These individuals are professionals who signed up for this and are paid to do the job. This isn’t a rescue; the media is simply sensationalizing the entire story.
> individuals are professionals who signed up for this and are paid to do the job
Is the thesis only leisure travellers can be rescued? Astronauts do not sign up to fly on faulty ships. They accept the risk of it happening. But that acceptance doesn’t diminish the tragedy of a ship breaking up on reëntry nor, by extension, the emergency status of a reëntry vehicle with misbehaving manoeuvring thrusters.
This discussion reminds me of the reaction among some to the FAA grounding Falcon 9 “after the first stage used in the [August] launch crash-landed and toppled into the Atlantic Ocean while attempting to touch down on a SpaceX droneship” [1]. It doesn’t matter that everyone else tosses their spent stages into the sea. There was a plan and it went abnormally. That calls for a review. If that review can’t be concluded satisfactorily, as it wasn’t in the case of Starliner, you have an emergency. Relieving someone from an emergency is a rescue.
By some of the standards raised in this thread, a test pilot ejected from their plane and stranded in the tundra wouldn’t qualify for rescue because they were paid or weren’t in immediate and obvious mortal peril or because the ejection seat worked.
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