everybody saves face (somewhat). My guess is they'll try to land it normally without passengers to "validate" it at least worked as advertised. But without risking astronaut lives. And then dragon swoops in and it's business as usual and nobody died.

The difference between Dragon and Starliner is that Nasa used Dragon for years without passengers so they knew the thing worked as advertised. And then the first launch with passengers was a non-event in terms of safety as it was just another launch for them. It's what SpaceX does: iterate lots until they can nail it every time.

The issue with Starliner is that launching it is too expensive to do this. No reusable rocket means they need a new one every time. So, this is only the third launch they've attempted. And the previous unmanned launches had lots of delays and issues. Technically they've never had a flight without problems.

They never had a lot of confidence building launches without passengers because the cost for that would have been astronomical. So, it's a big question mark in terms of safety. And all the constant incidents involving Boeing aren't instilling a lot of confidence.

So, they are simply running down the clock until failure is a foregone conclusion. The pressure is on Boeing to guarantee safety to NASA. And there's no way that either of them is signing off on a manned return of this thing because they'd never hear the end of it if it goes wrong. Which is why we're getting all these euphemistic statements about hard to quantify risks to explain why they can't sign off.

Yeah, and the fact that is gone on so long without them throwing a bunch of shit into Starliner and sending it back down with a whole lot of telemetry shows just how much clothing the emperor doesn't have. If NASA and the rest of the USA had an Engineering Culture, it would be a forgone conclusion that if the experiment went sideways you'd figure it out and continue on.

They went and made it political.

This isn't directed at you, for you, I wish could actually pay you for your response.

SpaceX has one thing going for it and it is iterate and gather data. NASA used to have this, and then they lost it. When shit becomes "important" it also becomes ridiculously stupid. We need to figure out how to make things not important.