Enlarge/ NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams wave to their families, friends, and NASA officials on their way to the launch pad June 5 to board Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are no strangers to time away from their families. Both are retired captains in the US Navy, served in war zones, and are veterans of previous six-month stays on the International Space Station.
When they launched to the space station on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 5, the astronauts expected to be home in a few weeks, or perhaps a month, at most. Their minimum mission duration was eight days, but NASA was always likely to approve a short extension. Wilmore and Williams were the first astronauts to soar into orbit on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, a milestone achieved some seven years later than originally envisioned by Boeing and NASA.
However, the test flight fell short of all of its objectives. Wilmore and Williams are now a little more than three months into what has become an eight-month mission on the station. The Starliner spacecraft was beset by problems, culminating in a decision last month by NASA officials to send the capsules back to Earth without the two astronauts. Rather than coming home on Starliner, Wilmore and Williams will return to Earth in February on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
Grateful for options
On Friday, the two astronauts spoke with reporters for the first time since NASA decided they would stay in orbit until early 2025.
“It was trying at times,” Wilmore said. There were some tough times all the way through. Certainly, as the commander or pilot of your spacecraft, you don’t want to see it go off without you, but that’s where we wound up.”
Both astronauts are veteran Navy test pilots and have previous flights on space shuttles and Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Captains never want to abandon ship, but that’s not what happened with Starliner. Instead, their ship left them.
Williams said she and Wilmore watched Starliner’s departure from the space station from the lab’s multi-window cupola module last week. They kept busy with several tasks, such as monitoring the undocking and managing the space station’s systems during the dynamic phase of the departure.
“We were watching our spaceship fly away at that point in time,” Williams said. “I think it’s good we had some extra activities. Of course, we’re very knowledgeable about Starliner, so it was obvious what was happening at each moment.”
NASA’s top managers did not have enough confidence in Starliner’s safety after five thrusters temporarily failed as the spacecraft approached the space station in June. They weren’t ready to risk the lives of the two astronauts on Starliner when engineers weren’t convinced the same thrusters, or more, would function as needed during the trip home.
It turned out the suspect thrusters on Starliner worked after it departed the space station and headed for reentry on September 6. One thruster on Starliner’s crew module—different in design from the thrusters that previously had trouble—failed on the return journey. Investigating this issue is something Boeing and NASA engineers will add to their to-do list before the next Starliner flight, alongside the earlier problems of overheating thrusters and helium leaks.
“It’s a very risky business, and things do not always turn out the way you want,” Wilmore said. “Every single test flight, especially a first flight of a spacecraft or aircraft that’s ever occurred, has found issues … 90 percent of our training is preparing for the unexpected, and sometimes the actual unexpected goes beyond what you even think that could happen.”
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft after landing Friday night at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico.
Boeing
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft sailed to a smooth landing in the New Mexico desert Friday night, an auspicious end to an otherwise disappointing three-month test flight that left the capsule’s two-person crew stuck in orbit until next year.
Cushioned by airbags, the Boeing crew capsule descended under three parachutes toward an on-target landing at 10: 01 pm local time Friday (12: 01 am EDT Saturday) at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico. From the outside, the landing appeared just as it would have if the spacecraft brought home NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who became the first people to launch on a Starliner capsule on June 5.
But Starliner’s cockpit was empty as it flew back to Earth Friday night. Last month, NASA managers decided to keep Wilmore and Williams on the International Space Station (ISS) until next year after agency officials determined it was too risky for the astronauts to return to the ground on Boeing’s spaceship. Instead of coming home on Starliner, Wilmore and Williams will fly back to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in February. NASA has incorporated the Starliner duo into the space station’s long-term crew.
The Starliner spacecraft began the journey home by backing away from its docking port at the space station at 6: 04 pm EDT (22: 04 UTC), one day after astronauts closed hatches to prepare for the ship’s departure. The capsule fired thrusters to quickly back away from the complex, setting up for a deorbit burn to guide Starliner on a trajectory toward its landing site. Then, Starliner jettisoned its disposable service module to burn up over the Pacific Ocean, while the crew module, with a vacant cockpit, took aim on New Mexico.
