NASA, not Boeing’s Starliner, will return stranded astronauts on SpaceX.
Boeing’s Starliner will come back to Earth empty, and the two astronauts who took it up into orbit on a test flight will return in a capsule built by a competing company, SpaceX.
The long-awaited decision by NASA means the astronauts will have to cool their heels on the International Space Station until February.
And it’s a stunning blow to Boeing’s beleaguered Starliner program, which has been beset by delays and technical troubles.
“Space flight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine. And a test flight, by nature, is neither safe nor routine,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a press briefing on Saturday.
He said that NASA officials knew that prior errors had cost the lives of two space shuttles and their crews, therefore they took that knowledge into consideration while making the choice. Nelson stated, “Safety is our North Star and our core value.”
Jim Free, an assistant administrator at NASA, continued, “This has not been an easy decision, but it is absolutely the right one.”
The eight-day journey to the station that astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams were scheduled to take in early June on Starliner has now extended to eight months.
This is as a result of issues that surfaced during the test flight. Weeks were spent by NASA and Boeing attempting to determine what was causing helium leaks and the strange behavior of thrusters that failed as Starliner got closer to the station.
NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich stated, “It’s been a long summer for our team,” adding that it was impossible to predict if the thrusters would malfunction at a crucial moment due to their complex condition. “The thrusters’ prediction just lacked sufficient precision.”
The organization has therefore turned to SpaceX, a dependable partner that has been offering taxi services to and from the station for a number of years.
A SpaceX capsule was already slated to arrive at the station the following month and return in February. NASA has made the decision to reorganize the arrangement such that Wilmore and Williams can travel home in this spacecraft with two seats available.
According to Stich, “that just happened to be the best, easiest, and most effective option.”
According to Norm Knight, director of flight operations at NASA, the two astronauts agreed with the agency’s decision, despite the fact that it will require them to spend more time away from their loved ones on Earth. Wilmore and Williams are both seasoned spacefarers who have completed lengthy missions on the International Space Station in the past.
The aerospace giant Boeing, which has long struggled with Starliner, is embarrassed by the fact that a competitor company has stepped in to finish a high-profile, milestone mission. The first unmanned test flight of Starliner in 2019 failed to reach the station. Although the second test flight in 2022 was declared successful, engineers subsequently discovered concerning issues like the usage of flammable adhesive tape. Resolving these problems caused a delay in its manned test flight.
As part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which was created to allow industry to conduct frequent flights to the nearby space station so that NASA could focus on traveling to the moon and beyond, Boeing and SpaceX have been under contract with the government for ten years.
Boeing was given a lot more funding than SpaceX to create a space taxi. SpaceX has completed several crewed missions for NASA, but Starliner has not yet completed a crewed round-trip journey to the International Space Station.
Boeing claimed that it would continue “to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft” in a statement posted on X, the original name of Twitter. In addition to carrying out the mission as directed by NASA, we are getting the spacecraft ready for a successful and safe unmanned return.
Administrator Nelson reported that he had spoken with Kelly Ortberg, CEO of Boeing, who stated that the business would keep attempting to comprehend the issues as soon as Starliner is safely returned. NASA officials announced that Starliner may undock from the space station and return to Earth early next month, and they would meet to explore this possibility next week.