Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams aboard the International Space Station
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams may remain aboard the International Space Station (ISS) until February 2025, due to issues with their spacecraft. This is the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, and it’s not yet clear whether it will be safe for Wilmore and Williams to return in it.
Starliner was scheduled to launch on June 5 and dock with the ISS for about a week before returning the astronauts to Earth. The launch was delayed by a myriad of minor issues with the spacecraft, including a small helium leak on the day of launch, which engineers determined would not cause any further delays.
However, before reaching the ISS, another helium leak occurred and five of Starliner’s 28 thrusters failed. Wilmore and Williams made it aboard the ISS safely, but their future remains unclear a month after their planned return to Earth.
“When we started this mission, it was a test mission.” Ken Bowersox “We knew the risks were potentially higher than flying on a more experienced spacecraft,” he said at a NASA press conference on Aug. 7. Currently, there’s disagreement within the space agency about whether the risks of further leaks or thruster failures on the return flight are too high to put people on Starliner again, he said.
A big part of assessing that risk will be trying to replicate in ground tests the problems Starliner experienced in space, NASA said. Steve Stitch At the press conference, he said some progress had been made but it wasn’t yet enough to significantly reduce the uncertainty about how Starliner would perform on its return to Earth: “We can’t prove it with complete certainty.” [that] “What you see in orbit is exactly the same as what you see on the ground,” Stich said.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Wilmore and Williams will be stuck on the ISS forever. There is a contingency plan: If NASA determines the risk to Starliner is too high, the Starliner’s software will need to be reconfigured to allow it to return to Earth autonomously and unmanned. Then, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, currently docked to the ISS, will be reconfigured to carry two additional astronauts.
But that’s not the primary option. There are also plans to use the next Crew Dragon spacecraft to bring astronauts back to Earth, although that launch date was just postponed to September. It was originally scheduled to carry four astronauts to the ISS, but it may only carry two, leaving room for Wilmore and Williams when the mission ends in February 2025.
Wilmore and Williams are training for all activities planned for the mission, including spacewalks, which would extend their stay in space from the planned eight days to nearly eight months. NASA has already directed SpaceX and Boeing to begin work on the upgrades needed to make either plan viable, but no selections have been made yet.
“These are backup contingency plans,” the ISS manager said. Dana Weigel “No decision has been made yet in terms of sticking to a specific plan,” Stich said at a press conference, adding that a decision would likely be made in mid-August. The broad impact of this dispute on NASA’s commercial crew program remains to be seen.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