After streaking through the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean and Mexico, Starliner deployed three main parachutes to slow its descent, then a ring of six airbags inflated around the bottom of the spacecraft to dampen the jolt of touchdown. This was the third time a Starliner capsule has flown in space, and the second time the spacecraft fell short of achieving all of its objectives.
Not the desired outcome
“I’m happy to report Starliner did really well today in the undock, deorbit, and landing sequence,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, which manages a contract worth up to $4.6 billion for Boeing to develop, test, and fly a series of Starliner crew missions to the ISS.
While officials were pleased with Starliner’s landing, the celebration was tinged with disappointment.
“From a human perspective, all of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there’s a piece of us that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it,” Stich said. “We had planned to have the mission land with Butch and Suni onboard. I think there are, depending on who you are on the team, different emotions associated with that, and I think it’s going to take a little time to work through that.”
Nevertheless, Stich said NASA made the right call last month when officials decided to complete the Starliner test flight without astronauts in the spacecraft.
“We made the decision to have an uncrewed flight based on what we knew at the time, and based on our knowledge of the thrusters and based on the modeling that we had,” Stich said. “If we’d had a model that would have predicted what we saw tonight perfectly, yeah, it looks like an easy decision to go say, ‘We could have had a crew tonight.’ But we didn’t have that.”
Boeing’s Starliner managers insisted the ship was safe to bring the astronauts home. It might be tempting to conclude the successful landing Friday night vindicated Boeing’s views on the thruster problems. However, he spacecraft’s propulsion system, provided by Aerojet Rocketdyne, clearly did not work as intended during the flight. NASA had the option of bringing Wilmore and Williams back to Earth on a different, flight-proven spacecraft, so they took it.
“It’s awfully hard for the team,” Stich said. “It’s hard for me, when we sit here and have a successful landing, to be in that position. But it was a test flight, and we didn’t have confidence, with certainty, of the thruster performance.”
Enlarge/ In this infrared view, Starliner descends under its three main parachutes moments before touchdown at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico.
NASA
As Starliner approached the space station in June, five of 28 control thrusters on Starliner’s service module failed, forcing Wilmore to take manual control as ground teams sorted out the problem. Eventually, engineers recovered four of the five thrusters, but NASA’s decision makers were unable to convince themselves the same problem wouldn’t reappear, or get worse, when the spacecraft departed the space station and headed for reentry and landing.
Engineers later determined the control jets lost thrust due to overheating, which can cause Teflon seals in valves to swell and deform, starving the thrusters of propellant. Telemetry data beamed back to the mission controllers from Starliner showed higher-than-expected temperatures on two of the service module thrusters during the flight back to Earth Friday night, but they continued working.
Ground teams also detected five small helium leaks on Starliner’s propulsion system soon after its launch in June. NASA and Boeing officials were aware of one of the leaks before the launch, but decided to go ahead with the test flight. Starliner was still leaking helium when the spacecraft undocked from the station Friday, but the leak rate remained within safety tolerances, according to Stich.
A couple of fresh technical problems cropped up as Starliner cruised back to Earth. One of 12 control jets on the crew module failed to ignite at any time during Starliner’s flight home. These are separate thrusters from the small engines that caused trouble earlier in the Starliner mission. There was also a brief glitch in Starliner’s navigation system during reentry.
Where to go from here?
Three NASA managers, including Stich, took questions from reporters in a press conference early Saturday following Starliner’s landing. Two Boeing officials were also supposed to be on the panel, but they canceled at the last minute. Boeing didn’t explain their absence, and the company has not made any officials available to answer questions since NASA chose to end the Starliner test flight without the crew aboard.
“We view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, in an August 24 press conference announcing the agency’s decision on how to end the Starliner test flight. It’s unusual for NASA officials to publicly discuss how their opinions differ from those of their contractors.
Joel Montalbano, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for space operations, said Saturday that Boeing deferred to the agency to discuss the Starliner mission in the post-landing press conference.
