It didn’t go perfectly.
Instead of returning home after about eight days, the spacecraft remains docked at the station, its return delayed indefinitely while teams continue to resolve a series of problems – helium leaks and a few thrusters that stopped working at a critical moment of flight – in the capsule’s propulsion system.
Although the top priority is ensuring that NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore return to Earth safely, the technical delays and Boeing’s ability to overcome them not only reflect the high stakes for the the future of the Starliner program, but also the company’s commitment. the future in space. Boeing desperately needs to demonstrate that it can fly astronauts safely and overcome the kinds of technical challenges that plague the spacecraft, as well as the company’s commercial aviation division.
Once the mission is completed, NASA and Boeing must undergo a rigorous process to certify Starliner for regular crew rotation missions with a full contingent of four astronauts for regular six-month stays on the station. Only then Starliner joins SpaceX’s Dragon, which first flew astronauts for NASA in 2020, and is fulfilling a $4.2 billion contract that NASA awarded to Boeing a decade ago.
NASA wants Boeing’s Starliner to serve as America’s second transportation system to the space station. SpaceX has performed this function alone since 2020, but NASA says it needs two systems in case one fails.
Years of setbacks, including a failed test flight without astronauts on board in 2019, have cost Boeing some $1.5 billion in cost overruns. He needs Starliner to start flying the regular crew rotation flights so he can start getting paid for missions.
“I have no doubt that they are looking at this very carefully and would not commit to deorbiting a spacecraft that was not safe,” said Wayne Hale, former director of NASA’s space shuttle program. who also served as a flight pilot. director of 40 shuttle flights. “For both Boeing and SpaceX, they make money from post-certification missions. These are paid flights. They would like to recoup their development costs and, in fact, profit from the exercise. So it’s important.
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Starliner caused a series of small helium leaks that confused NASA and Boeing and led to a number of delays in taking off and then returning home. Initially, crews said they thought the leaks were due to poor sealing, but later said they weren’t sure what was behind them. They are also trying to understand why five of the spacecraft’s small thrusters suddenly stopped working as the spacecraft approached the space station on June 6, forcing NASA to ask Boeing to back up the vehicle and turn the thrusters back on. to put them back online.
Initially, Starliner was supposed to return home on June 18; NASA then pushed this date back to June 26. The space agency postponed it again Friday until later in July, saying teams needed more time to study problems with the propulsion system.
There is no rush to get the astronauts home, NASA said; helium leaks do not pose a risk for return, he said. Four of the five thrusters are now operating normally, and because the spacecraft is equipped with 28 of those thrusters, there is a lot of redundancy, officials said. The spacecraft can stay docked in space for up to 45 days, giving crew members some breathing room to continue problem-solving.
NASA and Boeing have repeatedly emphasized that Starliner is healthy and could be used at any time to return astronauts to Earth in the event of an emergency on the space station.
“We are taking our time and following our mission management team’s standard process,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said in a statement. “We are letting the data guide our decision-making regarding the management of small leaks from the helium system and the performance of the thrusters that we observed during rendezvous and docking.”
Being able to resolve the propellant problem and helium leaks will play a prominent role in this certification review, officials said.
“We need to address the helium leaks,” Stich said at a press briefing last week. “We’re not going to do another mission like this with the helium leaks.” Teams also need to find out what “causes thrusters to have low thrust,” he added. “So we have some of that work to do after this flight.”
However, the certification process is not currently the agency’s main concern. For now, “the entire team has been focused on understanding what’s going on with this vehicle for the crewed flight test and our return plan.” So we didn’t look too far into the future,” Stich said. “Later this summer, we will outline all the work that awaits us after this vehicle returns with the crew, and then determine what the path forward is.”
In preparation for this work, Boeing and NASA want to collect as much data on the systems as possible. Boeing has already tested the thrusters while the spacecraft was docked with the space station. Boeing and NASA are working with ground simulators to test different scenarios to try to get to the root of the problems and ensure the safety of the vehicle.
The certification process is a “scrutiny,” Hale said. “And it’s clear that both of those issues need to be resolved” before NASA will allow Boeing to fly a full crew of astronauts. He added that “propellant failures and helium leaks are problems we constantly face in the shuttle program. They were very common.
Safety is paramount, and the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated in 2003 while returning from orbit, is still on people’s minds, he said. “These lessons are not forgotten,” he said.
Complicating matters, the helium and propellant problems are in Starliner’s service module, which provides most of the spacecraft’s engine power. Before returning to Earth, it is released and burns up in the atmosphere. Engineers therefore want to diagnose problems while the hardware is still accessible. This, Stich said, will allow them to gain “valuable insight into system upgrades we will want to make for post-certification missions.”
Since “the service module isn’t coming back, they have to extract all the data they can from it now,” said Mike Massimino, a former NASA astronaut and professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University. “You would want to stay in orbit as long as possible to get that data.”
Williams and Wilmore are also more than happy to remain in orbit, he said, especially since Williams was last in space in 2012 and Wilmore in 2015.
“More time in space is a good thing,” he said. “I wish I was up there. They were both waiting on this flight. Why rush?