human spaceflight

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Leaving behind its crew, Starliner departs space station and returns to Earth

Boeing, commercial crew, Commercial space, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / /

It worked —

“We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program,” says Boeing’s Starliner manager.

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft after landing Friday night at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft after landing Friday night at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico.

Boeing

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft sailed to a smooth landing in the New Mexico desert Friday night, an auspicious end to an otherwise disappointing three-month test flight that left the capsule’s two-person crew stuck in orbit until next year.

Cushioned by airbags, the Boeing crew capsule descended under three parachutes toward an on-target landing at 10: 01 pm local time Friday (12: 01 am EDT Saturday) at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico. From the outside, the landing appeared just as it would have if the spacecraft brought home NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who became the first people to launch on a Starliner capsule on June 5.

But Starliner’s cockpit was empty as it flew back to Earth Friday night. Last month, NASA managers decided to keep Wilmore and Williams on the International Space Station (ISS) until next year after agency officials determined it was too risky for the astronauts to return to the ground on Boeing’s spaceship. Instead of coming home on Starliner, Wilmore and Williams will fly back to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in February. NASA has incorporated the Starliner duo into the space station’s long-term crew.

The Starliner spacecraft began the journey home by backing away from its docking port at the space station at 6: 04 pm EDT (22: 04 UTC), one day after astronauts closed hatches to prepare for the ship’s departure. The capsule fired thrusters to quickly back away from the complex, setting up for a deorbit burn to guide Starliner on a trajectory toward its landing site. Then, Starliner jettisoned its disposable service module to burn up over the Pacific Ocean, while the crew module, with a vacant cockpit, took aim on New Mexico.

After streaking through the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean and Mexico, Starliner deployed three main parachutes to slow its descent, then a ring of six airbags inflated around the bottom of the spacecraft to dampen the jolt of touchdown. This was the third time a Starliner capsule has flown in space, and the second time the spacecraft fell short of achieving all of its objectives.

Not the desired outcome

“I’m happy to report Starliner did really well today in the undock, deorbit, and landing sequence,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, which manages a contract worth up to $4.6 billion for Boeing to develop, test, and fly a series of Starliner crew missions to the ISS.

While officials were pleased with Starliner’s landing, the celebration was tinged with disappointment.

“From a human perspective, all of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there’s a piece of us that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it,” Stich said. “We had planned to have the mission land with Butch and Suni onboard. I think there are, depending on who you are on the team, different emotions associated with that, and I think it’s going to take a little time to work through that.”

Nevertheless, Stich said NASA made the right call last month when officials decided to complete the Starliner test flight without astronauts in the spacecraft.

“We made the decision to have an uncrewed flight based on what we knew at the time, and based on our knowledge of the thrusters and based on the modeling that we had,” Stich said. “If we’d had a model that would have predicted what we saw tonight perfectly, yeah, it looks like an easy decision to go say, ‘We could have had a crew tonight.’ But we didn’t have that.”

Boeing’s Starliner managers insisted the ship was safe to bring the astronauts home. It might be tempting to conclude the successful landing Friday night vindicated Boeing’s views on the thruster problems. However, he spacecraft’s propulsion system, provided by Aerojet Rocketdyne, clearly did not work as intended during the flight. NASA had the option of bringing Wilmore and Williams back to Earth on a different, flight-proven spacecraft, so they took it.

“It’s awfully hard for the team,” Stich said. “It’s hard for me, when we sit here and have a successful landing, to be in that position. But it was a test flight, and we didn’t have confidence, with certainty, of the thruster performance.”

In this infrared view, Starliner descends under its three main parachutes moments before touchdown at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico.

Enlarge / In this infrared view, Starliner descends under its three main parachutes moments before touchdown at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico.

NASA

As Starliner approached the space station in June, five of 28 control thrusters on Starliner’s service module failed, forcing Wilmore to take manual control as ground teams sorted out the problem. Eventually, engineers recovered four of the five thrusters, but NASA’s decision makers were unable to convince themselves the same problem wouldn’t reappear, or get worse, when the spacecraft departed the space station and headed for reentry and landing.

Engineers later determined the control jets lost thrust due to overheating, which can cause Teflon seals in valves to swell and deform, starving the thrusters of propellant. Telemetry data beamed back to the mission controllers from Starliner showed higher-than-expected temperatures on two of the service module thrusters during the flight back to Earth Friday night, but they continued working.

Ground teams also detected five small helium leaks on Starliner’s propulsion system soon after its launch in June. NASA and Boeing officials were aware of one of the leaks before the launch, but decided to go ahead with the test flight. Starliner was still leaking helium when the spacecraft undocked from the station Friday, but the leak rate remained within safety tolerances, according to Stich.

A couple of fresh technical problems cropped up as Starliner cruised back to Earth. One of 12 control jets on the crew module failed to ignite at any time during Starliner’s flight home. These are separate thrusters from the small engines that caused trouble earlier in the Starliner mission. There was also a brief glitch in Starliner’s navigation system during reentry.

Where to go from here?

Three NASA managers, including Stich, took questions from reporters in a press conference early Saturday following Starliner’s landing. Two Boeing officials were also supposed to be on the panel, but they canceled at the last minute. Boeing didn’t explain their absence, and the company has not made any officials available to answer questions since NASA chose to end the Starliner test flight without the crew aboard.

“We view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, in an August 24 press conference announcing the agency’s decision on how to end the Starliner test flight. It’s unusual for NASA officials to publicly discuss how their opinions differ from those of their contractors.

Joel Montalbano, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for space operations, said Saturday that Boeing deferred to the agency to discuss the Starliner mission in the post-landing press conference.

Here’s the only quote from a Boeing official on Starliner’s return to Earth. It came in the form of a three-paragraph written statement Boeing emailed to reporters about a half-hour after Starliner’s landing: “I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program. “We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program.”

Nappi’s statement doesn’t answer one of the most important questions reporters would have asked anyone from Boeing if they participated in Saturday morning’s press conference: Does Boeing still have a long-term commitment to the Starliner program?

So far, the only indications of Boeing’s future plans for Starliner have come from second-hand anecdotes relayed by NASA officials. Boeing has been silent on the matter. The company has reported nearly $1.6 billion in financial charges to pay for previous delays and cost overruns on the Starliner program, and Boeing will again be on the hook to pay to fix the problems Starliner encountered in space over the last three months.

Montalbano said Boeing’s Starliner managers met with ground teams at mission control in Houston following the craft’s landing. “The Boeing managers came into the control room and congratulated the team, talked to the NASA team, so Boeing is committed to continue their work with us,” he said.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft fires thrusters during departure from the International Space Station on Friday.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft fires thrusters during departure from the International Space Station on Friday.

NASA

NASA isn’t ready to give up on Starliner. A fundamental tenet of NASA’s commercial crew program is to foster the development of two independent vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and eventually commercial outposts in low-Earth orbit. NASA awarded multibillion-dollar contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to complete development of their Starliner and Crew Dragon spaceships.