Here’s the only quote from a Boeing official on Starliner’s return to Earth. It came in the form of a three-paragraph written statement Boeing emailed to reporters about a half-hour after Starliner’s landing: “I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program. “We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program.”
Nappi’s statement doesn’t answer one of the most important questions reporters would have asked anyone from Boeing if they participated in Saturday morning’s press conference: Does Boeing still have a long-term commitment to the Starliner program?
So far, the only indications of Boeing’s future plans for Starliner have come from second-hand anecdotes relayed by NASA officials. Boeing has been silent on the matter. The company has reported nearly $1.6 billion in financial charges to pay for previous delays and cost overruns on the Starliner program, and Boeing will again be on the hook to pay to fix the problems Starliner encountered in space over the last three months.
Montalbano said Boeing’s Starliner managers met with ground teams at mission control in Houston following the craft’s landing. “The Boeing managers came into the control room and congratulated the team, talked to the NASA team, so Boeing is committed to continue their work with us,” he said.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft fires thrusters during departure from the International Space Station on Friday.
NASA
NASA isn’t ready to give up on Starliner. A fundamental tenet of NASA’s commercial crew program is to foster the development of two independent vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and eventually commercial outposts in low-Earth orbit. NASA awarded multibillion-dollar contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to complete development of their Starliner and Crew Dragon spaceships.
SpaceX’s Dragon started flying astronauts in 2020. NASA would like to have another US spacecraft for crew rotation flights to support the ISS. If Boeing had more success with this Starliner test flight, NASA expected to formally certify the spacecraft for operational crew flights beginning next year. Once that happens, Starliner will enter a rotation with SpaceX’s Dragon to transport crews to and from the station in six-month increments.
Stich said Saturday that NASA has not determined whether the agency will require Boeing launch another Starliner test flight before certifying the spacecraft for regular crew rotation missions. “It’ll take a little time to determine the path forward, but today we saw the vehicle perform really well,” he said.
On to Starliner-1?
But some of Stich’s other statements Saturday suggested NASA would like to proceed with certifying Starliner and flying the next mission with a full crew complement of four astronauts. NASA calls Boeing’s first operational crew mission Starliner-1. It’s the first of at least three and potentially up to six crew rotation missions on Boeing’s contract.
“It’s great to have the spacecraft back, and we’re now focused on Starliner-1,” Stich said.
Before that happens, NASA and Boeing engineers must resolve the thruster problems and helium leaks that plagued the test flight this summer. Stich said teams are studying several ways to improve the reliability of Starliner’s thrusters, including hardware modifications and procedural changes. This will probably push back the next crew flight of Starliner, whether it’s Starliner-1 or another test flight, until the end of next year or 2026, although NASA officials have not laid out a schedule.
The overheating thrusters are located inside four doghouse-shaped propulsion pods around the perimeter of Starliner’s service module. It turns out the doghouses retain heat like a thermos—something NASA and Boeing didn’t fully appreciate before this mission—and the thrusters don’t have time to cool down when the spacecraft fires its control jets in rapid pulses. It might help if Boeing removes some of the insulating thermal blankets from the doghouses, Stich said.
The easiest method of resolving the problem of Starliner’s overheating thrusters would be to change the rate and duration of thruster firings.
“What we would like to do is try not to change the thruster. I think that is the best path,” Stich said. “There thrusters have shown resilience and have shown that they perform well, as long as we keep their temperatures down and don’t fire them in a manner that causes the temperatures to go up.”
There’s one thing from this summer’s test flight that might, counterintuitively, help NASA certify the Starliner spacecraft to begin operational flights with its next mission. Rather than staying at the space station for eight days, Starliner remained docked at the research lab for three months, half of the duration of a full-up crew rotation flight. Despite the setbacks, Stich estimated the test flight achieved about 85 to 90 percent of its objectives.
“There’s a lot of learning that happens in that three months that is invaluable for an increment mission,” Stich said. “So, in some ways, the mission overachieved some objectives, in terms of being there for extra time. Not having the crew onboard, obviously, there are some things that we lack in terms of Butch and Suni’s test pilot expertise, and how the vehicle performed, what they saw in the cockpit. We won’t have that data, but we still have the wealth of data from the spacecraft itself, so that will go toward the mission objectives and the certification.”
