Why Boeing’s Starliner isn’t ready to return to Earth yet: NPR

When astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5, they thought they’d be back in time for the Juneteenth holiday.

Both were Boeing’s newest test spacecraft, called the Starliner. All they had to do was put it through its paces, briefly dock with the International Space Station (ISS) and return home. The whole mission was supposed to last about a week.

Instead, a series of leaks and malfunctions have caused NASA to indefinitely delay the pair’s return.

Whatever you do, don’t say they’re stuck.

“We’re not stuck on the ISS,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s vice president for its Commercial Crew Program, told reporters at a June 28 press conference. “The crew is in no danger and there is no increased danger when we decide to bring Suni and Butch back to Earth.”

Here’s what’s happening with Boeing’s newest spacecraft.

Even before this launch there were problems

The development of the Starliner has not been without problems. During its first test flight in 2019, which had no humans on board, it failed to reach the expected orbit. The problem was later traced to an on-board clock that had been set incorrectly – causing the Starliner’s thrusters to fire at the wrong time.

The Starliner never made it to the ISS on that trip, and NASA requested a second test flight without any astronauts. When it launched again in 2022, two thrusters on the Starliner failed to ignite as expected. It successfully switched to backup thrusters and docked at the space station.

The astronauts were finally due to launch last year, but then Boeing found two more problems with the spacecraft: problems with the parachute system that would allow them to float back to Earth and the tape used to hold electrical wiring. which constituted a potential fire hazard. Fixing both issues pushed the launch to this spring.

Finally, Williams and Wilmore tied up on May 6, when more problems arose—a stuck valve in the Starliner launch vehicle needed to be replaced, and mission engineers discovered that the Starliner itself was leaking helium.

Helium gas is used to pressurize the Starliner’s propulsion system, and it took NASA several weeks to determine that the leaks were not serious enough to cause the helium to run out during the mission.

Grouping of thrusters leads to vibration

When all systems were finally “broken”, the launch of the Starliner went off without a hitch. On June 5, Williams and Wilmore sailed into orbit.

But as they approached the ISS, new problems arose. Five of the 28 “Reaction Control Thrusters” aboard the Starliner’s service module shut down suddenly, and the spacecraft was held outside the docking port while engineers did some troubleshooting.

Eventually, the spacecraft successfully docked with the space station and four of the five thrusters came back online. But NASA later revealed it had found four additional helium leaks in various parts of the spacecraft, bringing the total to five.

NASA now says it needs to conduct additional testing and evaluation of these issues before Williams and Wilmore return to Earth. Space agency engineers suspect faulty seals may be behind the helium leaks, which they think pose little risk. But driver issues have been harder to pin down.

NASA says that starting this week, it will conduct extensive tests of a Starliner thruster at its White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, NM. The test launcher will be put through simulated launches, dockings and landing burns to see if engineers can replicate the problems, and also confirm that the thrusters can safely be used to bring Williams and Wilmore home.

“Once that testing is done, then we’ll look at the landing plan,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters. The whole process can take several weeks, he says.

Don’t say stuck

Even before the latest press conference, news outlets were speculating that Williams and Wilmore might be stuck at the station. It’s a claim that Boeing, in particular, seems to have succeeded with.

“Astronauts they are not stranded on the ISS,” read the first line of the company’s statement on the matter, which NPR obtained on June 26.

“They’re not stuck in space,” agrees Laura Forczyk, chief executive of Astralytical, a space consulting group. Astronauts have settled in comfortably on the International Space Station.

Starliner is designed to stay in space for up to 210 days, according to Stich. This test flight was originally supposed to be limited to 45 days, due to the spacecraft’s battery life, but Stich says the space station is recharging the batteries as designed, and NASA is looking to extend that limit.

At some point, NASA could use either a SpaceX Dragon capsule or a Russian Soyuz capsule to bring the pair home, but Forczyk doubts that will be necessary.

“I don’t see this as anything critical or life-threatening,” Forczyk says. “I just think they’re being overly cautious as they should be because this car is not working as it’s supposed to.”

Forczyk notes that problems with the helium system and thrusters are located in the Starliner’s service module, a part of the spacecraft that will be jettisoned before landing. For this reason, she says, engineers may want to keep Starliner on the station longer, so they can collect more data from the module before it burns up during reentry.

In further evidence of NASA’s faith in Starliner, Williams and Wilmore took shelter inside the spacecraft last week after a Russian satellite disintegrated, creating orbital debris that could have threatened the station.

“Butch and Suni boarded the spacecraft, fired up the vehicle, closed the hatch, and were ready to perform … an emergency disconnect and landing,” Stich says.

The future of the Starliner may be in limbo

In 2014, Boeing received a $4.2 billion contract from NASA to build the Starliner. The spacecraft was meant to ferry astronauts regularly to and from the International Space Station within the decade. Those flights are now years behind schedule and the delays have cost Boeing at least $1.5 billion in losses.

Meanwhile, rival company SpaceX, which was awarded just $2.6 billion, successfully flew humans in 2020 and has completed eight regular crewed missions for NASA to the space station.

Ron Epstein, an analyst at Bank of America, says the problems are part of larger issues at the aerospace giant. “I don’t think you can look at it in isolation,” he says.

Boeing has also seen problems with its 737 Max plane, including a door that flew off one plane earlier this year, and the delivery of two 747s to be used as presidential Air Force One has also been delayed.

At its root, Epstein says these issues are caused by a departure from “solid engineering” within the company’s management.

“You have management teams over several years that have focused more on shareholder returns than the company’s core engineering business,” he says.

The first regular flight of the Starliner carrying astronauts to the ISS is now scheduled for February 2025, but it is unclear whether NASA will certify the new spacecraft in time. Even if it did, it would likely only make a handful of flights before NASA retires the Space Station in 2030.

Given all of this, Epstein says it’s possible that, if NASA requires extensive modifications and adjustments to the Starliner, Boeing may decide to walk away from the program altogether.

“Boeing management has been clear, I think, to the investment community that Starliner and some aspects of space are just not core to them,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the company didn’t want to continue.”

But Boeing’s Nappi says the company is fully committed to the Starliner. “The plain and simple answer to the question is: ‘No, we’re not going to back down,'” he says. “That’s our job.”