by If you go somewhere expecting an eight-day trip and end up not being able to leave for eight months, most people would consider it “stuck”.
That’s what happened to Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, two NASA astronauts who traveled to the International Space Station in June aboard the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. During the test flight, the propulsion system malfunctioned, and engineers are not sure it would bring the two astronauts back to Earth alive.
So doesn’t that mean the astronauts are stuck?
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Delian Asparouhov, founder and president of Varda Space Industries, which seeks to manufacture drugs and other materials in space, posted on the social platform X: “I don’t know about you, but if I got stuck at an airport for seven. months longer than expected, that would certainly qualify as a ‘thread’.”
But for astronauts who spend their careers hoping to travel to space, extra time in orbit – 10 weeks now and counting – is not a heavy struggle for survival as it is for Matt Damon’s marooned astronaut character in the movie “The Martian. “
In fact, it might be more like asking your boss if you would like to extend a short business trip to Paris by half a year.
“Butch and I are up here, and it feels like coming home,” Williams, who previously had two long stints on the space station, said during a news conference last month. “It’s great to be here, so I’m not complaining.”
Whether Williams and Wilmore are stranded or not, NASA now has a difficult decision to make within the next week or so about the safest way to return them to Earth.
If it determines that the problems with the Starliner propulsion system pose too great a risk, NASA will switch to a backup plan, bringing the two astronauts home on Crew Dragon, a vehicle built by Boeing’s rival, SpaceX.
As a result, there will be a juggling of astronaut tasks for the space station. The next Crew Dragon, due to launch in late September, would take two astronauts to the space station instead of four, leaving two seats for Williams and Wilmore on the return trip around February next year.
Over the summer, NASA and Boeing officials hesitated to use the words, “stuck” and “stranded,” which would have put another black mark on a spacecraft that has been delayed for years by technical difficulties.
“I think reporters use imprecise language to get an audience,” said Lori Garver, who served as deputy administrator of NASA during the Obama administration. “We’re all used to that. I don’t think it’s worth getting defensive about, but they’re not really stuck.”
For one, while NASA and Boeing said Starliner would spend at least eight days at the space station, officials point out that this is a test flight designed to find problems. So, they say, it’s no surprise that everything hasn’t gone perfectly.
“I think we all knew it was going to go beyond that,” said Mark Nappi, the Boeing official in charge of the Starliner program. “We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about how much longer, but I think I regret that we just said, ‘We’ll hang in there until everything we want to do is done. .’”
The reasons for the astronauts’ extended visit – or beaching, if you prefer – are 28 thrusters known as the reaction control system that Starliner uses for maneuvering. During the approach to the space station, five of them malfunction. Although four were revived, and Starliner stopped safely, there were still concerns that they might fail again on the return trip.
Ground testing indicated that the problem could be caused by the expansion of Teflon seals inside the flaps, which restricted propellant flow.
But a subsequent test firing of the Starliner’s thrusters in orbit showed that performance had returned to near normal. That was strange, as one would not expect a distorted Teflon seal to return to its original shape. That raised the possibility that something else was causing the thruster problems.
Joseph Fragola, an aerospace safety expert who did not work on Starliner but did work with similar thrusters on the lunar lander during the Apollo program in the 1970s, said that the misalignment of the propellants could lead to increased gunk inside the molecules. That would also explain the reduced performance of the thrusters, and the residue could evaporate later, explaining why thrusters now work normally.
“I don’t know if that’s their problem, but it took us a long time to solve that problem,” Fragola said.
If that is the case, it could be very dangerous. The residue and an unbalanced mixture of propellants could set off an explosion, Fragola said.
NASA officials offer another reason to support their assertion that Williams and Wilmore are not truly stranded: They are confident enough in Starliner that two astronauts would use it in an emergency evacuation from the space station.
That was not the case in December 2022, when the Russian Soyuz capsule’s radiator leaked and the vehicle’s entire spacecraft floated into space. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio traveled to the space station on the Soyuz, and NASA officials determined that the damaged spacecraft was not safe enough for an emergency because the temperature inside during reentry could become fatally hot. At that time, a jury-rigged seat was placed for Rubio in Crew Dragon which was also docked at the space station.
It could be argued that Rubio was stranded at the space station until Russia sent a replacement Soyuz. He was scheduled to spend six months at the space station, but ended up setting the record for the longest single stay in orbit by an American astronaut: 371 days.
The extended stays for Williams, Wilmore and Rubio may have been unplanned, but they weren’t uncomfortable, with loads of supplies being picked up by cargo spaceships.
That was not the case in 2003 for Don Pettit, an astronaut currently in Russia preparing for his fourth space flight, a launch to the space station scheduled for September 11. During his first space flight two decades ago, he was one of three astronauts. on the space station when the space shuttle Columbia separated during re-entry.
Pettit, along with NASA’s Ken Bowersox, who is NASA’s top official overseeing the Starliner situation and was the ISS commander at the time, and Nikolai Budarin, a Russian astronaut, were not in immediate danger.
But as the three crew members grappled with the deaths of seven NASA astronauts—their friends and colleagues—Pettit and Bowersox also quickly realized that the shuttle Atlantis, which was to pick them up the following month, was not come anytime soon. They started rationing supplies.
“We were immediately short of water and short of food and short of clothing, and we extended these supplies as best we could,” Pettit said during an interview Friday.
In an interview with NASA in 2015, Pettit said there were more than enough supplies. But no one knew how long the shuttles would stay grounded.
“It’s like you’re sitting on a mountain of food and clothing, and you’re starting to ration these things, not because you have to for your mission, but because you’re doing it to expand the missions of others,” Pettit said. .
There are no washing machines in the space, so clothes are worn for a few days, then used as rags, then thrown away. Pettit said the astronauts started wearing their clothes longer than intended.
“The indicator that it’s time to change your underwear is when you start to get a rash around your waist,” Pettit said.
Pettit and his colleagues finally returned to Earth in May 2003 on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft – three months later than planned.
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