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft sits atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket before liftoff in June to begin the Crew Flight Test.
NASA is ready for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, stricken with thruster problems and helium leaks, to leave the International Space Station as soon as Friday, wrapping up a disappointing test flight that has clouded the long-term future of the Starliner program.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard Starliner on June 5, closed the spacecraft’s hatch Thursday in preparation for departure Friday. But it wasn’t what they envisioned when they left Earth on Starliner three months ago. Instead of closing the hatch from a position in Starliner’s cockpit, they latched the front door to the spacecraft from the space station’s side of the docking port.
The Starliner spacecraft is set to undock from the International Space Station at 6: 04 pm EDT (22: 04 UTC) Friday. If all goes according to plan, Starliner will ignite its braking rockets at 11: 17 pm EDT (03: 17 UTC) for a minute-long burn to target a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned landing at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, at 12: 03 am EDT (04: 03 UTC) Saturday.
The Starliner mission set to conclude this weekend was the spacecraft’s first test flight with astronauts, running seven years behind Boeing’s original schedule. But due to technical problems with the spacecraft, it won’t come home with the two astronauts who flew it into orbit back in June, leaving some of the test flight’s objectives incomplete.
This outcome is, without question, a setback for NASA and Boeing, which must resolve two major problems in Starliner’s propulsion system—supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne—before the capsule can fly with people again. NASA officials haven’t said whether they will require Boeing to launch another Starliner test flight before certifying the spacecraft for the first of up to six operational crew missions on Boeing’s contract.
A noncommittal from NASA
For over a decade, the space agency has worked with Boeing and SpaceX to develop two independent vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX launched its first Dragon spacecraft with astronauts in May 2020, and six months later, NASA cleared SpaceX to begin flying regular six-month space station crew rotation missions.
Officially, NASA has penciled in Starliner’s first operational mission for August 2025. But the agency set that schedule before realizing Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne would need to redesign seals and perhaps other elements in Starliner’s propulsion system.
No one knows how long that will take, and NASA hasn’t decided if it will require Boeing to launch another test flight before formally certifying Starliner for operational missions. If Starliner performs flawlessly after undocking and successfully lands this weekend, perhaps NASA engineers can convince themselves Starliner is good to go for crew rotation flights once Boeing resolves the thruster problems and helium leaks.
In any event, the schedule for launching an operational Starliner crew flight in less than a year seems improbable. Aside from the decision on another test flight, the agency also must decide whether it will order any more operational Starliner missions from Boeing. These “post-certification missions” will transport crews of four astronauts between Earth and the ISS, orbiting roughly 260 miles (420 kilometers) above the planet.
NASA has only given Boeing the “Authority To Proceed” for three of its six potential operational Starliner missions. This milestone, known as ATP, is a decision point in contracting lingo where the customer—in this case, NASA—places a firm order for a deliverable. NASA has previously said it awards these task orders about two to three years prior to a mission’s launch.
Josh Finch, a NASA spokesperson, told Ars that the agency hasn’t made any decisions on whether to commit to any more operational Starliner missions from Boeing beyond the three already on the books.
“NASA’s goal remains to certify the Starliner system for crew transportation to the International Space Station,” Finch said in a written response to questions from Ars. “NASA looks forward to its continued work with Boeing to complete certification efforts after Starliner’s uncrewed return. Decisions and timing on issuing future authorizations are on the work ahead.”
This means NASA’s near-term focus is on certifying Starliner so that Boeing can start executing its commercial crew contract. The space agency hasn’t determined when or if it will authorize Boeing to prepare for any Starliner missions beyond the three already on the books.
When it awarded commercial crew contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, NASA pledged to buy at least two operational crew flights from each company. The initial contracts from a decade ago had options for as many as six crew rotation flights to the ISS after certification.
