NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are handling a prolonged flight delay as seasoned travelers would: by booking alternate transportation home.The duo were scheduled to return to Earth on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule. But it developed mysterious thruster problems on the way to the International Space Station after a June 5 launch, leading to multiple extensions of the astronauts’ stay on the ISS while NASA worked on the problem. It’s now been decided they will fly home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon.“NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February and that Starliner will return uncrewed,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a press conference Saturday.
Administrator Bill Nelson (left) and NASA leadership participate at Saturday’s press conference. (Credit: NASA)
He and other agency executives said that testing and experiments on the ground left too much uncertainty over how Starliner’s thrusters might perform after undocking from the ISS and conducting a subseqent deorbit burn.“There was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program. He said recent tests revealed swelling and heating problems in these thrusters, which are grouped in rectangular assemblies that NASA and Boeing refer to as “doghouses” around the service module that Starliner will jettison after its deorbit burn.“Our core value is safety, and it is our North Star,” Nelson said after reminding the audience of the consequences of not defending that priority: “We lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward.”(Nelson may feel this more personally than most: As a Democratic Congressman from Florida, he flew aboard Columbia on the STS-61C mission in January 1986, the last shuttle launch before Challenger’s doomed liftoff. Columbia itself was lost on reentry in February 2003.)NASA and Boeing will now work to set up Starliner for an uncrewed return, in which it will be programmed to scoot away from the ISS faster than it would have with crew aboard and end in a descent under parachutes to a landing site in White Sands, New Mexico. “We continue to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft,” Boeing said in a tweet. “We are executing the mission as determined by NASA, and we are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return.”
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the ISS in June. (spacecraft. Credit: NASA)
This decision will involve multiple adjustments to the next Crew Dragon launch to the ISS, scheduled for no earlier than Sept. 24. This Crew-9 mission will launch with only two astronauts on board instead of the usual four so Wilmore and Williams can have the extra seats. NASA will announce which members of the original crew will keep that mission later.NASA’s announcement also reports that Crew-9 will launch from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the first time that facility will have hosted astronauts, instead of the usual Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. But there should be little drama about that mission otherwise. Since its May 2020 debut with astronauts onboard, SpaceX’s small fleet of Crew Dragons have been exceptionally reliable for both NASA and private customers, some of whom have exploited capsule capabilities that exceed NASA’s crew-transportation needs. On Tuesday, for example, one is scheduled to launch with tech billionaire Jared Isaacman and three crew members on a “Polaris Dawn” mission that will feature the first spacewalk in private spaceflight and a peak altitude of 870 miles. That will be the farthest any human has traveled from Earth since Apollo 17 closed out NASA’s Moon landings in December 1972.Bumpy Road Ahead for BoeingBoeing, however, is in for even more drama. The beleaguered aerospace giant was once a Washington favorite to be the sole recipient of a commercial-crew contract before NASA secured funding to hire both Boeing and SpaceX to build vehicles to replace the shuttle for ISS transportation.
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Now Boeing stands to eat still more costs on that $4.2 billion fixed-price contract, on which it has already recorded more than $1.5 billion in losses after prior setbacks that included a botched, uncrewed test flight in 2019 and multiple delays after that to rework such parts of Starliner as its thruster valves, electrical wiring, and parachutes.In the press conference, Nelson emphasized both the agency’s overall satisfaction with Boeing and its expectation that Boeing will do whatever is necessary to bring Starliner into operational service and provide NASA with the vehicle redundancy it sought with those awards to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014.“It’s a fixed-price contract,” he said. “We expect delivery on the contract.” Nelson professed his confidence that Starliner will fly with crew onboard again at “100%.” But when asked if Boeing, which was not present at the presser, might reach its own limit for Starliner expenses, he said “I don’t have the answer to that.”Another exchange in the press conference suggested that NASA could seek a third option: a crewed version of Sierra Space’s winged Dream Chaser spaceplane, which should have its first cargo mission to the ISS early next year. Sierra had pitched that vehicle, which looks like a baby shuttle and is designed to land on runways, to NASA during its commercial-crew procurement and then contested its rejection. Sierra still aims to build a crew-capable version for such private customers as the Orbital Reef space station Blue Origin aims to build with that Louisville, CO firm. Asked about Sierra, Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s ISS program gave this reply: “There is no existing contract with the agency for crewed capability–which doesn’t mean that that’s not a possibility somewhere in the future.”
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About Rob Pegoraro
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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