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Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — the two veteran NASA astronauts who piloted the first crew test flight of Boeing’s Starliner space shuttle — have now spent 63 days in space, about seven weeks longer than initially expected.
There is still no clear date for the visit, and NASA is now clarifying that the astronauts may not come home on the Starliner.
SpaceX, Boeing’s rival under NASA’s Commercial Crew program, could be used to bring Williams and Wilmore home. The move could extend the astronauts’ stay on the International Space Station by another six months, and they could return by 2025, agency officials said at a news conference Wednesday.
The comments by NASA leaders mark a stunning shift in tone at the space agency. Until now, officials have repeatedly hinted that Williams and Willmore might return home on the Starliner, and a backup scenario involving the Crew Dragon has been mentioned as a mere possibility. However, Wednesday’s update suggests that the SpaceX vehicle is quickly becoming a serious option.
“Based on where things have gone in the last week or two, I would say the chances of an unmanned Starliner return have increased quite a bit,” said Ken Bowersachs, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. That must be completed before a return date for the Starliner can be set. “But again, new data comes in, new analysis, different discussion — we may see things change the other way.”
The space agency has until “mid-August” to make a final decision, officials said.
CNN confirmed Tuesday that NASA has not yet begun a “flight readiness review” for the Starliner crew’s return from the space station. The company said on July 26 that it would start that process in the first two days of August.
But Boeing and NASA teams are still working on a possible return date for the mission, which began on June 5, as officials evaluate test data and conduct analyzes of propulsion problems and helium leaks that disrupted the Starliner capsule’s first stage of flight.
A ground test by mission teams in New Mexico as they worked to understand the problems led to surprising results, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said Wednesday.
The space agency previously said excessive heat around some Starliner thrusters caused Teflon seals to swell, restricting the flow of propellant and triggering thruster problems.
Uncertainty about whether those bulging seals are actually the cause of the problem — and how the problem might affect the Starliner vehicle in space — is at the root of disagreements within NASA about how safe it is for crews to return to Starliner, officials said. News conference.
NASA officials are “more and more embarrassed by the uncertainty surrounding the thrusters,” Stich said.
As NASA works to come to a consensus on the potential root cause of those problems and how much risk it might pose to a crewed Starliner return, the space agency has been seriously considering alternatives to home to Williams and Wilmore.
Neither Boeing nor SpaceX officials were available for comment during Wednesday’s briefing. Boeing maintains Boeing said in a statement Friday that, in its view, the Starliner is safe for astronauts to return.
Officials said they were considering several return scenarios if the Starliner was deemed unsafe to bring Williams and Willmore home.
One option is to launch the planned SpaceX Crew Dragon mission, Crew-9, with two astronauts instead of four. Williams and Wilmore will have two seats left aboard Crew-9, but it will make the astronauts part of the overall Crew-9 rotation on the International Space Station. That means Williams and Willmore will remain on the station for another six months — the length of a typical mission to the ISS — That would push their return to at least February 2025.
If so, the Starliner will be flown home empty. NASA will have to decide whether the data collected on this flight is enough to give the space agency the confidence to officially certify Starliner for routine trips to orbit.
However, NASA noted, the space agency isn’t sure it needs a contingency plan.
“We do not approve of this plan,” Stich said. “In other words, we have done all the work to make sure that this plan exists; We have clothing identified to fly in Crew-9 (for wear on the Williams and Willmore Crew Dragon). … But we didn’t run it properly because that’s what we’re going to go down.
Stich said the return of Williams and Wilmore on the Starliner remains the “prime” option.
However, it is noteworthy that NASA announced on Tuesday that it is delaying the launch of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission.
Crew-9 was scheduled to depart as soon as August 18 — with the expectation that the Starliner capsule would be home with its astronauts before then. Now, NASA said Crew-9 won’t take off before Sept. 24, allowing the agency more flexibility in deciding whether to use the Starliner contingency plan.
“This adjustment allows more time for mission managers to finalize the return plan for the agency’s Boeing crew flight test,” NASA said Tuesday. Press release.
However, whether or not NASA chooses to fly Williams and Wilmore home in the Crew Dragon remains a bit of a quandary.
“Stopping our primary route to bring Butch and Suni home on the Starliner puts additional risk in our other mission profile — so we have to weigh all those risks,” Bowersachs said.
For example, if Starliner were to fly home empty, the spacecraft would need a software update to configure the vehicle for autonomous flight home. It would also replace Starliner’s computers in 2022 to run on code originally written for the unmanned test flight — and NASA and Boeing haven’t revisited such software changes in two years, Stich says.
Engineers need to speed up the software update in what he calls an “integrated test facility” on the ground, Stich added.
“That’s the amount of time we’re projecting” for Williams and Wilmore to return home on the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, he said.
It’s currently unclear whether NASA is leaning toward returning astronauts aboard Starliner or using its contingency plan.
When asked, Powersox said Wednesday that he could not offer the possibility of either scenario.
“It could change drastically one way or the other depending on new data,” he said.
