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Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft and crew have been in space for more than a month, far longer than the initially anticipated one-week stay.
Due to technical issues with the vehicle, the return process has been postponed indefinitely and there is still no return date on the horizon.
But the two astronauts who carried out the historic test mission spoke mostly positively about the Boeing-built spacecraft that carried them to the International Space Station on its first crewed flight.
“The launch was amazing. I mean, it was really incredible,” Butch Wilmore, one of two NASA astronauts who led that mission, said during a press briefing Wednesday. “And then we went into our operational capability checks, and the spacecraft performed incredibly well.”
Wilmore praised the vehicle’s precise control, but also said he felt thrust “fade away” when several thrusters unexpectedly failed as the Starliner approached its docking port at the International Space Station.
“But thankfully we had practiced and were certified for manual control, and so we took over manual control for over an hour,” Wilmore added. Eventually, all of the thrusters were recovered before docking, according to NASA.
In addition to the thruster problems, Starliner also suffered a helium leak during the first leg of the journey.
To learn more about the propulsion issues, the Starliner team is conducting tests on the ground in New Mexico. The tests should be completed by the end of this week, officials said in a briefing Wednesday afternoon. They added that the test plans encountered a “snag” in the form of Hurricane Beryl, which reached the U.S. on July 8.
While NASA has not yet shared an estimated return date for Williams and Wilmore, Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said Wednesday that the “most important factor” in terms of timing is for the astronauts to return home before the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, which arrives in August with more astronauts.
“This is kind of a back end. I think we’re trying to track the data and see the earliest time we can target for separation and landing,” Stich said.
“I think some data suggests that, optimistically, it could happen by the end of July,” Stich added.
An eventful trip
Starliner’s first crewed mission took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on June 5, ending years of delays due to development setbacks, cost overruns and even an uncrewed test mission that had to be re-flown due to a mission termination error.
NASA and Boeing said the new wave of problems affecting this flight should not prevent the spacecraft from bringing its crew — the astronauts — back to space. Sunita Williams and Wilmore—returned safely home from space. However, they did not specify an expected time frame for Williams and Wilmore’s return and insisted that the crew was “not stuck.”
“If there’s a problem on the International Space Station, we can get on the (Starliner spacecraft), leave the station, talk to our crew and figure out the best way to get home,” Williams said.
“We’re absolutely confident,” Wilmore said of Starliner’s ability to get them home.
The reason ground crews want to keep Starliner safely attached to the International Space Station for now is so they can continue working to figure out what’s causing the thruster issues and helium leaks. Both issues are in a part of the Starliner that’s not expected to survive a return to Earth, leaving ground crews with little choice to continue collecting data from the component after Williams and Wilmore return home.
“This is a test flight — we expected to find some things,” Williams added, echoing comments he made before takeoff. “We find things and we fix them, make changes, do updates with our controls team.”
One of the goals of the additional thruster test is to understand whether the thrusters perform as expected on the journey home, Mark Nappi, Boeing’s vice president and manager of the Starliner program, said Wednesday.
“If the thrusters were damaged in some way, what would we do differently?” Nappi said. “We don’t believe our thrusters were damaged, but we still want to do this test to fill in the gaps and make sure of that.”
Removal of suitcases
Just before liftoff in June, NASA rearranged the cargo on the Starliner, removing the two suitcases belonging to Williams and Wilmore and replacing them with a 150-pound (68-kilogram) pump needed to make the space station’s toilet work as intended.
In space, every bit of fluid is important, and astronauts have long used a water processing system to convert urine into drinking water. But in May, part of that conversion system broke.
Dana Weigel, NASA’s International Space Station Program manager, said before the flight that the pump failure “puts us in a situation where we’re going to have to store a lot of urine,” adding that urine is stored in containers on the station.
NASA was therefore forced to rush to get a replacement part for the next flight to the space station, and chose to send the part at the expense of Williams and Wilmore’s personal comfort.
The two suitcases removed contained clothing and toiletries (including shampoo and soaps) selected by Wilmore and Williams.
Weigel added that there were spare clothes and toiletries at the station for Williams and Wilmore to use.
“I’m not aware of any issues with clothing or food availability, there really aren’t any,” Stich said Wednesday, adding that a resupply mission flown by Northrop Grumman is expected to arrive at the station around August.
Test flights: SpaceX vs. Boeing
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is designed to compete with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which launched its first crewed test mission, called Demo-2, in 2020 without any hitches.
Both Starliner and Crew Dragon are part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program.
But comparing the two vehicles isn’t always easy. While SpaceX designed its cargo Dragon spacecraft years before the Crew Dragon capsule, Boeing started from scratch with the Starliner.
But SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission looked very different from Starliner’s first crewed flight.
During SpaceX’s Demo-2 tour, astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley conducted at least two public tours of their spacecraft en route to the space station and held a press conference from the space station on June 1, 2020, the 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 staffed and expected to bring Behnken and Hurley home by the time the next crewed mission was ready to fly. As a result, SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission lasted 64 days — far shorter than the maximum announced journey time of 110 days.
Williams and Wilmore, meanwhile, are approaching day 36 of a space mission that officials initially described as a roughly week-long journey.
What’s more, the astronauts’ time in space is about 10 days short of NASA’s initial 45-day maximum, though officials are now considering increasing that maximum to at least 90 days.
Williams said Wednesday that he and Wilmore join the astronauts already on the station, helping with regular tasks.
“We do science for them, we do maintenance, we do some major maintenance that’s been pending for a while, things that have been on the books for a while,” Williams said.
“The beauty of the Commercial Crew Program is that we have two vehicles,” Stich also said Wednesday, referring to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which will fly new crew members to the space station in August.
“We have a little more time to look at the data and then decide if we need to do anything differently,” Stich said, referring to the flexibility that Crew Dragon provides to the International Space Station program and this test flight. “But the primary option today is to return Butch and Suni to Starliner.”
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