SpaceX’s Dragon started flying astronauts in 2020. NASA would like to have another US spacecraft for crew rotation flights to support the ISS. If Boeing had more success with this Starliner test flight, NASA expected to formally certify the spacecraft for operational crew flights beginning next year. Once that happens, Starliner will enter a rotation with SpaceX’s Dragon to transport crews to and from the station in six-month increments.

Stich said Saturday that NASA has not determined whether the agency will require Boeing launch another Starliner test flight before certifying the spacecraft for regular crew rotation missions. “It’ll take a little time to determine the path forward, but today we saw the vehicle perform really well,” he said.

On to Starliner-1?

But some of Stich’s other statements Saturday suggested NASA would like to proceed with certifying Starliner and flying the next mission with a full crew complement of four astronauts. NASA calls Boeing’s first operational crew mission Starliner-1. It’s the first of at least three and potentially up to six crew rotation missions on Boeing’s contract.

“It’s great to have the spacecraft back, and we’re now focused on Starliner-1,” Stich said.

Before that happens, NASA and Boeing engineers must resolve the thruster problems and helium leaks that plagued the test flight this summer. Stich said teams are studying several ways to improve the reliability of Starliner’s thrusters, including hardware modifications and procedural changes. This will probably push back the next crew flight of Starliner, whether it’s Starliner-1 or another test flight, until the end of next year or 2026, although NASA officials have not laid out a schedule.

The overheating thrusters are located inside four doghouse-shaped propulsion pods around the perimeter of Starliner’s service module. It turns out the doghouses retain heat like a thermos—something NASA and Boeing didn’t fully appreciate before this mission—and the thrusters don’t have time to cool down when the spacecraft fires its control jets in rapid pulses. It might help if Boeing removes some of the insulating thermal blankets from the doghouses, Stich said.

The easiest method of resolving the problem of Starliner’s overheating thrusters would be to change the rate and duration of thruster firings.

“What we would like to do is try not to change the thruster. I think that is the best path,” Stich said. “There thrusters have shown resilience and have shown that they perform well, as long as we keep their temperatures down and don’t fire them in a manner that causes the temperatures to go up.”

There’s one thing from this summer’s test flight that might, counterintuitively, help NASA certify the Starliner spacecraft to begin operational flights with its next mission. Rather than staying at the space station for eight days, Starliner remained docked at the research lab for three months, half of the duration of a full-up crew rotation flight. Despite the setbacks, Stich estimated the test flight achieved about 85 to 90 percent of its objectives.

“There’s a lot of learning that happens in that three months that is invaluable for an increment mission,” Stich said. “So, in some ways, the mission overachieved some objectives, in terms of being there for extra time. Not having the crew onboard, obviously, there are some things that we lack in terms of Butch and Suni’s test pilot expertise, and how the vehicle performed, what they saw in the cockpit. We won’t have that data, but we still have the wealth of data from the spacecraft itself, so that will go toward the mission objectives and the certification.”

Leaving behind its crew, Starliner departs space station and returns to Earth Read More »

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After another Boeing letdown, NASA isn’t ready to buy more Starliner missions

Boeing, commercial crew, Commercial space, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / /
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft sits atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket before liftoff in June to begin the Crew Flight Test.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft sits atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket before liftoff in June to begin the Crew Flight Test.

NASA is ready for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, stricken with thruster problems and helium leaks, to leave the International Space Station as soon as Friday, wrapping up a disappointing test flight that has clouded the long-term future of the Starliner program.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard Starliner on June 5, closed the spacecraft’s hatch Thursday in preparation for departure Friday. But it wasn’t what they envisioned when they left Earth on Starliner three months ago. Instead of closing the hatch from a position in Starliner’s cockpit, they latched the front door to the spacecraft from the space station’s side of the docking port.

The Starliner spacecraft is set to undock from the International Space Station at 6: 04 pm EDT (22: 04 UTC) Friday. If all goes according to plan, Starliner will ignite its braking rockets at 11: 17 pm EDT (03: 17 UTC) for a minute-long burn to target a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned landing at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, at 12: 03 am EDT (04: 03 UTC) Saturday.

The Starliner mission set to conclude this weekend was the spacecraft’s first test flight with astronauts, running seven years behind Boeing’s original schedule. But due to technical problems with the spacecraft, it won’t come home with the two astronauts who flew it into orbit back in June, leaving some of the test flight’s objectives incomplete.

This outcome is, without question, a setback for NASA and Boeing, which must resolve two major problems in Starliner’s propulsion system—supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne—before the capsule can fly with people again. NASA officials haven’t said whether they will require Boeing to launch another Starliner test flight before certifying the spacecraft for the first of up to six operational crew missions on Boeing’s contract.

A noncommittal from NASA

For over a decade, the space agency has worked with Boeing and SpaceX to develop two independent vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX launched its first Dragon spacecraft with astronauts in May 2020, and six months later, NASA cleared SpaceX to begin flying regular six-month space station crew rotation missions.

Officially, NASA has penciled in Starliner’s first operational mission for August 2025. But the agency set that schedule before realizing Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne would need to redesign seals and perhaps other elements in Starliner’s propulsion system.

No one knows how long that will take, and NASA hasn’t decided if it will require Boeing to launch another test flight before formally certifying Starliner for operational missions. If Starliner performs flawlessly after undocking and successfully lands this weekend, perhaps NASA engineers can convince themselves Starliner is good to go for crew rotation flights once Boeing resolves the thruster problems and helium leaks.

In any event, the schedule for launching an operational Starliner crew flight in less than a year seems improbable. Aside from the decision on another test flight, the agency also must decide whether it will order any more operational Starliner missions from Boeing. These “post-certification missions” will transport crews of four astronauts between Earth and the ISS, orbiting roughly 260 miles (420 kilometers) above the planet.

NASA has only given Boeing the “Authority To Proceed” for three of its six potential operational Starliner missions. This milestone, known as ATP, is a decision point in contracting lingo where the customer—in this case, NASA—places a firm order for a deliverable. NASA has previously said it awards these task orders about two to three years prior to a mission’s launch.

Josh Finch, a NASA spokesperson, told Ars that the agency hasn’t made any decisions on whether to commit to any more operational Starliner missions from Boeing beyond the three already on the books.

“NASA’s goal remains to certify the Starliner system for crew transportation to the International Space Station,” Finch said in a written response to questions from Ars. “NASA looks forward to its continued work with Boeing to complete certification efforts after Starliner’s uncrewed return. Decisions and timing on issuing future authorizations are on the work ahead.”

This means NASA’s near-term focus is on certifying Starliner so that Boeing can start executing its commercial crew contract. The space agency hasn’t determined when or if it will authorize Boeing to prepare for any Starliner missions beyond the three already on the books.

