It didn’t go perfectly.
Instead of returning home after about eight days, the spacecraft remains docked to the station, its return delayed indefinitely while teams continue to deal with a series of problems — helium leaks and several thrusters that stopped working at a critical moment in flight — during the flight . capsule propulsion system.
While the top priority is making sure NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore return safely to Earth, the technical delays and whether Boeing can overcome them reflect the high stakes not only for the future of the Starliner program, but also for the future in space. Boeing is desperate to prove it can safely fly astronauts and overcome the kinds of technical problems that plague the spacecraft — as well as the company’s commercial aviation division.
Once the mission is complete, NASA and Boeing must will undergo a rigorous Starliner certification process for regular crew rotation missions with a full contingent of four astronauts for regular six-month stays on the station. Only then is it possible The Starliner joins SpaceX’s Dragon, which first flew astronauts for NASA in 2020, fulfilling a $4.2 billion contract NASA awarded to Boeing a decade ago.
NASA wants the Boeing Starliner to serve as America’s second transportation system to the space station. SpaceX has operated the function alone since 2020, but NASA says it needs two systems in case one fails.
Years of setbacks, including a botched test flight without astronauts on board in 2019, cost Boeing about $1.5 billion in cost overruns. He needs the Starliner to start flying regular flights with crew rotation so he can start getting paid for missions.
“I have a lot of confidence that they’re taking a very hard look at this and that they wouldn’t commit to de-orbiting a spacecraft that wasn’t safe,” said Wayne Hale, a former NASA space shuttle program director who also served as the flight. director for 40 shuttle flights. “For Boeing, as for SpaceX, they make money on post-certification missions. These are revenue flights. They would love to recoup their development costs and actually make a profit from this exercise. So it’s important.”
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The Starliner caused a series of small helium leaks that confused NASA and Boeing and led to a series of delays in the launch and subsequent return home. Initially, the teams said they thought the leaks were caused by a bad seal, but later said they weren’t sure what was behind them. They are also trying to figure out why the spacecraft’s five small thrusters suddenly stopped working as the spacecraft approached the space station on June 6, forcing NASA to have Boeing return the vehicle and re-ignite the thrusters to bring them back online.
The Starliner was originally scheduled to return home on June 18; then NASA pushed it back to June 26. The space agency pushed it back again on Friday until sometime later in July, saying the teams needed more time to study problems with the propulsion system.
There’s no rush to get the astronauts home, NASA said; Helium leaks do not pose a return risk, he said. Four of the five thrusters are now functioning normally, and since the spacecraft is equipped with 28 such thrusters, there is plenty of redundancy, officials said. The spacecraft can stay docked in space for up to 45 days, giving crew members a little breathing room to continue troubleshooting.
NASA and Boeing have repeatedly stressed that the Starliner is healthy and could be used to fly astronauts back to Earth at any time in the event of a space station emergency.
“We’re taking our time and following a standard mission management team,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “We let the data guide our decision-making in relation to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance that we observed during rendezvous and docking.”
The ability to resolve the problem with the nozzle and helium leaks will play a significant role in this certification review, officials said.
“We have to deal with helium leaks,” Stich said at a news conference last week. “We will not fly another mission like this with a helium leak. Teams also need to figure out what “causes the jets to have low thrust,” he added. “So we have some work to do after this flight.
However, the certification process is not currently the main concern of the agency. For now, “the whole team is 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 ahead,” said Stich. “Later this summer, we’ll lay out all the work ahead of us when that vehicle comes back with a crew, and then we’ll figure out what the way forward is.”
In preparation for this work, Boeing and NASA want to collect as much data as possible about the systems. Boeing was already testing the thrusters while the spacecraft was attached to the space station. Boeing and NASA are working with simulators on the ground to test different scenarios to try to get to the root of the problems and make sure the vehicle is safe.
The certification process is a “careful review,” Hale said. “And those two issues obviously need to be resolved” before NASA allows Boeing to fly a full crew of astronauts. He added that “jet failures and helium leaks are something we’ve dealt with all along in the space shuttle program. They were very common.”
Safety is paramount, and the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia, which broke up in 2003 while returning from orbit, is always in the back of people’s minds, he said. “Those lessons are not forgotten,” he said.
Complicating matters is the fact that the problems with the helium and thrusters are located in the Starliner’s service module, which provides most of the spacecraft’s engine power. It is ejected and burns up in the atmosphere before returning to Earth. So engineers want to diagnose problems while the hardware is still available. That, Stich said, will allow them to gain “valuable insight into the system upgrades we’ll want to make for post-certification missions.”
Because “the service module is not coming back, they now have to get all the data they can out of it,” said Mike Massimino, a former NASA astronaut and professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University. “You’d want to stay in orbit as long as possible to get that data.
Williams and Wilmore are more than happy to stay in orbit, he said, especially since Williams was last in space in 2012 and Wilmore in 2015.
“More time in space is a great thing,” he said. “I’d like to be up there. They were both waiting for that flight. Why rush it?”