Two NASA astronauts orbiting Boeing’s Starliner are now stranded in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after engineers discovered several problems with the Boeing spacecraft. Teams on the ground are now racing to assess the condition of the Starliner.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were 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 issues. According to NASA, the astronauts will now return home before June 26.
After years of delays, Boeing’s Starliner capsule successfully blasted off on its inaugural crewed flight from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5 at 10:52 a.m. EDT. But during the 25-hour flight, engineers discovered five separate helium leaks in the spacecraft. Motivation system.
Now, to give engineers time to fix the glitches, NASA has announced that it is withdrawing the dangerous flight, extending the crew’s stay on the space station by at least three weeks.
“We have learned that our helium system is not performing as designed,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, said at a June 18 news conference. “While manageable, it’s still not working as we designed it. So we’re going to have to figure it out.”
While the Starliner shuttle’s return module is currently docked in the ISS’s Harmony module, NASA and Boeing engineers are assessing major hardware problems on board, including five helium leaks that stressed the shuttle’s propulsion system and five thruster failures in response. -control system.
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After operating the thrusters on June 15, engineers appeared to have at least partially resolved most of these problems, but their exact causes were unknown.
However, the limited fuel of the Harmony module means the Starliner can only stay docked for 45 days, so the window for a safe return flight shrinks.
The problems are just the latest in a long list of setbacks and headaches for Boeing’s space shuttle. The agency developed the Starliner capsule as part of NASA’s Commercial Group program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to send astronauts into low-Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA’s space shuttles in 2011. Superimposed 12 group flights Since it started functioning in 2020.
But Starliner’s first unmanned test flight in 2019 was thwarted by a software bug that put it into the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was thwarted by problems with a fuel valve. After additional reviews last year, the company had to fix problems with the capsule’s parachutes and remove a mile (1.6 kilometer) of tape that was found to be flammable.
The current mission is Boeing’s third attempt to carry a crew to the ISS. The former two were scrubbed by a vibrating oxygen valve on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket that housed the Starliner (which was developed by Lockheed Martin) and a computer malfunction in the ground launch sequencer, respectively.