When it awarded commercial crew contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, NASA pledged to buy at least two operational crew flights from each company. The initial contracts from a decade ago had options for as many as six crew rotation flights to the ISS after certification.

Since then, NASA has extended SpaceX’s commercial crew contract to cover as many as 14 Dragon missions with astronauts, and SpaceX has already launched eight of them. The main reason for this contract extension was to cover NASA’s needs for crew transportation after delays with Boeing’s Starliner, which was originally supposed to alternate with SpaceX’s Dragon for human flights every six months.

After another Boeing letdown, NASA isn’t ready to buy more Starliner missions Read More »

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NASA wants Starliner to make a quick getaway from the space station

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WSSHing for success —

Starliner is set to land at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico shortly after midnight.

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is set to undock from the International Space Station on Friday evening.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is set to undock from the International Space Station on Friday evening.

NASA

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will gently back away from the International Space Station Friday evening, then fire its balky thrusters to rapidly depart the vicinity of the orbiting lab and its nine-person crew.

NASA asked Boeing to adjust Starliner’s departure sequence to get away from the space station faster and reduce the workload on the thrusters to reduce the risk of overheating, which caused some of the control jets to drop offline as the spacecraft approached the outpost for docking in June.

The action begins at 6: 04 pm EDT (22: 04 UTC) on Friday, when hooks in the docking mechanism connecting Starliner with the International Space Station (ISS) will open, and springs will nudge the spacecraft away its mooring on the forward end of the massive research complex.

Around 90 seconds later, a set of forward-facing thrusters on Starliner’s service module will fire in a series of 12 pulses over a few minutes to drive the spacecraft farther away from the space station. These maneuvers will send Starliner on a trajectory over the top of the ISS, then behind it until it is time for the spacecraft to perform a deorbit burn at 11: 17 pm EDT (03: 17 UTC) to target landing at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, shortly after midnight EDT (10 pm local time at White Sands).

How to watch, and what to watch for

The two videos embedded below will show NASA TV’s live coverage of the undocking and landing of Starliner.

Starliner is leaving its two-person crew behind on the space station after NASA officials decided last month they did not have enough confidence in the spacecraft’s reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, used to make exact changes to the capsule’s trajectory and orientation in orbit. Five of the 28 RCS thrusters on Starliner’s service module failed during the craft’s rendezvous with the space station three months ago. Subsequent investigations showed overheating could cause Teflon seals in a poppet valve to swell, restricting the flow of propellant to the thrusters.

Engineers recovered four of the five thrusters after they temporarily stopped working, but NASA officials couldn’t be sure the thrusters would not overheat again on the trip home. NASA decided it was too risky for Starliner to come home with astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on Boeing’s crew test flight on June 5, becoming the first people to fly on the commercial capsule. They will remain aboard the station until February, when they will return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

The original flight plan, had Wilmore and Williams been aboard Starliner for the trip home, called for the spacecraft to make a gentler departure from the ISS, allowing engineers to fully check out the performance of its navigation sensors and test the craft’s ability to loiter in the vicinity of the station for photographic surveys of its exterior.

“In this case, what we’re doing is the break-out burn, which will be a series of 12 burns, each not very large, about 0.1 meters per second (0.2 mph) and that’s just to take the Starliner away from the station, and then immediately start going up and away, and eventually it’ll curve around to the top and deorbit from above the station a few orbits later,” said Anthony Vareha, NASA’s flight director overseeing ISS operations during Starliner’s undocking sequence.

Astronauts won’t be inside Starliner’s cockpit to take manual control in the event of a major problem, so NASA managers want the spacecraft to get away from the space station as quickly as possible.

On this path, Starliner will exit the so-called approach ellipsoid, a 2.5-by-1.25-by-1.25-mile (4-by-2-by-2-kilometer) invisible boundary around the orbiting laboratory, about 20 to 25 minutes after undocking, NASA officials said. That’s less than half the time Starliner would normally take to leave the vicinity of the ISS.

“It’s a quicker way to get away from the station, with less stress on the thrusters,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “Essentially, once we open the hooks, the springs will push Starliner away and then we’ll do some really short thruster firings to put us on a trajectory that will take us above the station and behind, we’ll be opening to a nice range to where we can execute the deorbit burn.”

In the unlikely event of a more significant series of thruster failures, the springs that push Starliner away from the station should be enough to ensure there’s no risk of collision, according to Vareha.

“Then, after that, we really are going to just stay in some very benign attitudes and not fire the the thrusters very much at all,” Stich said.

Starliner will need to use the RCS thrusters again to point itself in the proper direction to fire four larger rocket engines for the deorbit burn. Once this burn is complete, the RCS thrusters will reorient the spacecraft to jettison the service module to burn up in the atmosphere. The reusable crew module relies on a separate set of thrusters during reentry.

Finally, the capsule will approach the landing zone in New Mexico from the southwest, flying over the Pacific Ocean and Mexico before deploying three main parachutes and airbags to cushion its landing at White Sands. Boeing and NASA teams there will meet the spacecraft and secure it for a road voyage back to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for refurbishment.

Meanwhile, engineers must resolve the causes of the thruster problems and helium leaks that plagued the Starliner test flight before it can fly astronauts again.

NASA wants Starliner to make a quick getaway from the space station Read More »

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Boeing will try to fly its troubled Starliner capsule back to Earth next week

Boeing, commercial crew, Commercial space, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / /

Destination desert —

The two astronauts who launched on Starliner will stay behind on the International Space Station.

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft undocks from the International Space Station at the conclusion of an unpiloted test flight in May 2022.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft undocks from the International Space Station at the conclusion of an unpiloted test flight in May 2022.

NASA

NASA and Boeing are proceeding with final preparations to undock the Starliner spacecraft from the International Space Station next Friday, September 6, to head for landing at White Sands Space Harbor in southern New Mexico.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were supposed to return to Earth inside Starliner, will remain behind on the space station after NASA decided last week to conclude the Boeing test flight without its crew on board. NASA officials decided it was too risky to put the astronauts on Starliner after the spacecraft suffered thruster failures during its flight to the space station in early June.

Instead, Wilmore and Williams will come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule no earlier than February, extending their planned stay on the space station from eight days to eight months. Flying on autopilot, the Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to depart the station at approximately 6: 04 pm EDT (22: 04 UTC) on September 6. The capsule will fire its engines to drop out of orbit and target a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico at 12: 03 am EDT (04: 03 UTC) on September 7, NASA said in a statement Thursday.

NASA officials completed the second part of a two-day Flight Readiness Review on Thursday to clear the Starliner spacecraft for undocking and landing. However, there are strict weather rules for landing a Starliner spacecraft, so NASA and Boeing managers will decide next week whether to proceed with the return next Friday night or wait for better conditions at the White Sands landing zone.