Since then, NASA has extended SpaceX’s commercial crew contract to cover as many as 14 Dragon missions with astronauts, and SpaceX has already launched eight of them. The main reason for this contract extension was to cover NASA’s needs for crew transportation after delays with Boeing’s Starliner, which was originally supposed to alternate with SpaceX’s Dragon for human flights every six months.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is set to undock from the International Space Station on Friday evening.
NASA
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will gently back away from the International Space Station Friday evening, then fire its balky thrusters to rapidly depart the vicinity of the orbiting lab and its nine-person crew.
NASA asked Boeing to adjust Starliner’s departure sequence to get away from the space station faster and reduce the workload on the thrusters to reduce the risk of overheating, which caused some of the control jets to drop offline as the spacecraft approached the outpost for docking in June.
The action begins at 6: 04 pm EDT (22: 04 UTC) on Friday, when hooks in the docking mechanism connecting Starliner with the International Space Station (ISS) will open, and springs will nudge the spacecraft away its mooring on the forward end of the massive research complex.
Around 90 seconds later, a set of forward-facing thrusters on Starliner’s service module will fire in a series of 12 pulses over a few minutes to drive the spacecraft farther away from the space station. These maneuvers will send Starliner on a trajectory over the top of the ISS, then behind it until it is time for the spacecraft to perform a deorbit burn at 11: 17 pm EDT (03: 17 UTC) to target landing at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, shortly after midnight EDT (10 pm local time at White Sands).
How to watch, and what to watch for
The two videos embedded below will show NASA TV’s live coverage of the undocking and landing of Starliner.
Starliner is leaving its two-person crew behind on the space station after NASA officials decided last month they did not have enough confidence in the spacecraft’s reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, used to make exact changes to the capsule’s trajectory and orientation in orbit. Five of the 28 RCS thrusters on Starliner’s service module failed during the craft’s rendezvous with the space station three months ago. Subsequent investigations showed overheating could cause Teflon seals in a poppet valve to swell, restricting the flow of propellant to the thrusters.
Engineers recovered four of the five thrusters after they temporarily stopped working, but NASA officials couldn’t be sure the thrusters would not overheat again on the trip home. NASA decided it was too risky for Starliner to come home with astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on Boeing’s crew test flight on June 5, becoming the first people to fly on the commercial capsule. They will remain aboard the station until February, when they will return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
The original flight plan, had Wilmore and Williams been aboard Starliner for the trip home, called for the spacecraft to make a gentler departure from the ISS, allowing engineers to fully check out the performance of its navigation sensors and test the craft’s ability to loiter in the vicinity of the station for photographic surveys of its exterior.
“In this case, what we’re doing is the break-out burn, which will be a series of 12 burns, each not very large, about 0.1 meters per second (0.2 mph) and that’s just to take the Starliner away from the station, and then immediately start going up and away, and eventually it’ll curve around to the top and deorbit from above the station a few orbits later,” said Anthony Vareha, NASA’s flight director overseeing ISS operations during Starliner’s undocking sequence.
Astronauts won’t be inside Starliner’s cockpit to take manual control in the event of a major problem, so NASA managers want the spacecraft to get away from the space station as quickly as possible.
On this path, Starliner will exit the so-called approach ellipsoid, a 2.5-by-1.25-by-1.25-mile (4-by-2-by-2-kilometer) invisible boundary around the orbiting laboratory, about 20 to 25 minutes after undocking, NASA officials said. That’s less than half the time Starliner would normally take to leave the vicinity of the ISS.
“It’s a quicker way to get away from the station, with less stress on the thrusters,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “Essentially, once we open the hooks, the springs will push Starliner away and then we’ll do some really short thruster firings to put us on a trajectory that will take us above the station and behind, we’ll be opening to a nice range to where we can execute the deorbit burn.”
In the unlikely event of a more significant series of thruster failures, the springs that push Starliner away from the station should be enough to ensure there’s no risk of collision, according to Vareha.
“Then, after that, we really are going to just stay in some very benign attitudes and not fire the the thrusters very much at all,” Stich said.
