After overcoming in-flight failures of Boeing’s commercial spacecraft, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore finally reached the safety of the International Space Station on Thursday. Ten years in the making, Wednesday’s Cape Canaveral launch was Boeing’s third attempt after aborting two previous launches, partly due to helium leaks in the service module of its Starliner series capsule, which Williams calls Calypso. Although dexterous handling and scientific precision prevailed, the astronauts were plagued by further helium leaks during the flight, including one known pre-launch and three discovered after their capsule was already in orbit.
The earth had held Calypso tightly. Even tethered to the Atlas V’s combined 90,250 pounds of rocket fuel, the Starliner capsule fought hard to break free — firing its own thrusters in a final burn to stabilize its elliptical orbit. Free from gravity, Williams and Wilmore were about to close their eyes when mission control kicked in.
“It looks like we picked up a few more helium leaks,” NASA said from the ground. “Butch, I’m sorry. We are still figuring out the story.”
“We’re ready,” Wilmore said. “Give it to us.”
Quickly back on the clock, the two experienced astronauts got to work closing two culprit valves spotted by the sharp-eyed public scientists below. After the leaks were stopped, Boeing stepped in to tell NASA that the astronauts were “safe to fly.”
Just as the astronauts were finally within range of the station, a ship-saving fuse came from NASA engineers watching over the capsule: something was wrong, five of Starliner’s 28 thrusters were dead. Because the jets were stationary, it was too dangerous to dock.
Glistening just 800 feet away was the ISS – a meteoroid-infested patchwork of radically hard space experiments, held together by a network of indomitable ground nerds 250 miles below. The station, a hulking metal canary in the Russian-American policy mine, was filled with spacewalking scientists from both countries, using the last shreds of international agreement in an attempt to defy the impossible.
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo’s Saturn – since Alan Shepard’s flight in 1961, manned American spacecraft have always called upon crossroads keepers when they cross the threshold of the impossible. Then came the Space Shuttle and the Dragon – and by NASA’s calculations, after rocketing into orbit to the deafening roar of diehard Russian rocket engines, Williams and Wilmore were aboard the sixth inaugural voyage of an American spacecraft. Veteran spacewalker Williams, who stocked up on curry with her Ganesh statue, has now become the first woman to take to the stars on such a mission. In the 63 years of confused space-time between Shepard’s Mercury launch and her own journey, and in the span of her 322 days in space—a record that no one other than space giant Peggy Whitson could beat—an impossible number of things had happened. can stop Williams. . With her can just a stone’s throw from the dead space between Calypso and the station, they could still do that.
But not this time. Not today. The duo had already set the capsule’s thrusters to manual control when NASA gave them the green light.
With the manifolds wide open and the helium reserves online, Suni and Butch slammed into it – unleashing a wave of celestial power through the capsule with a hot-fire test that brought four of the dead jets back to life. The intrepid duo released the clutch for a spaceflight in Tokyo, shut down the engines and manually piloted the capsule to make a second attempt at the ISS rendezvous. With surgical precision, Williams and Wilmore’s Calypso maneuvers became a slow-motion ballet toward the forward port of the ISS Harmony dock – where they captured the landing in a historic first.
A sigh of relief later, NASA and Boeing confirmed that Calypso was safely anchored.
“Nice to be attached to the big city in the sky,” Wilmore said.
Suni agreed – she stepped out of the capsule and headed straight to a dance party with the international space crew she calls family.
Wilmore and Williams now join Expedition 71 crew members aboard the ISS: Roscosmos cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin and Oleg Kononenko, and NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Matt Dominick, Tracy Dyson and Jeanette Epps. The intrepid duo are expected to spend eight days aboard the space laboratory before returning to Earth.