Over the last few days, flight controllers updated parameters in Starliner’s software to handle a fully autonomous return to Earth without inputs from astronauts flying in the cockpit, NASA said. Boeing has flown two unpiloted Starliner test flights using the same type of autonomous reentry and landing operations. This mission, called the Crew Flight Test (CFT), was the first time astronauts launched into orbit inside a Starliner spacecraft, and was expected to pave the way for future operational missions to rotate four-person crews to and from the space station.

With the Starliner spacecraft unable to complete its test flight as intended, there are fundamental questions about the future of Boeing’s commercial crew program. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said last week that Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, told him the aerospace company remained committed to Starliner. However, Boeing will be on the hook to pay for the cost of resolving problems with overheating thrusters and helium leaks that hamstrung the CFT mission. Boeing hasn’t made any public statements about the long-term future of the Starliner program since NASA decided to pull its astronauts off the spacecraft for its return to Earth.

Preparing for a contingency

NASA is clearly more comfortable with returning Wilmore and Williams to Earth inside SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, but the change disrupts crew operations at the space station. This week, astronauts have been reconfiguring the interior of a Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the outpost to support six crew members in the event of an emergency evacuation.

With Starliner leaving the space station next week, Dragon will become the lifeboat for Wilmore and Williams. If a fire, a collision with space junk, a medical emergency, or something else forces the crew to leave the complex, the Starliner astronauts will ride home on makeshift seats positioned under the four regular seats inside Dragon, where crews typically put cargo during launch and landing.

At least one of the Starliner astronauts would have to come home without a spacesuit to protect them if the cabin of the Dragon spacecraft depressurized on the descent. This has never happened on a Dragon mission before, but astronauts wear SpaceX-made pressure suits to mitigate the risk. The four astronauts who launched on Dragon have their suits, and NASA officials said a spare SpaceX suit already on the space station fit one of the Starliner astronauts, but they didn’t identify which one.

A pressure suit for the other Starliner crew member will launch on the next Dragon spacecraft—on the Crew-9 mission—set for liftoff on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than September 24. Starliner’s troubles have also disrupted plans for the Crew-9 mission.

On Friday, NASA announced it would remove two astronauts from the Crew-9 mission, including its commander, Zena Cardman, who is a spaceflight rookie. Veteran astronaut Nick Hague will move from the pilot’s seat to take over as Crew-9 commander. Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will join him.

NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, have an agreement to launch Russian cosmonauts on Dragon missions and US astronauts on Russian Soyuz flights to the station. In exchange for NASA providing a ride for Gorbunov, NASA astronaut Don Pettit will fly to the space station on a Soyuz spacecraft next month.

The so-called “seat swap” arrangement ensures that, even if Dragon or Soyuz were grounded, there is always at least one US astronaut and one Russian cosmonaut on the station overseeing each partner’s segment of the outpost, maintaining propulsion, power generating, pointing control, thermal control, and other critical capabilities to keep the lab operational.

Boeing will try to fly its troubled Starliner capsule back to Earth next week Read More »

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NASA’s Starliner decision was the right one, but it’s a crushing blow for Boeing

Boeing, commercial crew, Commercial space, Features, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / /

Falling short —

It’s unlikely Boeing can fly all six of its Starliner missions before retirement of the ISS in 2030.

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A Starliner spacecraft mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket before an unpiloted test flight in 2022.

Enlarge / A Starliner spacecraft mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket before an unpiloted test flight in 2022.

Ten years ago next month NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency’s most experienced contractors, won the lion’s share of government money available to end the agency’s sole reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.

At the time, Boeing won $4.2 billion from NASA to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two, and potentially up to six, operational crew flights to rotate crews between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for essentially the same scope of work.

A decade later the Starliner program finds itself at a crossroads after Boeing learned it will not complete the spacecraft’s first Crew Flight Test with astronauts onboard. NASA formally decided Saturday that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the Starliner capsule June 5, will instead return to Earth inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Put simply, NASA isn’t confident enough in Boeing’s spacecraft after it suffered multiple thrusters failures and helium leaks on the way to the ISS.

So where does this leave Boeing with its multibillion contract? Can the company fulfill the breadth of its commercial crew contract with NASA before the space station’s scheduled retirement in 2030? It now seems that there is little chance of Boeing flying six more Starliner missions without a life extension for the ISS. Tellingly, perhaps, NASA has only placed firm orders with Boeing for three Starliner flights once the agency certifies the spacecraft for operational use.

Boeing’s bottom line

Although Boeing did not make an official statement Saturday on its long-term plans for Starliner, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters he received assurances from Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, that the company remains committed to the commercial crew program. And it will take a significant commitment from Boeing to see it through. Under the terms of its fixed price contract with NASA, the company is on the hook to pay for any expenses to fix the thruster and helium leak problems and get Starliner flying again.

Boeing has already reported $1.6 billion in charges on its financial statements to pay for delays and cost overruns on the Starliner program. That figure will grow as the company will likely need to redesign some elements in the spacecraft’s propulsion system to remedy the problems encountered on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. NASA has committed $5.1 billion to Boeing for the Starliner program, and the agency has already paid out most of that funding.

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

The next step for Starliner remains unclear, and we’ll assess that in more detail later in the story. Had the Starliner test flight ended as expected, with its crew inside, NASA targeted no earlier than August 2025 for Boeing to launch the first of its six operational crew rotation missions to the space station. In light of Saturday’s decision, there’s a high probability Starliner won’t fly with astronauts again until at least 2026.

Starliner safely delivered astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station on June 6, a day after their launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. But five of the craft’s 28 reaction control system thrusters overheated and failed as it approached the outpost. After the failures on the way to the space station, NASA’s engineers were concerned Starliner might suffer similar problems, or worse, when the control jets fired to guide Starliner on the trip back to Earth.

On Saturday, senior NASA leaders decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The two astronauts, who originally planned for an eight-day stay at the station, will now spend eight months on the orbiting research lab until they come back to Earth with SpaceX.

If it’s not a trust problem, is it a judgement issue?

Boeing managers had previously declared Starliner was safe enough to bring Wilmore and Williams home. Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, regularly appeared to downplay the seriousness of the thruster issues during press conferences throughout Starliner’s nearly three-month mission.

So why did NASA and Boeing engineers reach different conclusions? “I think we’re looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, and the agency’s most senior civil servant. “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s our technical expertise and our experience that we have to balance. We balance risk across everything, not just Starliner.”

The people at the top of NASA’s decision-making tree have either flown in space before, or had front-row seats to the calamitous decision NASA made in 2003 to not seek more data on the condition of space shuttle Columbia’s left wing after the impact of a block of foam from the shuttle’s fuel tank during launch. This led to the deaths of seven astronauts, and the destruction of Columbia during reentry over East Texas. A similar normalization of technical problems, and a culture of stifling dissent, led to the loss of space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

“We lost two space shuttles as a result there not being a culture in which information could come forward,” Nelson said Saturday. “We have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection, you come forward. Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest, and even at its most routine. And a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine. So the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety.”

