NASA says the Boeing Starliner will extend its first astronaut mission into the summer after taking off June 5 for what was supposed to be a 10-day flight.
Starliner experienced both helium leaks and propellant problems during a June 6 docking with the International Space Station (ISS). The spacecraft is stable and rated to leave the ISS in an emergency, Boeing and NASA management stress. But after testing the thrusters in space, NASA and Boeing said they want to take more time to understand the root cause.
A test campaign will begin July 2 at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico to replicate how the thrusters were used in flight, NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said during an update on live today (June 28) with journalists. The testing will take approximately two weeks, but it depends on what is found – and then more tests will be required. As such, NASA and Boeing do not yet have a landing date for the Starliner.
“We’re not going to target a specific date until we’ve completed that testing and looked at the fault tree and then figure out the path for it,” Stich said.
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The 10-day Starliner crew test mission with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, both former US Navy test pilots, is a development mission that had flexibility built into it in case of unexpected in space.
The unexpected occurred on June 6 during docking, after a small, persistent helium leak and five misbehaving thrusters affected the Starliner’s final approach to the ISS. NASA abandoned the first docking attempt to ensure the Starliner was ready for launch, but authorized the second attempt, which brought the spacecraft to dock at the orbital complex.
Additional testing and review of the helium supply and five propellants (out of 28 in the feedback control system) revealed that the leak had stabilized and that most of the propellants were recovering. NASA and Boeing have decided, however, not to use at least one of those thrusters during the landing due to performance concerns.
Before today’s conference call, the last major update from Starliner officials came on June 21, which suggested the landing would happen sometime after July 2. Analysis continues today, teleconference participants noted, and more testing on the spacecraft may be required depending on what is found at White Sands.
“Once it’s all done, we’ll meet up and make sure we’ve done everything we need to do to understand the system, then we’ll come home safely,” said Mark Nappi, Boeing’s vice president and program manager of commercial crew. . program. Nappi stressed that the timing of what will happen next cannot be said yet. “These tests are unpredictable [as to] how long they last and how successful they will be.”
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While the analysis continues on the ground, Wilmore and Williams spent their time on other ISS tasks, such as maintenance. “They know this is a test flight and they knew we were going to learn, and that’s all good. It’s not all unexpected,” Nappi said of the crew’s comments in recent communications with Boeing from orbit.
The Starliner is a new type of spacecraft from Boeing, compared to the other commercial crew supplier that carries astronauts to the ISS: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which is based on the Cargo Dragon design. Starliner took two uncrewed missions to prepare for the CFT, after the first attempt failed to reach the ISS in 2019 due to computer glitches.
Dragon, meanwhile, had a single uncrewed mission in 2019 and a single astronaut flight test in 2020 before beginning operational crewed ISS missions every six months.
After the COVID-19 pandemic and dozens of corrections, the second Starliner test flight arrived safely at the ISS in 2022, after also experiencing problems with the thruster during docking. One reason the CFT is docked for extra time is to evaluate the service module, which holds most of the fuel, as it will be jettisoned during landing. This testing may determine more about why the Starliner’s propulsion system had problems during the 2022 and 2024 dockings.