It’s official. NASA has ordered SpaceX to bring the agency’s Starliner crew home. They have been stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) all summer, after their Boeing spacecraft experienced helium leaks and thruster problems.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson made the decision today, following an internal Agency Test Flight Readiness Review. The review included a mission status update, review of technical data and closeout actions, as well as certifying flight rationale to proceed with undocking and return from the ISS.
This was Starliner’s 3rd flight test, but first crewed
NASA veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on Starliner June 5 atop a ULA Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, on an end-to-end test flight of the Boeing Starliner.
It’s the first crewed flight of the spacecraft, which cost over $4.5 billion and is years behind schedule after flying 2 previous un-crewed orbital tests. The first in 2019 also didn’t go well, so Boeing flew a second un-crewed test in May 2022, at their own expense.
SpaceX meanwhile has been launching crews for NASA since 2019, and were only awarded about half of what NASA gave Boeing. Elon Musk’s company is currently preparing to launch a private crew on Polaris Dawn on Tuesday, while simultaneously preparing to launch NASA’s next ISS crew on the Crew-9 mission with 4 astronauts next month.
Now, they will only send 2 astronauts on Crew-9, leaving 2 seats available for Butch and Suni to come home on the Dragon spacecraft early next year. That mission is slated to launch as soon as Sep 24.
Uncertainty and crew safety was NASA’s deciding factor
Boeing and NASA have worked closely together to test, gather data and determine a path forward for the Starliner. Ultimately, it was a remaining uncertainty in the operability of the spacecraft’s thrusters that led NASA to the decision to return Butch and Suni on the next scheduled SpaceX NASA Dragon mission.
“The uncertainty in our margins is where we have come to make the decision,” said NASA’s Associate Administrator Jim Free. “That uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters, and we still have some work to go. This was not an easy decision but it is the right one.”
“This whole discussion is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past,” said NASA Administrator Nelson. “We lost 2 space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward. We have been very solicitous of all our employees that if you have some objection, then you come forward. Our decision is the result of a commitment to safety. Our core value is safety, and it is our North Star.”
This isn’t the end for Starliner
The point of NASA’s commercial crew program isn’t just giving the United States access to space on our own vehicles, but to have redundancy too and provide “assured access”. If one spacecraft becomes inoperable, another is ready to finish the job. This mission is a perfect example. As a flight test things go wrong. They are by their very nature not safe or routine.
NASA and Boeing will bring the spacecraft home un-crewed, and immediately get to work fixing the problems, to eventually fly again to certify the capsule for operational crew-rotation missions to the ISS.
“We are still in the middle of a test flight,” said former astronaut Ken Bowersox, who currently serves as NASA’s Associate Administrator for the agency’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. “We have to remain vigilant, get the vehicle back on deck and go through the data. Once we’ve done that we’ll start thinking about our next steps for Starliner’s next flight.
SpaceX to the Rescue
Currently, the SpaceX Dragon Crew-8 capsule is at the ISS. It will now be reconfigured as a contingency lifeboat in case something goes wrong on the ISS. The Starliner will be readied to undock and return to Earth un-crewed, aiming for a re-entry and landing at White Sands, NM next month.
The NASA / SpaceX Crew-9 spacecraft requires some minor modifications, such as ballast since now only 2 astronauts are launching, but it’s all systems GO for Dragon to pick up the crew. Both Butch and Suni have integrated into the ISS crew and are staying busy with a lot of research, experiments and maintenance of the ISS.
