Let’s hope that astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are comfortable up there
on the International Space Station, because now NASA officials are saying they won’t
be coming home until August.
Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, tried to underplay this most
recent delay. “Some of the data suggests optimistically, maybe it’s by the end of July,
but we’ll just follow the data each step at a time,” he said in a press conference this
week.
So far, the astronauts themselves are cool with this. “We’re having a great time aboard
the ISS,” Williams said in a virtual press conference. “I’m not complaining. Butch is not
complaining that we’re up here for a couple of extra weeks.”
Still, at this point, it’s hard to spin the way this mission is playing out, even with Stich’s
insistence that these issues are standard with test flights.
Way back in early June when Boeing’s Starliner finally took off on its first crewed test
flight, the plan was for Wilmore, mission commander, and Williams, mission pilot, to
have a sojourn of about a week in low Earth orbit before they – and the Starliner,
dubbed “Calypso” – would head back, completing the mission.
However, things haven’t worked out according to the original plan, or the plan after that
one, or even the one after that, as we’ve noted before. After running years behind
schedule and millions of dollars over budget, the launch for Boeing’s commercial crew
spacecraft was scrubbed twice in May and had to go through intensive analyses before
NASA officials cleared it for launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June
5 – in spite of a small helium leak. (Boeing and NASA engineers had discovered and
reviewed it shortly after the first launch attempt, before ultimately clearing Starliner to go
up, leak and all.)
Initially, Starliner’s triumphant liftoff must have seemed like a badly needed win for
Boeing. The company has been running along to a steady, noisy drumbeat of bad press
over alleged malfunctions, sketchy dealings with the Federal Aviation Administration
and disasters in recent years, from the Alaska Airlines flight that lost a door back in
January and the troubling revelations about its 737 Max series of planes. (Earlier this
week the aerospace giant struck a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice, agreeing to
plead guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to defraud the federal government to avoid
going to trial over fatal 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019.)
But things haven’t turned out that way.
Instead, by the time Starliner reached the ISS on June 6, the spacecraft had sprung
additional helium leaks and, as it docked, five of its thrusters, which are used to help
steer and pilot the ship, were malfunctioning.
And so began the delays. Although NASA officials continue to insist that Williams and
Wilmore are not, in fact, stranded aboard the ISS, all signs indicate that the same NASA
officials are clearly not going to have the pair go through re-entry on Starliner based on
only blind faith.
Since the vehicle’s arrival at the ISS, NASA and Boeing engineers have been analyzing
these issues intensively. They managed to get four of the five offending thrusters to fire
again upon further testing once Starliner was docked, but are still working to understand
what caused the issues and how it will affect the craft. Earlier this month, they even
opted to begin performing ground fire testing on an exact replica’s thrusters at the
federal space agency’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.
The plan now is to make sure the helium leaks won’t cause any issues and to finish
testing out the thrusters to make sure they’ll function as required whenever the crew
does undock from the ISS. “We’re going to work methodically through our processes,
including a return flight readiness review with the agency, before we get the go to
proceed towards undocking and landing,” Stich said. “This is a very standard process.”
There’s a scheduled rotation for the regular space station crew in mid-August, so right
now NASA folks are hoping to get Williams and Wilmore home again before then, to
“avoid overcrowding,” Stich said. In the meantime, though, the ISS has enough supplies
to support Williams, Wilmore and the seven other astronauts stationed there right now,
according to Stich.
And Mark Nappi, Boeing vice president and commercial crew program manager,
maintained that the delays and extra testing are strictly about the future, a future where
Boeing’s Starliner will emerge from this process stronger and better than before. “All this
information is going to go in a big bucket, and all the engineers are going to review it
and try to see if it doesn’t point to root cause or point to some additional testing that we
can do in the future to eliminate this problem once and for all,” he said.
That may be the case, but it’s fair to wonder how much that will matter in the long run.
While Boeing has struggled to get Starliner off the ground, SpaceX completed its test
flights in 2020, and has been running missions to and from the ISS for four years now.
Originally, Starliner was slated to tote four astronauts to the space station for a six-
month stay in February 2025, but NASA has already started looking at subbing in
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, with Starliner’s first operational mission being delayed until
later in the year.
In fact, there were even some hypothesizing that NASA might ultimately opt to use
SpaceX’s commercial capsule to bring Williams and Wilmore home. However, despite,
well, everything, NASA officials have confirmed that although it’s possible for the two
astronauts to hitch a ride on Crew Dragon, there are currently no plans to actually use
the SpaceX vehicle to bring them back to Earth, according to Stich.
As to the astronauts in question, they’re still Starliner fans, they said in a virtual press
conference with Wilmore stating that they remain “absolutely confident” in the
spacecraft. “We will be ready then unless the data shows otherwise,” he said. “But right
now, based on what we know,
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