Now, it seems that culture may truly have changed. With SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft available to give Wilmore and Williams a ride home, this ended up being a relatively straightforward decision. Ken Bowersox, head of NASA’s space operations mission directorate, said the managers polled for their opinion all supported bringing the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without anyone onboard.

However, NASA and Boeing need to answer for how the Starliner program got to this point. The space agency approved the launch of the Starliner CFT mission in June despite knowing the spacecraft had a helium leak in its propulsion system. Those leaks multiplied once Starliner arrived in orbit, and are a serious issue on their own that will require corrective actions before the next flight. Ultimately, the thruster problems superseded the seriousness of the helium leaks, and this is where NASA and Boeing are likely to face the most difficult questions moving forward.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station.

Enlarge / NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station.

Boeing’s previous Starliner mission, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), successfully launched in 2022 and docked with the space station, later coming back to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico. The test flight achieved all of its major objectives, setting the stage for the Crew Flight Test mission this year. But the spacecraft suffered thruster problems on that flight, too.

Several of the reaction control system thrusters stopped working as Starliner approached the space station on the OFT-2 mission, and another one failed on the return leg of the mission. Engineers thought they fixed the problem by introducing what was essentially a software fix to adjust timing and tolerance settings on sensors in the propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne.

That didn’t work. The problem lay elsewhere, as engineers discovered during testing this summer, when Starliner was already in orbit. Thruster firings at White Stands, New Mexico, revealed a small Teflon seal in a valve can bulge when overheated, restricting the flow of oxidizer propellant to the thruster. NASA officials concluded there is a chance, however small, that the thrusters could overheat again as Starliner departs the station and flies back to Earth—or perhaps get worse.

“We are clearly operating this thruster at a higher temperature, at times, than it was designed for,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “I think that was a factor, that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully, we’re operating the thruster outside of where it should be operated at.”

NASA’s Starliner decision was the right one, but it’s a crushing blow for Boeing Read More »

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After months of mulling, NASA will decide on Starliner return this weekend

commercial crew, Commercial space, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / /

Standby for news —

“The agency flight readiness review is where any formal dissents are presented and reconciled.”

–

A high-resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite owned by Maxar captured this view of the International Space Station on June 7 with Boeing's Starliner capsule docked at the lab's forward port (lower right).

Enlarge / A high-resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite owned by Maxar captured this view of the International Space Station on June 7 with Boeing’s Starliner capsule docked at the lab’s forward port (lower right).

Senior NASA leaders, including the agency’s administrator, Bill Nelson, will meet Saturday in Houston to decide whether Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is safe enough to ferry astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth from the International Space Station.

The Flight Readiness Review (FRR) is expected to conclude with NASA’s most consequential safety decision in nearly a generation. One option is to clear the Starliner spacecraft to undock from the space station in early September with Wilmore and Williams onboard, as their flight plan initially laid out, or to bring the capsule home without its crew.

As of Thursday, the two veteran astronauts have been on the space station for 77 days, nearly 10 times longer than their planned stay of eight days. Wilmore and Williams were the first people to launch and dock at the space station aboard a Starliner spacecraft, but multiple thrusters failed and the capsule leaked helium from its propulsion system as it approached the orbiting complex on June 6.

That led to months of testing—in space and on the ground—data reviews, and modeling for engineers to try to understand the root cause of the thruster problems. Engineers believe the thrusters overheated, causing Teflon seals to bulge and block the flow of propellant to the small control jets, resulting in losing thrust. The condition of the thrusters improved once Starliner docked at the station when they weren’t repeatedly firing, as they need to do when the spacecraft is flying alone.

However, engineers and managers have not yet reached a consensus about whether the same problem could recur, or get worse, during the capsule’s journey back to Earth. In a worst-case scenario, if too many thrusters fail, the spacecraft would be unable to point in the proper direction for a critical braking burn to guide the capsule back into the atmosphere toward landing.

The suspect thrusters are located on Starliner’s service module, which will perform the deorbit burn and then separate from the astronaut-carrying crew module before reentry. A separate set of small engines will fine-tune Starliner’s trajectory during descent.

If NASA managers decide it’s not worth the risk, Wilmore and Williams would extend their stay on the space station until at least February of next year, when they would return to Earth inside a Dragon spacecraft provided by SpaceX, Boeing’s rival in NASA’s commercial crew program. This would eliminate the threat that thruster problems on the Starliner spacecraft might pose to the crew’s safety during the trip to Earth, but it comes with myriad side effects.

These effects include disrupting crew activities on the space station by bumping two astronauts off the next SpaceX flight, exposing Wilmore and Williams to additional radiation during their time in space, and dealing a debilitating blow to Boeing’s Starliner program.

If Boeing’s capsule cannot return to Earth with its two astronauts, NASA may not certify Starliner for operational crew missions without an additional test flight. In that case, Boeing probably wouldn’t be able to complete all six of its planned operational crew missions under a $4.2 billion NASA contract before the International Space Station is due for retirement in 2030.

FRR-eedom to speak

The Flight Readiness Review at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will begin Saturday morning. Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut and head of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, will chair the meeting. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson will participate, too. If there’s no unanimous agreement around the table at the FRR, a final decision on what to do could be elevated above Bowersox to NASA’s associate administrator, Jim Free or to Nelson.

“The agency flight readiness review is where any formal dissents are presented and reconciled,” NASA said in a statement Thursday. “Other agency leaders who routinely participate in launch and return readiness reviews for crewed missions include NASA’s administrator, deputy administrator, associate administrator, various agency center directors, the Flight Operations Directorate, and agency technical authorities.”

NASA has scheduled a press conference for no earlier than 1 pm ET (17: 00 UTC) Saturday to announce the agency’s decision and next steps, the agency said.

Lower-level managers will meet Friday in a so-called Program Control Board to discuss their findings and views before the FRR. At a previous Program Control Board meeting, managers disagreed on whether the agency was ready to sign off that the Starliner spacecraft was safe enough to return its astronauts to Earth.

There’s one new piece of information that engineers will brief to the Program Control Board on Friday:

“Engineering teams have been working to evaluate a new model that represents the thruster mechanics and is designed to more accurately predict performance during the return phase of flight,” NASA said. “This data could help teams better understand system redundancy from undock to service module separation. Ongoing efforts to complete the new modeling, characterize spacecraft performance data, refine integrated risk assessments, and determine community recommendations will fold into the agency-level review.”

After months of mulling, NASA will decide on Starliner return this weekend Read More »

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NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation

Boeing, commercial crew, Features, human spaceflight, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / /
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

As soon as this week, NASA officials will make perhaps the agency’s most consequential safety decision in human spaceflight in 21 years.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are nearly 10 weeks into a test flight that was originally set to last a little more than one week. The two retired US Navy test pilots were the first people to fly into orbit on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft when it launched on June 5. Now, NASA officials aren’t sure Starliner is safe enough to bring the astronauts home.

