The Boeing Starliner Astronauts Will Come Home on SpaceX's Dragon

NASA has announced that astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams volition instrumentality to Earth adjacent February aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.

The announcement astatine a property league contiguous caps disconnected months of speculation astir the champion program to safely bring the astronauts location aft malfunctions with their ride, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, postponed their departure from the International Space Station successful June.

“Boeing has worked precise hard with NASA to get the indispensable information to marque this decision,” NASA head Bill Nelson said astatine the briefing. “We privation to further recognize the basal causes and recognize the plan improvements truthful that the Boeing Starliner volition service arsenic an important portion of our assured unit entree to the ISS.”

Wilmore and Williams launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, connected June 5, becoming the archetypal astronauts to execute a crewed trial formation of Starliner, a capsule developed by Boeing to ferry radical to and from the ISS.

During the attack to the station, 5 of Starliner’s 28 thrusters failed to function. The unit was capable to reconstruct 4 of them and safely docked with the station, wherever they discovered Starliner’s propulsion strategy was besides leaking helium from aggregate places.

Wilmore and Williams were primitively scheduled to enactment onboard the ISS for astir a week earlier returning to Earth successful Starliner. But their instrumentality has been delayed for much than 2 months arsenic ngo planners struggled to isolate the origin of the thruster problems and measure the risks of utilizing Starliner for the formation home.

NASA has emphasized that Wilmore and Williams person not been “stranded,” nor are they successful immoderate danger. Likewise, the astronauts person publically approached the extended enactment arsenic a fortunate interruption that lets them rack up much clip successful space.

“We are having a large clip present connected ISS,” Williams told reporters in a July call from the ISS. “You know, Butch and I person been up present before, and it feels similar coming backmost home. It feels bully to interval around. It feels bully to beryllium successful abstraction and enactment up present with the International Space Station team.”

Cargo ships regularly dock with the ISS, providing capable supplies for each unit members onboard, and NASA considers Starliner to beryllium harmless capable for the astronauts to usage successful the lawsuit of an exigency evacuation of the ISS.

Starliner had flown doubly earlier without astronauts; it failed to scope the presumption during its archetypal uncrewed trial formation successful 2019, but it successfully cleared the second trial successful 2022 by docking with the ISS and landing backmost astatine White Sands Missile Range successful New Mexico. It is the 2nd vehicle, pursuing SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, to transportation astronauts to the abstraction presumption arsenic portion of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which seeks to make commercially operated spacecraft to transport crews to and from the ISS.

SpaceX’s Dragon completed its archetypal crewed trial formation successful 2020, earning certification from NASA to proceed with regular operational flights with astronauts. Over the past 4 years, Dragon has successfully carried a twelve crews to and from the ISS. Between the status of NASA’s Space Shuttle successful 2011 and the archetypal Dragon crewed ngo successful 2020, NASA and different agencies were solely reliant connected Russia’s Soyuz capsule to bring their astronauts to the station. The Commercial Crew Program is designed to enactment ISS operations with aggregate spacecraft transport options successful the lawsuit that 1 fails.

Starliner is nary alien to setbacks; galore of the erstwhile tests of the spacecraft person tally into delays and the task has mislaid more than $1.5 cardinal successful overruns.

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