Why Boeing’s Starliner Still Isn’t Ready to Return to Earth: NPR

When astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams took off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5, they thought they would be back in time for the June 16 holiday.

The two were testing Boeing’s newest spacecraft, called the Starliner. All they had to do was walk through it, dock briefly with the International Space Station (ISS) and return home. The whole mission was supposed to last about a week.

Instead, a series of leaks and malfunctions caused NASA to delay the duo’s return indefinitely.

Whatever you do, don’t say they’re stuck.

“We’re not stuck on the ISS,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s vice president for the Commercial Crew Program, told reporters at a June 28 news conference. Suni and Butch back to Earth.”

Here’s what’s going on with Boeing’s latest spacecraft.

There were already problems before this launch

The development of the Starliner did not go smoothly. It failed to reach the expected orbit during its first unmanned test flight in 2019. The problem was later traced to the onboard clock being set incorrectly – causing the Starliner’s jets to fire at the wrong time.

The Starliner never made it to the ISS on that trip, and NASA requested a second test flight without any astronauts. When it restarted in 2022, two thrusters on the Starliner failed as expected. He successfully switched to backup thrusters and docked with the space station.

The astronauts were finally supposed to lift off last year, but then Boeing found two more problems with the spacecraft: problems with the parachute system that would have allowed them to float back to Earth, and the tape used to secure the wiring that posed a potential fire hazard. Fixing both issues pushed the launch to this spring.

Finally, Williams and Wilmore were strapped in on May 6 when more problems arose — a stuck valve on the rocket launching the Starliner had to be replaced, and mission engineers discovered that the Starliner itself was leaking helium.

Helium gas is used to pressurize the Starliner’s propulsion system, and it took NASA several weeks to determine that the leaks were not severe enough to cause helium depletion during the mission.

Thruster cluster leads to fluster

When all systems were finally “go”, the launch of the Starliner went off without a hitch. On June 5, Williams and Wilmore launched into orbit.

But as they approached the ISS, new problems arose. Five of the 28 “Reaction Control System” thrusters aboard the Starliner’s service module shut down unexpectedly, leaving the spacecraft grounded just outside the docking port while engineers did some troubleshooting.

Eventually, the spacecraft successfully docked with the space station and four of the five thrusters were reattached. However, NASA later revealed that it had discovered four more helium leaks in different parts of the spacecraft, bringing the total to five.

NASA now says it must conduct additional testing and evaluation of these issues before Williams and Wilmore return to Earth. Space agency engineers suspect that faulty seals, which they believe pose little risk, may be behind the helium leaks. But problems with the jets were harder to detect.

NASA says it will conduct extensive tests of the Starliner thruster at its White Sands test facility in Las Cruces, NM, starting this week. problems and also confirm that the jets can be safely used to bring Williams and Wilmore home.

“Once the testing is complete, we’ll look at the landing plan,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters. According to him, the whole process can take several weeks.

Don’t say stuck

Even before the last press conference, the media speculated that Williams and Wilmore might be stuck aboard the station. It’s a claim that Boeing in particular seems to bristle at.

“Astronauts.” they are not stranded on the ISS,” read the first line of a company statement on the matter, obtained by NPR on June 26.

“They’re not stuck in space,” agrees Laura Forczyk, managing director of Astralytical, a space consulting group. Astronauts are comfortably housed on the International Space Station.

The Starliner is designed to stay in space for up to 210 days, according to Stich. That test flight was originally supposed to be limited to 45 days, due to the spacecraft’s battery life, but Stich says the space station is recharging the batteries as designed, and NASA is looking to extend that limit.

In a real emergency, NASA could use either a SpaceX Dragon capsule or a Russian Soyuz capsule to bring the duo home, but Forczyk doubts that will be necessary.

“I don’t see it as anything critical or life-threatening,” Forczyk says. “I just think they’re being extra careful, as they should be, because this vehicle is not working as intended.

Forczyk notes that the problems with the helium system and thrusters are located in the Starliner’s service module, the part of the spacecraft that will be jettisoned before landing. For that reason, he says, engineers may want to keep the Starliner on the station longer to collect more data from the pod before it burns up during reentry.

In further evidence of NASA’s confidence in Starliner, Williams and Wilmore took shelter inside the spacecraft last week after the Russian satellite disintegrated, creating orbital debris that could have threatened the station.

“Butch and Suni boarded the spacecraft, powered up the vehicle, closed the hatch, and were ready to perform the … emergency disconnect and landing,” says Stich.

The future of the Starliner could be in limbo

In 2014, Boeing received a $4.2 billion contract from NASA to build the Starliner. The spacecraft was supposed to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station regularly over a ten-year period. Those flights are now years behind schedule, and the delays have cost Boeing at least $1.5 billion.

Meanwhile, rival SpaceX, which raised just $2.6 billion, successfully flew humans in 2020, completing eight regular crewed missions for NASA to the space station.

Ron Epstein, an analyst at Bank of America, says the problems are part of larger problems for the airline giant. “I don’t think you can look at it in isolation,” he says.

Boeing has also experienced problems with its 737 Max planes, including a door that flew off the plane earlier this year, and its delivery of two 747s to be used as the president’s Air Force One has also been delayed.

In essence, Epstein says these problems are caused by a shift away from “hardcore engineering” in the company’s leadership.

“For years you’ve had management teams that are more focused on shareholder returns than the core engineering business of the company,” he says.

The Starliner’s first regular flight with astronauts to the ISS is now scheduled for February 2025, but it’s unclear whether NASA will certify the new spacecraft in time. Even if it did, it would likely only make a few flights before NASA retires the space station in the 2030s.

Given all that, Epstein says it’s possible that if NASA requires extensive modifications and repairs to the Starliner, Boeing may decide to pull out of the program altogether.

“I think Boeing management has been clear to the investment community that Starliner and certain aspects of space are just not core to them,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the company didn’t want to continue.”

But Boeing’s Nappi says the company is fully committed to the Starliner. “The plain and simple answer to the question is, ‘No, we’re not going to back down,'” he says. “That’s our job.