Three of the managers at the center of the pending decision, Ken Bowersox and Steve Stich from NASA and Boeing’s LeRoy Cain, either had key roles in the ill-fated final flight of Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 or felt the consequences of the accident.

At that time, officials misjudged the risk. Seven astronauts died, and the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed as it reentered the atmosphere over Texas. Bowersox, Stich, and Cain weren’t the people making the call on the health of Columbia‘s heat shield in 2003, but they had front-row seats to the consequences.

Bowersox was an astronaut on the International Space Station when NASA lost Columbia. He and his crewmates were waiting to hitch a ride home on the next Space Shuttle mission, which was delayed two-and-a-half years in the wake of the Columbia accident. Instead, Bowersox’s crew came back to Earth later that year on a Russian Soyuz capsule. After retiring from the astronaut corps, Bowersox worked at SpaceX and is now the head of NASA’s spaceflight operations directorate.

Stich and Cain were NASA flight directors in 2003, and they remain well-respected in human spaceflight circles. Stich is now the manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, and Cain is now a Boeing employee and chair of the company’s Starliner mission director. For the ongoing Starliner mission, Bowersox, Stich, and Cain are in the decision-making chain.

All three joined NASA in the late 1980s, soon after the Challenger accident. They have seen NASA attempt to reshape its safety culture after both of NASA’s fatal Space Shuttle tragedies. After Challenger, NASA’s astronaut office had a more central role in safety decisions, and the agency made efforts to listen to dissent from engineers. Still, human flaws are inescapable, and NASA’s culture was unable to alleviate them during Columbia‘s last flight in 2003.

NASA knew launching a Space Shuttle in cold weather reduced the safety margin on its solid rocket boosters, which led to the Challenger accident. And shuttle managers knew foam routinely fell off the external fuel tank. In a near-miss, one of these foam fragments hit a shuttle booster but didn’t damage it, just two flights prior to Columbia‘s STS-107 mission.

“I have wondered if some in management roles today that were here when we lost Challenger and Columbia remember that in both of those tragedies, there were those that were not comfortable proceeding,” Milt Heflin, a retired NASA flight director who spent 47 years at the agency, wrote in an email to Ars. “Today, those memories are still around.”

“I suspect Stich and Cain are paying attention to the right stuff,” Heflin wrote.

The question facing NASA’s leadership today? Should the two astronauts return to Earth from the International Space Station in Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, with its history of thruster failures and helium leaks, or should they come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule?

Under normal conditions, the first option is the choice everyone at NASA would like to make. It would be least disruptive to operations at the space station and would potentially maintain a clearer future for Boeing’s Starliner program, which NASA would like to become operational for regular crew rotation flights to the station.

But some people at NASA aren’t convinced this is the right call. Engineers still don’t fully understand why five of the Starliner spacecraft’s thrusters overheated and lost power as the capsule approached the space station for docking in June. Four of these five control jets are now back in action with near-normal performance, but managers would like to be sure the same thrusters—and maybe more—won’t fail again as Starliner departs the station and heads for reentry.

NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation Read More »

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SpaceX moving Dragon splashdowns to Pacific to solve falling debris problem

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A Crew Dragon spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station in 2022. The section of the spacecraft on the left is the pressurized capsule, while the rear section, at right, is the trunk.

Enlarge / A Crew Dragon spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station in 2022. The section of the spacecraft on the left is the pressurized capsule, while the rear section, at right, is the trunk.

NASA

Sometime next year, SpaceX will begin returning its Dragon crew and cargo capsules to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean and end recoveries of the spacecraft off the coast of Florida.

This will allow SpaceX to make changes to the way it brings Dragons back to Earth and eliminate the risk, however tiny, that a piece of debris from the ship’s trunk section might fall on someone and cause damage, injury, or death.

“After five years of splashing down off the coast of Florida, we’ve decided to shift Dragon recovery operations back to the West Coast,” said Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management.

Public safety

In the past couple of years, landowners have discovered debris from several Dragon missions on their property, and the fragments all came from the spacecraft’s trunk, an unpressurized section mounted behind the capsule as it carries astronauts or cargo on flights to and from the International Space Station.

SpaceX returned its first 21 Dragon cargo missions to splashdowns in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Los Angeles. When an upgraded human-rated version of Dragon started flying in 2019, SpaceX moved splashdowns to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico to be closer to the company’s refurbishment and launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The benefits of landing near Florida included a faster handover of astronauts and time-sensitive cargo back to NASA and shorter turnaround times between missions.

The old version of Dragon, known as Dragon 1, separated its trunk after the deorbit burn, allowing the trunk to fall into the Pacific. With the new version of Dragon, called Dragon 2, SpaceX changed the reentry profile to jettison the trunk before the deorbit burn. This meant that the trunk remained in orbit after each Dragon mission, while the capsule reentered the atmosphere on a guided trajectory. The trunk, which is made of composite materials and lacks a propulsion system, usually takes a few weeks or a few months to fall back into the atmosphere and doesn’t have control of where or when it reenters.

Air resistance from the rarefied upper atmosphere gradually slows the trunk’s velocity enough to drop it out of orbit, and the amount of aerodynamic drag the trunk sees is largely determined by fluctuations in solar activity.

SpaceX and NASA, which funded a large portion of the Dragon spacecraft’s development, initially determined the trunk would entirely burn up when it reentered the atmosphere and would pose no threat of surviving reentry and causing injuries or damaging property. However, that turned out to not be the case.

In May, a 90-pound chunk of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that departed the International Space Station fell on the property of a “glamping” resort in North Carolina. At the same time, a homeowner in a nearby town found a smaller piece of material that also appeared to be from the same Dragon mission.

These events followed the discovery in April of another nearly 90-pound piece of debris from a Dragon capsule on a farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. SpaceX and NASA later determined the debris fell from orbit in February, and earlier this month, SpaceX employees came to the farm to retrieve the wreckage, according to CBC.

Pieces of a Dragon spacecraft also fell over Colorado last year, and a farmer in Australia found debris from a Dragon capsule on his land in 2022.

SpaceX moving Dragon splashdowns to Pacific to solve falling debris problem Read More »

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Rocket delivered to launch site for first human flight to the Moon since 1972

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Rocket delivered to launch site for first human flight to the Moon since 1972

The central piece of NASA’s second Space Launch System rocket arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. Agency officials intend to start stacking the towering launcher in the next couple of months for a mission late next year carrying a team of four astronauts around the Moon.

The Artemis II mission, officially scheduled for September 2025, will be the first voyage by humans to the vicinity of the Moon since the last Apollo lunar landing mission in 1972. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen will ride the SLS rocket away from Earth, then fly around the far side of the Moon and return home inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft.

