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Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is set to celebrate its greatest achievement this month: Backing two NASA astronauts on a round trip to the International Space Station, proving the long-delayed and over-budgeted capsule is up to the task.
Starliner is halfway to that goal.
But the two veteran astronauts piloting this test flight are now in a testing position – extending their stay aboard the space station for a second time as engineers on the ground scramble to learn more about the issues that have gone awry the first part of their journey.
Space flight veterans Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore arrived at the space station aboard the Starliner on June 6. NASA originally estimated that they would last about a week.
But the vehicle’s troubles en route, including a helium leak and thrusters that suddenly stopped working, have raised questions about how the back half of the mission will play out.
Williams and Wilmore will now return no sooner than June 26, NASA announced Tuesday, extending their mission to at least 20 days as engineers race to better understand the spacecraft’s problems as it docks to safe with the space station.
Officials have said there’s no reason to believe Starliner won’t be able to bring the astronauts back home, though “We want to work through the rest of the details,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager. , at Tuesday. news conference.
Boeing, meanwhile, has tried to frame the mission as a success and learning opportunity, even as the Starliner crew is left grappling with the “unplanned” side of the mission, according to Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager Boeing on the Starliner program, put it on Tuesday.
It is not uncommon for astronauts to have unexpected stays aboard the space station — for days, weeks or even months. (NASA has also said the Starliner can spend up to 45 days at the orbiting lab if needed, according to Stich.)
But the story creates a moment of uncertainty and shame that joins a long list of similar mistakes with the Boeing Starliner program, which already goes back many years. It also adds to a chorus of unfavorable news that has followed Boeing as a company for some time.
A nail-biting finale
Boeing and NASA engineers said they have an option to leave Starliner – with Williams and Wilmore – on board the station longer than planned mainly for further analysis. The helium leak and thruster issues on part of the vehicle are not intended to survive the journey home from space, so mission teams are delaying the spacecraft’s return as part of a last-ditch effort to save all they can learn about the things that went wrong. .
The danger comes anytime a spacecraft returns home from orbit. It is probably the most dangerous stretch of any mission to space.
The journey will require the Starliner to hit Earth’s thick atmosphere while traveling at more than 22 times the speed of sound. The process will bake the spacecraft’s exterior at about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Then, a series of parachutes – redesigned and tested by Boeing as recently as January – must safely slow the capsule down before it reaches terra firma. (Starliner will be the first US-made capsule to parachute to land on the ground rather than splash down in the ocean. Boeing hopes the Starliner will be easier to recover and restore after flight with the to that.)
A series of difficulties
Starliner’s journey to this historic crewed test mission began in 2014 when NASA tapped both Boeing and SpaceX to develop a spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts to the International Space Station.
At the time, Boeing was seen as the savvy aerospace giant to do the job first and SpaceX was the unpredictable newcomer.
Over the past decade, however, the tides have changed.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft safely completed its first crewed mission — which seemed to go off without a hitch — in 2020. And astronauts have been regularly flying and paying customers from the vehicle ever since.
The two astronauts who piloted the inaugural Crew Dragon flight – Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley – stayed aboard the space station longer than expected, spending more than 60 days instead of the short period expected by expected on such test flights.
But Hurley and Behnken’s stay was extended so that the astronauts could lend a hand with daily activities aboard the space station, which was understaffed at the time. The extension was not directly related to specific software or hardware problems with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.
On the other hand, Boeing’s Starliner program has struggled almost every step of the way. The vehicle has battled years of delays, setbacks and additional costs that have cost the company more than $1 billion, according to public financial records.
The first Starliner test mission, flown unmanned in late 2019, was full of missteps. The vehicle orbited incorrectly, a sign of software orbit including a coding error that set the internal clock at 11 o’clock.
A second unmanned flight test in 2022 revealed additional software problems and trouble with some of the vehicle’s thrusters.
Stich, NASA’s program manager, indicated during a June 6 news conference that engineers may not have fully resolved those problems by 2022.
“We thought we had solved that problem,” Stich said, adding, “I think we’re missing something fundamental that’s going on inside the thruster.”
Michael Lembeck, an associate professor of aerospace engineering practice at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who was a consultant to Boeing’s space flight division from 2009 to 2014, told CNN that it would be difficult to determine whether additional ground tests may have caused the thruster issues. capture on hand.
But Lembeck emphasized that evaluating the success of this test mission is not as simple as comparing it directly to the inaugural crewed test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.
For example, he said, SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule — the predecessor to Crew Dragon’s director — completed more than a decade of uncrewed cargo missions to the space station before Crew Dragon flew.
“SpaceX had a head start with the cargo program,” Lembeck said. “I think they have an advantage that Boeing didn’t have. Boeing needs to build a crew vehicle from scratch.”
If this Starliner test mission were to encounter additional obstacles, however, it could put Boeing in a situation where it has to rely on its rival to bring Williams and Wilmore home.
“The embarrassing backup is that Crew Dragon would have to go and get the astronauts back,” Lembeck said. The spacecraft “could be put up with two crew members and sent back with four — and that’s probably the way home.”
Boeing’s wider problems
Boeing executives have repeatedly tried to clarify that the Starliner program operates independently from the company’s other units – including the commercial aircraft division that has been at the center of scandals for years.
“We have people flying on this vehicle. We always take it so seriously,” Nappi said during a news briefing in April before Starliner took off.
Nappi also confirmed at the time that the Starliner crew was operating at “peak performance” and “are looking forward to a safe mission completion”.
When asked about that assertion Tuesday, Stich, the NASA executive, said officials at Boeing and NASA always expected to find additional issues that needed to be addressed during this test flight.
Williams alluded to that prospect during a pre-flight news conference, saying, “We’re always finding things, and we’re going to continue to find things.
“Not everything is going to be perfect when we fly the spacecraft. …We feel very safe and comfortable with how this spacecraft flies, and we have backup procedures in case we need those,” Williams said.
However, Stitch acknowledged on Tuesday that Boeing and NASA may have been able to prevent some of the hangups the Starliner encountered: “Maybe we could have done a different test on the ground to get some of the characterize (thruster issues) ahead of time,” he said.
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