Starliner astronaut praises spacecraft despite defects and delays

To learn more about the propulsion issues, the Starliner team is conducting ground tests in New Mexico. Those tests should be completed by this weekend, officials said during a press conference Wednesday afternoon. They added that the test plans encountered a “setback” in the form of Hurricane Beryl, which hit the US on July 8.

While NASA has not yet shared a return date for Williams and Wilmore, Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said Wednesday that the “big factor” for the timing is getting the astronauts home before NASA arrives. arrival of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission with more astronauts in August.

“That’s kind of a limit. I think we’re really working on trying to follow the data and see what the earliest date is that we could target to undock and land,” Stich said.

“I think some of the data suggests, optimistically, that maybe it will be by the end of July,” Stich added.

An eventful trip

Starliner’s inaugural crewed mission took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 5, ending years of delays that beset the vehicle as it faced development setbacks, cost overruns and even an unmanned test mission that suffered an error that ended the mission and had to be carried out again.

NASA and Boeing said the new wave of problems affecting this flight should not prevent the spacecraft from bringing its crew — astronauts Sunita Williams and Wilmore — back to Earth safely. However, they did not name an expected timeframe for Williams and Wilmore’s return, insisting that the crew is not “locked in.”

“I feel confident that if we needed to, if there was a problem with the International Space Station, we would get in (the Starliner spacecraft) and be able to undock, talk to our team and figure out the best way to get home,” Williams said.

“We are absolutely confident,” Wilmore said of Starliner’s ability to get them home.

The reason teams on the ground say they want to keep Starliner safely docked with the International Space Station for now is so they can continue working to figure out what caused the problems with the thrusters and the helium leaks. Both problems are in a part of Starliner that is not expected to survive reentry back to Earth, leaving teams on the ground with few options to continue collecting data from the component after Williams and Wilmore return home.

“This is a test flight — we were hoping to find some things,” Williams added, echoing comments he made before takeoff. “We’re finding things, and we’re fixing them and making changes, making updates with our control team.”

Boeing’s Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of the company’s Starliner program, said Wednesday that one of the goals of additional thruster testing is to understand whether the thrusters will perform as expected on the way home.

“If the thrusters were somehow damaged, then what would we do differently?” Nappi said. “We don’t believe we have damaged thrusters, but again, we want to fill in the gaps and perform this test to make sure of that.”

Removing the suitcases

Shortly before liftoff in June, NASA reorganized the cargo aboard Starliner, removing two suitcases for Williams and Wilmore and replacing them with a 68-kilogram bomb needed to make the space station’s bathroom function as intended.

In space, every drop of liquid matters, and astronauts have long used a water processing system to convert urine into drinking water. But in May, a part of that conversion system broke.

The bomb failure “put us in a position where we would have to store a large amount of urine,” Dana Weigel, NASA’s International Space Station Program manager, said before the flight. She added that urine was being stored in containers on board the station.

That’s why NASA had to rush to get a replacement part on the next flight to the space station, opting to send it with Williams and Wilmore at the expense of some of their personal comforts.

The two suitcases that were removed contained clothing and toiletries — including shampoo and soap — that Wilmore and Williams selected.

Weigel added that replacement clothing and toiletries were already in season for Williams and Wilmore to use.

“I’m not aware of any issues related to clothing availability, or food availability — we really don’t have any,” Stich noted Wednesday, adding that a Northrop Grumman-led resupply mission is expected to arrive at the station around August. .

Test flights

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was designed to compete with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which had its first crewed test mission, called Demo-2, in 2020, which apparently went off without a hitch.

Both Starliner and Crew Dragon are part of the same NASA program, called Commercial Crew.

Comparing the two vehicles, however, is not always simple. SpaceX designed its Dragon cargo spacecraft years before its Crew Dragon capsule, while Boeing started virtually from scratch with Starliner.

But SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission looked very different from Starliner’s maiden crewed flight.

During SpaceX Demo-2, astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley took at least two public tours of their spacecraft while en route to the space station, and held a space station press conference on June 1, 2020 — a day after docking.

Hurley and Behnken already knew their mission would likely last months. NASA said before liftoff that the agency wanted to keep the space station fully equipped, waiting to bring Behnken and Hurley home until the next crewed mission was ready to fly. In the end, SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission lasted 64 days — much less than the trip’s announced maximum duration of 110 days.

Williams and Wilmore, on the other hand, are approaching their 36th day in space for a mission that officials initially considered a trip of about a week.

Additionally, astronauts are about 10 days away from the 45-day maximum limit initially set by NASA, but officials are now considering extending that maximum to at least 90 days.

Williams said Wednesday that she and Wilmore joined the astronauts already aboard the station to help with regular tasks.

“We’re doing science for them, maintenance, some major maintenance that has been waiting for a while, like things that have been on the list for a while,” Williams said.

Stich also said Wednesday that “the good thing about the Commercial Crew Program is we have two vehicles” — referring to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which is expected to fly new crew members to the space station in August.

“We have a little more time to look at the data and then make a decision about whether we need to do something different,” said Stich, referring to the flexibility that Crew Dragon grants to the International Space Station schedule and this test flight. “But the main option today is to get Butch and Suni back on Starliner.”