NASA TV
After weeks of speculation, NASA finally made it official on Saturday: The two astronauts who flew to the International Space Station in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will not be returning aboard that craft. Instead, NASA has asked SpaceX to use its Crew Dragon spacecraft to return astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth.
“NASA has determined that Butch and Suni will return aboard Crew 9 in February of next year,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the start of a news conference at the Johnson Space Center on Saturday afternoon.
Nelson and NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Meloy attended the Flight Readiness Review Meeting in Houston on Saturday, which underscored the gravity of NASA’s decision. The meeting brought together NASA’s top brass and included an informal “go/no-go” vote. Those in attendance voted unanimously for Wilmore and Williams to return to Earth aboard Crew Dragon. So did the official recommendation for the Commercial Crew Program, which Nelson accepted.
As a result, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will detach from the station early next month (sources say the tentative date is September 6) and attempt an autonomous return to Earth and landing in the southwestern US desert.
Then, sometime after September 24, the Crew Dragon spacecraft will launch to the space station with two astronauts (NASA has yet to announce the names of the two crew members), leaving two empty seats for the station. Wilmore and Williams will join the two Crew 9 astronauts for their previously scheduled six-month stay at the space station, after which all four will return to Earth aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Saturday’s announcement is significant for Boeing, which joined NASA’s Commercial Crew Program more than a decade ago, lending legitimacy to the agency’s efforts to fund private companies to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. The company’s failure, despite NASA officials’ praise at a press conference Saturday, will impact Boeing’s spaceflight future as the Starliner mission is a failure. Ars will have more to say about Starliner’s future course later today.
I never got used to the thruster issue.
In the weeks since Starliner arrived at the space station in early June, Boeing and NASA officials had expressed confidence in the spacecraft’s ability to return Wilmore and Williams. They said they just needed to gather a little more data on the performance of the spacecraft’s Response Control System thrusters. Five of the 28 small thrusters that guide Starliner failed on the journey to the space station.
Boeing and NASA engineers tested the performance of these thrusters at a facility in White Sands, New Mexico, in July. Initially, the engineers were excited to replicate the failures they observed on Starliner’s en route to the space station. (Reproducing failures is a key step in understanding the root cause of hardware problems.)
But what NASA found after dismantling the failed thruster was concerning, said Steve Stich, director of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
“I would say that the White Sands test was a surprise to us,” Stich said Saturday. “It was a piece of Teflon that expanded and got into the flow passage and caused the oxidizer not to flow properly into the thruster, which caused a reduction in thrust. When we saw that, I think it changed things a little bit for us.”
When NASA relayed their findings to the thruster’s manufacturer, Aerojet Rocketdyne, the company said it had never seen anything like it before. At this point, NASA engineers began to think that it might not be possible to identify the root cause of the problem in time and understand the physics well enough to be confident that Starliner would not experience thruster problems on its return to Earth.
Thank you for using SpaceX
The result of this uncertainty is that NASA will now turn to one other commercial crew provider: SpaceX. This is not a happy outcome for Boeing, which a decade ago disparaged SpaceX as something of a space cowboy. I’ve been covering the space industry closely for the past 15 years, and for most of that time Boeing was considered by many in the industry to be the prestigious name of spaceflight, but… SpaceX It was deemed so reckless that it would result in the deaths of the astronauts.
Now the space agency has effectively turned to SpaceX to rescue Boeing astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
This isn’t the first time SpaceX has backed a competitor recently. In the past two years, SpaceX has launched satellites for low-orbit internet competitor OneWeb after being squeezed by the Russian space program. It also launched European sovereign Galileo satellites after delays to its Ariane 6 rocket. It has also launched multiple Cygnus spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman, another space station cargo service provider for NASA. And now, SpaceX is backing manned spacecraft competitor Boeing.
After Saturday’s press conference, I asked NASA’s top official, Jim Freeh, how he felt about SpaceX, once a startup that now serves the Western spaceflight community — after all, without SpaceX, NASA would have no way to deliver crew and cargo to the International Space Station.
“They fly a lot and they’re successful,” Freeh said. “And, you know, when they have problems, they find a way to recover, like they did with the second stage problem. We decided, as an option, to have two companies to get the crew to the station, and they gave us that option. Conversely, if Boeing was there, and we had a systemic issue with Dragon, we’d have the same problem and Boeing would have to bring us back. But I can’t argue with how much they’ve flown and what they’ve flown, that’s for sure.”
