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The two NASA astronauts who travelled to the ISS on Boeing’s Starliner capsule will have to stay on the space station ‘indefinitely’ while Boeing engineers are troubleshooting various faults in the spacecraft.

The clock is ticking as the capsule can only stay docked at the station for 45 days. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were originally scheduled to return to Earth on June 13 after a week on the ISS, but their stay has been extended for a second time due to ongoing issues. The astronauts will now return home no sooner than June 26th, according to NASA.

Boeing’s Starliner capsule successfully blasted off on its inaugural crewed flight from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5. However, during the 25-hour flight, engineers discovered five separate helium leaks in the spacecraft’s thruster system.

“We’ve learned that our helium system is not performing as designed,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, said at a news conference on June 18.

“Albeit manageable, it’s still not working like we designed it. So we’ve got to go figure that out.”

Very little seems to be working as it should at Boeing ever since they merged with McDonnell Douglas, whose safety record was shaky to say the least. With the leadership at Boeing taken over by the latter company’s team, Boeing’s reputation has gone down like a DC-10 (also brought to you by McDonnell Douglas).

The return module of the Starliner spacecraft is currently docked to the ISS’s Harmony module as NASA and Boeing engineers assess the hardware issues aboard the vessel, including leaks to the system that pressurizes the spacecraft’s propulsion system and five thruster failures to its reaction-control system.

After powering the thrusters up on June 15, engineers found that most of these issues appeared to be at least partially resolved, but their exact causes remain unknown.

 

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Starliner’s first uncrewed test flight in 2019 was scuppered by a software fault that placed it in the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was held back by issues with a fuel valve. After some reviews last year, the company had to fix issues with the capsule’s parachutes and remove around 1.6 kilometres of tape that was found to be flammable.

The current mission is Boeing’s third attempt to take the crew to the ISS. The previous two were scrubbed by a vibrating oxygen valve on the Atlas V rocket on which Starliner was mounted (developed by Lockheed Martin) and a computer glitch in a ground launch sequencer.

Fortunately, the astronauts are safe aboard the ISS for now, but all eyes will be on Boeing to get them home. If they’re not up to the task, SpaceX might just have to go fetch the astronauts – seeing as they’ve racked up 12 successful flights since 2020.

[source:livescience]