Starliner will need to use the RCS thrusters again to point itself in the proper direction to fire four larger rocket engines for the deorbit burn. Once this burn is complete, the RCS thrusters will reorient the spacecraft to jettison the service module to burn up in the atmosphere. The reusable crew module relies on a separate set of thrusters during reentry.
Finally, the capsule will approach the landing zone in New Mexico from the southwest, flying over the Pacific Ocean and Mexico before deploying three main parachutes and airbags to cushion its landing at White Sands. Boeing and NASA teams there will meet the spacecraft and secure it for a road voyage back to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for refurbishment.
Meanwhile, engineers must resolve the causes of the thruster problems and helium leaks that plagued the Starliner test flight before it can fly astronauts again.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft undocks from the International Space Station at the conclusion of an unpiloted test flight in May 2022.
NASA
NASA and Boeing are proceeding with final preparations to undock the Starliner spacecraft from the International Space Station next Friday, September 6, to head for landing at White Sands Space Harbor in southern New Mexico.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were supposed to return to Earth inside Starliner, will remain behind on the space station after NASA decided last week to conclude the Boeing test flight without its crew on board. NASA officials decided it was too risky to put the astronauts on Starliner after the spacecraft suffered thruster failures during its flight to the space station in early June.
Instead, Wilmore and Williams will come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule no earlier than February, extending their planned stay on the space station from eight days to eight months. Flying on autopilot, the Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to depart the station at approximately 6: 04 pm EDT (22: 04 UTC) on September 6. The capsule will fire its engines to drop out of orbit and target a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico at 12: 03 am EDT (04: 03 UTC) on September 7, NASA said in a statement Thursday.
NASA officials completed the second part of a two-day Flight Readiness Review on Thursday to clear the Starliner spacecraft for undocking and landing. However, there are strict weather rules for landing a Starliner spacecraft, so NASA and Boeing managers will decide next week whether to proceed with the return next Friday night or wait for better conditions at the White Sands landing zone.
Over the last few days, flight controllers updated parameters in Starliner’s software to handle a fully autonomous return to Earth without inputs from astronauts flying in the cockpit, NASA said. Boeing has flown two unpiloted Starliner test flights using the same type of autonomous reentry and landing operations. This mission, called the Crew Flight Test (CFT), was the first time astronauts launched into orbit inside a Starliner spacecraft, and was expected to pave the way for future operational missions to rotate four-person crews to and from the space station.
With the Starliner spacecraft unable to complete its test flight as intended, there are fundamental questions about the future of Boeing’s commercial crew program. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said last week that Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, told him the aerospace company remained committed to Starliner. However, Boeing will be on the hook to pay for the cost of resolving problems with overheating thrusters and helium leaks that hamstrung the CFT mission. Boeing hasn’t made any public statements about the long-term future of the Starliner program since NASA decided to pull its astronauts off the spacecraft for its return to Earth.
Preparing for a contingency
NASA is clearly more comfortable with returning Wilmore and Williams to Earth inside SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, but the change disrupts crew operations at the space station. This week, astronauts have been reconfiguring the interior of a Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the outpost to support six crew members in the event of an emergency evacuation.
With Starliner leaving the space station next week, Dragon will become the lifeboat for Wilmore and Williams. If a fire, a collision with space junk, a medical emergency, or something else forces the crew to leave the complex, the Starliner astronauts will ride home on makeshift seats positioned under the four regular seats inside Dragon, where crews typically put cargo during launch and landing.
At least one of the Starliner astronauts would have to come home without a spacesuit to protect them if the cabin of the Dragon spacecraft depressurized on the descent. This has never happened on a Dragon mission before, but astronauts wear SpaceX-made pressure suits to mitigate the risk. The four astronauts who launched on Dragon have their suits, and NASA officials said a spare SpaceX suit already on the space station fit one of the Starliner astronauts, but they didn’t identify which one.
A pressure suit for the other Starliner crew member will launch on the next Dragon spacecraft—on the Crew-9 mission—set for liftoff on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than September 24. Starliner’s troubles have also disrupted plans for the Crew-9 mission.