“The core is the backbone of SLS, and it’s the backbone of the Artemis mission,” said Matthew Ramsey, NASA’s mission manager for Artemis II. “We’ve been waiting for the core to get here because all the integrated tests and checkouts that we do have to have the core stage. It has the flight avionics that drive the whole system. The boosters are also important, but the core is really the backbone for Artemis. So it’s a big day.”

The core stage rolled off of NASA’s Pegasus barge at Kennedy early Wednesday, following a weeklong ocean voyage from New Orleans, where Boeing builds the rocket under contract to NASA.

Ramsey told Ars that ground teams hope to begin stacking the rocket’s two powerful solid rocket boosters on NASA’s mobile launcher platform in September. Each booster, supplied by Northrop Grumman, is made of five segments with pre-packed solid propellant and a nose cone. All the pieces for the SLS boosters are at Kennedy and ready for stacking, Ramsey said.

The SLS upper stage, built by United Launch Alliance, is also at the Florida launch site. Now, the core stage is at Kennedy. In August or September, NASA plans to deliver the two remaining elements of the SLS rocket to Florida. These are the adapter structures that will connect the core stage to the upper stage, and the upper stage to the Orion spacecraft.

A heavy-duty crane inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) will hoist each segment of the SLS boosters into place on the launch platform. Once the boosters are fully stacked, ground teams will lift the 212-foot (65-meter) core stage vertical in the transfer aisle running through the center of the VAB. A crane will then lower the core stage between the boosters. That could happen as soon as December, according to Ramsey.

Then comes the launch vehicle stage adapter, the upper stage, the Orion stage adapter, and finally, the Orion spacecraft itself.

Moving toward operations

NASA’s inspector general reported in 2022 that NASA’s first four Artemis missions will each cost $4.1 billion. Subsequent documents, including a Government Accountability Office report last year, suggest the expendable SLS core stage is responsible for at least a quarter of the cost for each Artemis flight.

The core stage for Artemis II is powered by four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 engines produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne. Two of the reusable engines for Artemis II have flown on the space shuttle, and the other two RS-25s were built in the shuttle era but never flew. Each SLS launch will put the core stage and its engines in the Atlantic Ocean.

Steve Wofford, who manages the stages office for the SLS program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, told Ars there are “no major configuration differences” between the core stages for Artemis I and Artemis II. The only minor differences involve instrumentation that NASA wanted on Artemis I to measure pressures, accelerations, vibrations, temperatures, and other parameters on the first flight of the Space Launch System.

“We are still working off some flight observations that we made on Artemis I, but no showstoppers,” Wofford said. “On the first article, the test flight, Artemis I, we really loaded it up. That’s a golden opportunity to learn as much as you can about the vehicle and the flight regime, and anchor all your models… As you progress, you need less and less of that. So Core Stage 2 will have less development flight instrumentation than Core Stage 1, and then Core Stage 3 will have less still.”

Rocket delivered to launch site for first human flight to the Moon since 1972 Read More »

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NASA nears decision on what to do with Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft

Boeing, butch wilmore, commercial crew, Commercial space, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, starliner, suni williams / /
Boeing's Strainer spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station in this picture taken July 3.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Strainer spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station in this picture taken July 3.

The astronauts who rode Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station last month still don’t know when they will return to Earth.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been in space for 51 days, six weeks longer than originally planned, as engineers on the groundwork through problems with Starliner’s propulsion system.

The problems are twofold. The spacecraft’s reaction control thrusters overheated, and some of them shut off as Starliner approached the space station June 6. A separate, although perhaps related, problem involves helium leaks in the craft’s propulsion system.

On Thursday, NASA and Boeing managers said they still plan to bring Wilmore and Williams home on the Starliner spacecraft. In the last few weeks, ground teams completed testing of a thruster on a test stand at White Sands, New Mexico. This weekend, Boeing and NASA plan to fire the spacecraft’s thrusters in orbit to check their performance while docked at the space station.

“I think we’re starting to close in on those final pieces of flight rationale to make sure that we can come home safely, and that’s our primary focus right now,” Stich said.

The problems have led to speculation that NASA might decide to return Wilmore and Williams to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. There’s one Crew Dragon currently docked at the station, and another one is slated to launch with a fresh crew next month. Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said the agency has looked at backup plans to bring the Starliner crew home on a SpaceX capsule, but the main focus is still to have the astronauts fly home aboard Starliner.

“Our prime option is to complete the mission,” Stich said. “There are a lot of good reasons to complete this mission and bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner. Starliner was designed, as a spacecraft, to have the crew in the cockpit.”

Starliner launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5. Wilmore and Williams are the first astronauts to fly into space on Boeing’s commercial crew capsule, and this test flight is intended to pave the way for future operational flights to rotate crews of four to and from the International Space Station.

Once NASA fully certifies Starliner for operational missions, the agency will have two human-rated spaceships for flights to the station. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has been flying astronauts since 2020.

Tests, tests, and more tests

NASA has extended the duration of the Starliner test flight to conduct tests and analyze data in an effort to gain confidence in the spacecraft’s ability to safely bring its crew home and to better understand the root causes of the overheating thrusters and helium leaks. These problems are inside Starliner’s service module, which is jettisoned to burn up in the atmosphere during reentry, while the reusable crew module, with the astronauts inside, parachutes to an airbag-cushioned landing.

The most important of these tests was a series of test-firings of a Starliner thruster on the ground. This thruster was taken from a set of hardware slated to fly on a future Starlink mission, and engineers put it through a stress test, firing it numerous times to replicate the sequence of pulses it would see in flight. The testing simulated two sequences of flying up to the space station, and five sequences the thruster would execute during undocking and a deorbit burn for return to Earth.

“This thruster has seen quite a bit of pulses, maybe even more than what we would anticipate we would see during a flight, and more aggressive in terms of two uphills and five downhills,” Stich said. “What we did see in the thruster is the same kind of thrust degradation that we’re seeing on orbit. In a number of the thrusters (on Starliner), we’re seeing reduced thrust, which is important.”

Starliner’s flight computer shut off five of the spacecraft’s 28 reaction control system thrusters, produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne, during the rendezvous with the space station last month. Four of the five thrusters were recovered after overheating and losing thrust, but officials have declared one of the thrusters unusable.

The thruster tested on the ground showed similar behavior. Inspections of the thruster at White Sands showed bulging in a Teflon seal in an oxidizer valve, which could restrict the flow of nitrogen tetroxide propellant. The thrusters, each generating about 85 pounds of thrust, consume the nitrogen tetroxide, or NTO, oxidizer and mix it with hydrazine fuel for combustion.

A poppet valve, similar to an inflation valve on a tire, is designed to open and close to allow nitrogen tetroxide to flow into the thruster.

“That poppet has a Teflon seal at the end of it,” Nappi said. “Through the heating and natural vacuum that occurs with the thruster firing, that poppet seal was deformed and actually bulged out a little bit.”

