The popular meme in a lot of space coverage these days implies that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are stuck aboard the International Space Station. Some say that Starliner is incapacitated and unable to return them to Earth. NASA and Boeing have steadfastly stated that is not the case, but at the same time, a test flight originally scheduled for eight days has been repeatedly extended to conduct tests on faulty thrusters on the CST-100 Starliner’s service module.
NASA and Boeing officials held a press conference today and stated that no return date has yet been set for Starliner. According to the officials, engineers are continuing to investigate system failures on the spacecraft and gather data on the Starliner thruster pods.
NASA and Boeing Are Still Analyzing Thruster Data
“We’re taking our time on the ground to go through all the data that we have before we decide on the return opportunity,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program said this afternoon. “We’re taking time to build confidence in the spacecraft to understand the thruster performance, those app thrusters that failed off during docking and also totally understand the helium margins before we undock.”
-Steve Stitch, NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager. Photo: NASA
Stich added, “What we’re doing is not unusual for a new spacecraft. I think Ken Bowersox put it very well last time we talked [to the press] that now that we have ISS and the ability to power spacecraft from ISS, we have a nice opportunity to almost use the International Space Station as a temporary hangar, to take our time and understand the spacecraft before we undock and return.”
Regarding the problematic thrusters, those are not needed to de-orbit Starliner and are instead used mainly for docking operations, which, of course, un-docking is part of. “Those thrusters aren’t used to provide the thrust for the deorbit burn. Those are the OMACs. We’ll fire four OMAC thrusters out of the twelve that we have. We know all twelve OMACs are working just fine.” At that point of the mission, Stich said, the problematic thrusters are to “Just hold the orientation of the spacecraft.”
Helium Leak Issue Near Resolution?
Stich said, “We hope to bring [the Helium leak] into the Starliner mission management team for final resolution later this week. The team has been working really hard to understand that story and double- and triple-check the margins related to the rest of the flight.”
Stich added that the efforts were hampered to some degree by Hurricane Beryl passing through the metropolitan Houston area, where he and much of the team is located. “I would say, with the hurricane coming through, some people are actually impacted and are not able to work as much as we would hope. But we’re still continuing to make a lot of progress.”
Starliner Batteries Currently Okay
During the conference, Stich was asked about the battery life aboard Starliner, which was set prior to the mission at 45 days. Starliner has now been in space for 35 days, implying that it must return in ten days or less. According to Stitch, this is not the case.
“What we’ve been doing is we can compare voltages from every single cell and every single battery,” Stich said. “There are twelve total batteries. I think there are 512 cells per battery. We look at the individual cells and how they’re performing relative to each other. And if a cell or even a sub module in the battery had lower voltages or lower output, that could be indicative of some kind of health issue relative to that particular part of the battery.”
He continued, “And so we get all this data on the ground. We’ve been watching it for the entire flight. We don’t really see any degradation in any of the cells. If the cells are healthy, essentially the risk level of having some imperfection in the cell is the same for those cells as it is any of these cells, which are commonly used in electronics all across the country.”
“When we looked at that, essentially, if you don’t see any signs that the battery is degrading or any of the cells are degrading, then your risk level for any given day is the same. Therefore, the next period of time would be the same risk as the current period of time, 45 more days would be about the same risk.”
Return On A SpaceX Crew Dragon Not Being Considered
Many members of the public and even some in the press have expressed the thought on social media that perhaps the easiest solution would be to return the Starliner astronauts on a SpaceX vehicle. This move was contemplated when there were issues with a Soyuz capsule losing coolant while docked at the ISS, but this is not the case with Starliner.
Photo: NASA
Stich stated, “We knew that the coolant system on that service module part of the Soyuz had totally leaked out. There was a lot of concern about what happens when that service module cooling system is used to transfer heat from the descent module on Soyuz.”
The temperatures inside the Soyuz module would have gotten pretty warm for entry. There was a lot of concern about not only the crew but also the avionics. In that case, we decided to use [Crew] Dragon as a contingency return option for Frank [Rubio] and had it set up to, if we needed, use it as a lifeboat.”
“We had a configuration of Frank in the mid-deck of Dragon. Certainly, we’ve dusted off a few of those things to look at relative to Starliner, just to be prepared in the event that we would have to use some of those kinds of things again.”
Stich then clarified: “Our prime option is to return Butch and Suni on Starliner. We’ve declared Starliner safe to be an emergency return vehicle.”
That distinction may be important — Starliner is safe as an emergency return vehicle, and what Stich states seems to also imply that it has not been cleared as a non-emergency normal return vehicle. Too much might be made of that statement, however, as there is a readiness review prior to the departure of any crewed mission from ISS. That review has not yet happened for Starliner, so at this point, the point of not being cleared may be a semantic one, at least until the review occurs. No date has yet been given for that to happen.
There’s been no discussion with sending another Dragon to rescue the Starliner crew.”Steve Stich, July 10, 2024
