Boeing’s Cursed ISS Mission May Finally Make It Back to Earth

The saga of the Starliner’s archetypal crewed ngo whitethorn soon beryllium coming to an end. On Saturday July 20, engineering teams with NASA and Boeing completed a blistery occurrence trial of the spacecraft’s thrusters. The affirmative results suggest that the spacecraft’s archetypal voyage to the International Space Station with astronauts connected committee whitethorn yet reason successful the coming days.

The Starliner CST-100 spacecraft has been docked astatine the ISS since June 6, a time aft it finally blasted off atop an Atlas V rocket. The motorboat came days aft an earlier effort had been scrubbed. Ground teams detected a helium leak earlier that launch, with 2 much appearing aft liftoff and different 2 identified erstwhile the vessel had parked astatine the ISS. The docking process itself was acold from flawless, with 5 thrusters failing during the archetypal docking attempt.

Originally scheduled to instrumentality to Earth connected June 14, the Starliner’s unit has been aboard the ISS acold longer than planned. NASA and Boeing officials person insisted that Starliner is susceptible of safely returning the astronauts astatine immoderate time, and that the lengthy delay is to instrumentality vantage of an accidental to bash tests that are intolerable connected Earth. Accordingly, the abstraction bureau maintains that the astronauts are not stranded. 

In a statement released Tuesday, NASA said the 2 astronauts who had travel aboard the ISS via the Starliner, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, entered the spacecraft and tested 27 of its 28 thrusters 1 astatine a time. The tests were aimed astatine measuring thruster show and helium leak rates. NASA said the preliminary results were encouraging and were wrong the margins indispensable for the unit to yet instrumentality location aboard the ship. 

Wilmore and Williams person conducted respective different tests since the adust fire, including a cheque of its h2o systems and interior pressure. The information from the thruster tests is being reviewed. Once that investigation is done, NASA said it volition merchandise a people instrumentality day for the 2 unit members. 

In its ain statement, Boeing said a formation trial readiness reappraisal volition hap astatine immoderate constituent precocious this week. The 2 astronauts volition besides instrumentality portion successful 2 simulations of the undocking process this week.

The Starliner, portion of a $4.3 cardinal Boeing declaration with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, has had a rocky tally since its inception, moving into galore delays, outgo overruns, and method issues. The problems got truthful atrocious that NASA head Bill Nelson took shots astatine Boeing during a 2022 interview, chastising the company for falling truthful acold down rival SpaceX successful its improvement of a reusable unit capsule.