NASA says Boeing’s Starliner will extend its first astronaut mission well into the summer after launching June 5 for what was supposed to be a 10-day flight.
Starliner experienced both helium leaks and thruster problems during a docking with the International Space Station (ISS) on June 6. The spacecraft is stable and can leave the ISS in the event of an emergency and leadership stress from Boeing and NASA. But after testing the thrusters in space, NASA and Boeing said they wanted to take more time to understand the cause.
A test campaign will begin as early as July 2 at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico to replicate how the boosters were used in flight, Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said during a livestreamed update with reporters today (June 28). The testing will last about two weeks, but that depends on what’s found — and more analysis will be needed after that. As such, NASA and Boeing don’t yet have a landing date for Starliner.
“We’re not going to set a specific date until we’ve completed testing and we’ve looked at the fault tree so we know how to proceed,” Stich said.
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Starliner’s 10-day Crew Flight Test mission with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, both former U.S. Navy test pilots, is a developmental mission with built-in flexibility in case unexpected events occur in space.
The unexpected happened on June 6 during docking, when a persistent small helium leak and five misbehaving thrusters affected Starliner’s final approach to the ISS. NASA waved off the first docking attempt to ensure Starliner was ready to depart, but cleared the second attempt, allowing the spacecraft to dock with the orbiting complex.
Additional testing and evaluation of the helium supply and five thrusters (of the 28 in the reaction control system) revealed that the leak had stabilized and most of the thrusters were recovering. However, NASA and Boeing decided not to use at least one of those thrusters during the landing due to performance issues.
Before today’s conference call, the last major update from Starliner officials came on June 21, suggesting the landing would take place sometime after July 2. The analysis continues today, conference call participants noted, and even more testing may be needed on the spacecraft depending on what is found at White Sands.
“Once everything is done, we meet and make sure we’ve done everything we need to do to understand the system and then we get home safely,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew . program. Nappi emphasized that the timing of what will happen next cannot yet be said. ‘These tests are unpredictable [as to] how long they will last and how successful they will be.”
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While the on-site analysis continued, 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 from it, and this is all good. None of this is unexpected,” Nappi said of the crew’s comments in recent communications with Boeing from space.
Starliner is a new type of spacecraft from Boeing, unlike the other commercial crew supplier that transports astronauts to the ISS: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which is based on the Cargo Dragon design. Starliner undertook two unmanned missions to prepare for CFT after the first attempt failed to reach the ISS in 2019 due to computer glitches.
Dragon conducted one unmanned mission in 2019 and one test flight with one astronaut in 2020 before launching operational crewed missions to the ISS every six months.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic and dozens of repairs, Starliner’s second unmanned test flight safely reached the ISS in 2022, after also experiencing thruster problems during docking. One reason CFT is docked extra long is to evaluate the service module that holds the majority of the fuel as it is discarded during landing. That test could provide more clarity about why Starliner’s thruster system had problems during docking in 2022 and 2024.