The Starliner spacecraft docked with the International Space Station on June 13 and is orbiting 262 miles above Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. NASA has said Starliner requires additional testing before it can return to Earth.
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When astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched from Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida on June 5, they assumed they would return well in time for the Juneteenth holiday.
The two were test-running Boeing’s newest spacecraft, the Starliner. All they had to do was test drive it and briefly dock with the International Space Station (ISS) before returning. The entire mission was scheduled to last about a week.
However, a series of leaks and malfunctions forced NASA to indefinitely postpone the pair’s return.
Anyway, whatever you do, don’t tell them they’re being left behind.
“We are not locked down on the ISS,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s vice president of commercial crew programs, told reporters during a press conference on June 28. “The crew is not at risk, and the decision to return Suni and Bucci to Earth does not pose any increased risk.”
Let’s take a look at what’s happening on Boeing’s newest spacecraft.
NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station. The astronauts’ return to Earth has been delayed while NASA conducts additional tests of Starliner’s thrusters.
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There were problems before this release
Starliner’s development hasn’t gone smoothly: its first test flight, conducted by an unmanned aircraft in 2019, failed to reach the planned orbit. The problem was later determined to be caused by an incorrectly set onboard clock, which caused Starliner’s thrusters to fire at the wrong time.
Starliner was unable to reach the ISS on that flight, leading NASA to request a second test flight without astronauts. When it was due to launch again in 2022, two of Starliner’s thrusters failed to fire as expected, and it was able to switch to its spare thrusters and successfully dock with the space station.
The astronauts were finally supposed to launch last year, but then Boeing discovered two more issues with the spacecraft: a problem with the parachute system that would bring the astronauts back to Earth, and tape used to secure the wiring in place that posed a fire hazard. The launch was postponed until this spring while those two issues were fixed.
Finally, Williams and Wilmore buckled in on May 6, but more problems emerged: a valve in the rocket launching the Starliner was clogged and needed to be replaced, and mission engineers discovered that the Starliner itself was leaking helium.
Helium gas is used to pressurize Starliner’s propulsion system, and it took NASA several weeks to determine that the leak wasn’t serious enough to cause the spacecraft to run out of helium during the mission.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft finally lifted off on an Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Station on June 5. The launch came after years of delays and setbacks.
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Thruster clusters cause chaos
All systems finally said “go” and Starliner launched without a hitch, sending Williams and Wilmore into orbit on June 5.
But as it approached the ISS, a new problem emerged: Five of the 28 “reaction control thrusters” on Starliner’s service module unexpectedly shut down, forcing the spacecraft to wait just outside the docking port while engineers troubleshooted.
The spacecraft eventually docked safely with the space station, with four of its five thrusters back online, but NASA later announced that it had discovered four more helium leaks in other parts of the spacecraft, bringing the total to five.
NASA now says it needs to do additional testing and evaluation of these issues before Williams and Wilmore can return to Earth. The space agency’s engineers suspect the helium leak is due to a faulty seal and consider the risk remote, but the thruster problem is harder to pin down.
NASA announced that it will conduct extensive testing of Starliner’s thrusters at its White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, starting this week. The test thrusters will be subjected to simulated launch, docking, and landing burns to see if engineers can replicate the problem and determine whether the thrusters can be used to safely return Williams and Wilmore to the spacecraft.
“Once that testing is complete, we’ll work through a landing plan,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters. The entire process could take several weeks, he said.
Don’t tell me you’re stuck
Even before the latest press conference, media outlets had speculated that Williams and Wilmore were trapped aboard the space station, a claim that Boeing in particular seemed to bristle at.
“The astronauts do not have “It was left behind on the ISS,” the company’s statement, received by NPR on June 26, began.
As Starliner prepared to dock with the International Space Station, some thrusters did not fire as expected.
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“They’re not trapped in space,” agrees Laura Forczyk, executive director of space consulting group Astrallytical. Astronauts are comfortable aboard the International Space Station.
Starliner is designed to stay in space for up to 210 days, Stich said. The test flight was originally going to be limited to 45 days because of the spacecraft’s battery life, but Stich said the space station is charging its batteries as designed and NASA is considering extending that limit.
In a real pinch, NASA could use SpaceX’s Dragon or Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to bring the pair home, but Forczyk doubts that would be necessary.
“I don’t think this is anything serious or life-threatening,” Forzik said, “but I think they’re just being extremely careful because this vehicle is not operating as it should.”
Forczyk noted that the helium system and thruster issues were in Starliner’s service module, the part of the spacecraft that detaches before landing, so engineers may want to keep Starliner at the space station longer to gather more data from the module before it burns up on re-entry, she said.
As further evidence of NASA’s confidence in Starliner, Williams and Wilmore took refuge inside the spacecraft last week when a Russian satellite broke apart, creating orbital debris that could pose a threat to the space station.
“Butch and Suni boarded the spacecraft, powered it up, closed the hatch, and prepared to execute the emergency undocking and landing,” Stitch said.
Starliner’s future may be in limbo
In 2014, Boeing won a $4.2 billion contract from NASA to build Starliner, a spacecraft that was supposed to regularly ferry astronauts to the International Space Station within the decade. The flight is now years behind schedule, and the delays have cost Boeing at least $1.5 billion.
Meanwhile, rival SpaceX, which has a budget of just $2.6 billion, successfully launched a crewed flight in 2020 and has completed eight routine crewed missions to NASA’s space station.
Bank of America analyst Ron Epstein says the issues are part of a larger problem for the aerospace giant. “I don’t think you can look at this in isolation,” he said.
Boeing has also had problems with its 737 Max jets, including one that saw a door fly off earlier this year, and has also faced delays to deliveries of the two 747s used as Air Force One, the presidential aircraft.
Starliner is expected to eventually land somewhere in the western US, just as it will do during its uncrewed test flight in 2022.
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Epstein said the root of these problems lies in the company’s management’s distance from “hard-core engineering.”
“For many years, management has focused on returning profits to shareholders rather than on the company’s core engineering business,” he said.
Starliner’s first scheduled flight carrying astronauts to the ISS is scheduled for February 2025, but it’s unclear whether NASA will certify the new spacecraft in time — and even if it does, it’s likely to only perform a few flights before NASA retires the space station in 2030.
Given all of this, Epstein said, if NASA requires significant changes or modifications to Starliner, Boeing may decide to withdraw from the program altogether.
“I think Boeing management has been very clear with the investment community that Starliner and certain aspects of space are not their core business,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the company no longer wants to continue in the business.”
But Boeing’s Nappi says the company is committed to Starliner. “The simple answer to that question is, ‘No, we’re not going away,'” he said. “This is our job.”