On Friday, NASA announced it would remove two astronauts from the Crew-9 mission, including its commander, Zena Cardman, who is a spaceflight rookie. Veteran astronaut Nick Hague will move from the pilot’s seat to take over as Crew-9 commander. Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will join him.
NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, have an agreement to launch Russian cosmonauts on Dragon missions and US astronauts on Russian Soyuz flights to the station. In exchange for NASA providing a ride for Gorbunov, NASA astronaut Don Pettit will fly to the space station on a Soyuz spacecraft next month.
The so-called “seat swap” arrangement ensures that, even if Dragon or Soyuz were grounded, there is always at least one US astronaut and one Russian cosmonaut on the station overseeing each partner’s segment of the outpost, maintaining propulsion, power generating, pointing control, thermal control, and other critical capabilities to keep the lab operational.
Pretty much every day for the last couple of weeks, workers wielding welding guns and torches have climbed onto SpaceX’s Starship launch pad in South Texas to make last-minute upgrades ahead of the next test flight of the world’s largest rocket.
Livestreams of the launch site provided by LabPadre and NASASpaceflight.com have shown sparks raining down two mechanical arms extending from the side of the Starship launch tower at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast east of Brownsville, Texas. We are publishing several views here of the welding activity with the permission of LabPadre, which runs a YouTube page with multiple live views of Starbase.
If SpaceX has its way on the next flight of Starship, these arms will close together to capture the first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, as it descends back to Earth and slows to a hover over the launch pad.
This method of rocket recovery is remarkably different from how SpaceX lands its smaller Falcon 9 booster, which has landing legs to touch down on offshore ocean-going platforms or at concrete sites onshore. Catching the rocket with large metallic arms—sometimes called “mechazilla arms” or “chopsticks”—would reduce the turnaround time to reuse the booster and simplify its design, according to SpaceX.
SpaceX has launched the nearly 400-foot-tall (121 meter) Starship rocket four times, most recently in June, when the Super Heavy booster, itself roughly 233 feet (71 meters) tall, made a pinpoint splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Starbase.
On the same flight in June, the Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world and reentered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. The ship survived reentry and splashed down in the open ocean northwest of Australia. This flight was the first time either part of the Starship rocket made it back to Earth intact, but SpaceX didn’t recover the booster or the ship.
Doubling up
Lessons learned from the June test flight prompted SpaceX to replace thousands of heat shield tiles on the Starship vehicle for the next mission. While the ship survived reentry in June, onboard camera views showed numerous tiles ripped away from the vehicle. Last month, SpaceX test-fired engines on the booster and ship assigned to the next launch.
On August 8, SpaceX said Starship and Super Heavy were “ready to fly, pending regulatory approval” from the Federal Aviation Administration. An FAA spokesperson said the agency is evaluating SpaceX’s proposed flight profile for the next Starship test flight, when SpaceX wants to try catching the booster on the pad. This will be the first time SpaceX will try to bring the stainless-steel Super Heavy booster, as long as and wider than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, back to a landing on land.
Enlarge/ Sparks fly at Starbase as welders work overnight at the Starship launch pad.
While the rocket appears to be ready to fly, SpaceX officials clearly believe there’s more work to do on the launch pad. Closer views revealed welders are installing structural supports, or doublers, to certain parts of the catch arms. Elsewhere on the arms, workers were seen removing and adding other unknown pieces of hardware. SpaceX hasn’t specified exactly what kind of work teams are doing on the Starship launch pad in Texas, but the focus is on beefing up hardware necessary for catching the Super Heavy booster.
All of this work is occurring during the hottest part of the year in South Texas. On most days this month, afternoon temperatures have soared into the mid-to-upper 90s Fahrenheit, with sticky humidity. A lot of the work on the catch arms has occurred at night, when temperatures drop into the lower 80s.
It’s unclear how long it will take for the FAA to approve a license for SpaceX to launch and recover the rocket on the next test flight or when SpaceX will complete the upgrades on the launch pad. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, suggested earlier this month that the flight could take off by the end of August, but the condition of the launch pad and remaining tests indicate a launch is still probably at least a couple of weeks away.
