Two NASA astronauts who traveled into orbit on Boeing's Starliner are currently stranded in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after engineers discovered numerous problems with the Boeing spacecraft . Teams on the ground are now racing to assess Starliner's condition.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were originally scheduled to return to Earth on June 13 after a week on the ISS, but their stay has been extended a second time due to ongoing problems. The astronauts will now return home before June 26, according to NASA.
After years of delays, Boeing's Starliner capsule exited successfully on its maiden crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. EDT on June 5. But during the 25-hour flight, engineers discovered five helium leaks to the propulsion system of the spacecraft.
Now, to give engineers time to work out the problems, NASA has announced it will push back the dangerous return flight, extending the crew's stay on the space station to at least three weeks.
“We've learned that our helium system is not working as designed,” Mark Nappi, director of Boeing's Starliner program, said at a June 18 news conference. “Even though it's manageable, it still doesn't work the way we designed it to. So we have to go figure it out.”
The Starliner spacecraft's return module is currently docked with the ISS's Harmony module while NASA and Boeing engineers assess vital hardware problems aboard the ship, including five helium leaks in the system that are pressurizing the system of spacecraft propulsion and five thruster failures in its reaction. – control system.
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After firing up the thrusters on June 15, engineers found that most of these problems appeared to be at least partially resolved, but their exact causes were still unknown.
However, the limited fuel in the Harmony module means Starliner can only stay docked for 45 days, so the window for a safe return flight is shrinking.
The problems are the latest in a long list of setbacks and headaches for Boeing's spacecraft. The company built the Starliner capsule as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit after NASA's space shuttles were retired in 2011. Crew SpaceX's Dragon also emerged from this initiative and has accumulated 12 manned flights since it started operating in 2020.
But Starliner's first uncrewed test flight in 2019 was marred by a software glitch that put it in the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was slowed by problems with a fuel valve. After further reviews last year, the company had to fix problems with the capsule's parachutes and remove about 1.6 kilometers of tape that was found to be flammable.
The current mission is Boeing's third attempt to bring crew to the ISS. The previous two rubbed off through a vibrating oxygen valve on the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket on which the Starliner was mounted (and which was developed by Lockheed Martin) and a computer error in a ground launch sequencer, respectively.
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