Stich said engineers are evaluating the integrity of the Teflon seal to determine if it could remain intact through the undocking and deorbit burn of the Starliner spacecraft. The thrusters aren’t needed while Starliner is attached to the space station.

“Could that particular seal survive the rest of the flight? That’s the important part,” Stich said.

NASA nears decision on what to do with Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft Read More »

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NASA update on Starliner thruster issues: This is fine

Boeing, commercial crew, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / /
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on final approach to the International Space Station last month.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on final approach to the International Space Station last month.

Before clearing Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule to depart the International Space Station and head for Earth, NASA managers want to ensure the spacecraft’s problematic control thrusters can help guide the ship’s two-person crew home.

The two astronauts who launched June 5 on the Starliner spacecraft’s first crew test flight agree with the managers, although they said Wednesday that they’re comfortable with flying the capsule back to Earth if there’s any emergency that might require evacuation of the space station.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were supposed to return to Earth weeks ago, but managers are keeping them at the station as engineers continue probing thruster problems and helium leaks that have plagued the mission since its launch.

“This is a tough business that we’re in,” Wilmore, Starliner’s commander, told reporters Wednesday in a news conference from the space station. “Human spaceflight is not easy in any regime, and there have been multiple issues with any spacecraft that’s ever been designed, and that’s the nature of what we do.”

Five of the 28 reaction control system thrusters on Starliner’s service module dropped offline as the spacecraft approached the space station last month. Starliner’s flight software disabled the five control jets when they started overheating and losing thrust. Four of the thrusters were later recovered, although some couldn’t reach their full power levels as Starliner came in for docking.

Wilmore, who took over manual control for part of Starliner’s approach to the space station, said he could sense the spacecraft’s handling qualities diminish as thrusters temporarily failed. “You could tell it was degraded, but still, it was impressive,” he said. Starliner ultimately docked to the station in autopilot mode.

In mid-June, the Starliner astronauts hot-fired the thrusters again, and their thrust levels were closer to normal.

“What we want to know is that the thrusters can perform; if whatever their percentage of thrust is, we can put it into a package that will get us a deorbit burn,” said Williams, a NASA astronaut serving as Starliner’s pilot. “That’s the main purpose that we need [for] the service module: to get us a good deorbit burn so that we can come back.”

These small thrusters aren’t necessary for the deorbit burn itself, which will use a different set of engines to slow Starliner’s velocity enough for it to drop out of orbit and head for landing. But Starliner needs enough of the control jets working to maneuver into the proper orientation for the deorbit firing.

This test flight is the first time astronauts have flown in space on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, following years of delays and setbacks. Starliner is NASA’s second human-rated commercial crew capsule, and it’s poised to join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in a rotation of missions ferrying astronauts to and from the space station through the rest of the decade.

But first, Boeing and NASA need to safely complete the Starliner test flight and resolve the thruster problems and helium leaks plaguing the spacecraft before moving forward with operational crew rotation missions. There’s a Crew Dragon spacecraft currently docked to the station, but Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, told reporters Wednesday that, right now, Wilmore and Williams still plan to come home on Starliner.

“The beautiful thing about the commercial crew program is that we have two vehicles, two different systems, that we could use to return crew,” Stich said. “So we have a little bit more time to go through the data and then make a decision as to whether we need to do anything different. But the prime option today is to return Butch and Suni on Starliner. Right now, we don’t see any reason that wouldn’t be the case.”

Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, said officials identified more than 30 actions to investigate five “small” helium leaks and the thruster problems on Starliner’s service module. “All these items are scheduled to be completed by the end of next week,” Nappi said.

“It’s a test flight, and the first with crew, and we’re just taking a little extra time to make sure that we understand everything before we commit to deorbit,” Stich said.

NASA update on Starliner thruster issues: This is fine Read More »

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NASA orders more tests on Starliner, but says crew isn’t stranded in space

Boeing, commercial crew, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / /
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13.

NASA and Boeing officials pushed back Friday on headlines that the commercial Starliner crew capsule is stranded at the International Space Station but said they need more time to analyze data before formally clearing the spacecraft for undocking and reentry.

Two NASA astronauts, commander Butch Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams, will spend at least a few more weeks on the space station as engineers on the ground conduct thruster tests to better understand issues with the Starliner propulsion system in orbit. Wilmore and Williams launched June 5 aboard an Atlas V rocket and docked at the station the next day, completing the first segment of Starliner’s first test flight with astronauts.

NASA managers originally planned for the Starliner spacecraft to remain docked at the space station for at least eight days, although they left open the possibility of a mission extension. The test flight is now likely to last at least a month and a half, and perhaps longer, as engineers wrestle with helium leaks and thruster glitches on Starliner’s service module.

Batteries on this Starliner spacecraft were initially only certified for a 45-day mission duration, but NASA officials said they are looking at extending the limit after confirming the batteries are functioning well.

“We have the luxury of time,” said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s space operations mission directorate. “We’re still in the middle of a test mission. We’re still pressing forward.”

Previously, NASA and Boeing officials delayed Starliner’s reentry and landing from mid-June, then from June 26, and now they have bypassed a potential landing opportunity in early July. Last week, NASA said in a statement that the agency’s top leadership will meet to formally review the readiness of Starliner for reentry, something that wasn’t part of the original plan.

“We’re not stuck on ISS”

Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said Friday that he wanted to clear up “misunderstandings” that led to headlines claiming the Starliner spacecraft was stuck or stranded at the space station.

“I want to make it very clear that Butch and Suni are not stranded in space,” Stich said. “Our plan is to continue to return them on Starliner and return them home at the right time. We have a little bit more work to do to get there for the final return, but they’re safe on (the) space station.”

With Starliner docked, the space station currently hosts three different crew spacecraft, including SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Russia’s Soyuz. There are no serious plans under consideration to bring Wilmore and Williams home on a different spacecraft.

“Obviously, we have the luxury of having multiple vehicles, and we work contingency plans for lots of different cases, but right now, we’re really focused on returning Butch and Suni on Starliner,” Stich said.

“We’re not stuck on the ISS,” said Mark Nappi, Boeing’s vice president in charge of the Starliner program. “It’s pretty painful to read the things that are out there. We’ve gotten a really good test flight that’s been accomplished so far, and it’s being viewed rather negatively.”

Stich said NASA officials should have “more frequent interaction” with reporters to fill in gaps of information on the Starliner test flight. NASA’s written updates are not always timely, and often lack details and context.

NASA officials have cleared the Starliner spacecraft for an emergency return to Earth if astronauts need to evacuate the space station for safety or medical reasons. But NASA hasn’t yet approved Starliner for reentry and landing under “nominal” conditions.

“When it is a contingency situation, we’re ready to put the crew on the spacecraft and bring them home as a lifeboat,” Bowersox said. “For the nominal entry, we want to look at the data more before we make the final call to put the crew aboard the vehicle, and it’s a serious enough call that we’ll bring the senior management team together (for approval).”

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