Once workers finish up their tasks upgrading the pad and clearing scaffolding and cranes from the area, SpaceX will likely stack the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage and fill them with propellants during a full countdown rehearsal, as it has before each previous Starship launch.
Musk has signaled several times that the company will try to catch the Super Heavy booster on the next flight, which will also accelerate the Starship upper stage to nearly orbital velocity for another reentry demonstration over the Indian Ocean. Last month, SpaceX released a video teasing a catch of the booster on the next Starship flight, showing the rocket returning to Starbase with its Raptor engines firing.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has stacked a second Starship launch tower next to the existing launch pad in Texas. The company still has a lot of work to do to outfit the second launch pad before it is ready to support a Starship flight, but SpaceX could have it ready for activation sometime next year. SpaceX also plans two Starship launch pads at Cape Canaveral, Florida. All these sites will allow SpaceX to launch Starships more often. The company is also finishing a sprawling factory near the Starship factory in South Texas, just a couple of miles inland from the launch pads there.
Enlarge/ A Starliner spacecraft mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket before an unpiloted test flight in 2022.
Ten years ago next month NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency’s most experienced contractors, won the lion’s share of government money available to end the agency’s sole reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.
At the time, Boeing won $4.2 billion from NASA to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two, and potentially up to six, operational crew flights to rotate crews between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for essentially the same scope of work.
A decade later the Starliner program finds itself at a crossroads after Boeing learned it will not complete the spacecraft’s first Crew Flight Test with astronauts onboard. NASA formally decided Saturday that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the Starliner capsule June 5, will instead return to Earth inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Put simply, NASA isn’t confident enough in Boeing’s spacecraft after it suffered multiple thrusters failures and helium leaks on the way to the ISS.
So where does this leave Boeing with its multibillion contract? Can the company fulfill the breadth of its commercial crew contract with NASA before the space station’s scheduled retirement in 2030? It now seems that there is little chance of Boeing flying six more Starliner missions without a life extension for the ISS. Tellingly, perhaps, NASA has only placed firm orders with Boeing for three Starliner flights once the agency certifies the spacecraft for operational use.
Boeing’s bottom line
Although Boeing did not make an official statement Saturday on its long-term plans for Starliner, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters he received assurances from Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, that the company remains committed to the commercial crew program. And it will take a significant commitment from Boeing to see it through. Under the terms of its fixed price contract with NASA, the company is on the hook to pay for any expenses to fix the thruster and helium leak problems and get Starliner flying again.
Boeing has already reported $1.6 billion in charges on its financial statements to pay for delays and cost overruns on the Starliner program. That figure will grow as the company will likely need to redesign some elements in the spacecraft’s propulsion system to remedy the problems encountered on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. NASA has committed $5.1 billion to Boeing for the Starliner program, and the agency has already paid out most of that funding.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
The next step for Starliner remains unclear, and we’ll assess that in more detail later in the story. Had the Starliner test flight ended as expected, with its crew inside, NASA targeted no earlier than August 2025 for Boeing to launch the first of its six operational crew rotation missions to the space station. In light of Saturday’s decision, there’s a high probability Starliner won’t fly with astronauts again until at least 2026.
Starliner safely delivered astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station on June 6, a day after their launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. But five of the craft’s 28 reaction control system thrusters overheated and failed as it approached the outpost. After the failures on the way to the space station, NASA’s engineers were concerned Starliner might suffer similar problems, or worse, when the control jets fired to guide Starliner on the trip back to Earth.
On Saturday, senior NASA leaders decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The two astronauts, who originally planned for an eight-day stay at the station, will now spend eight months on the orbiting research lab until they come back to Earth with SpaceX.
If it’s not a trust problem, is it a judgement issue?
Boeing managers had previously declared Starliner was safe enough to bring Wilmore and Williams home. Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, regularly appeared to downplay the seriousness of the thruster issues during press conferences throughout Starliner’s nearly three-month mission.
So why did NASA and Boeing engineers reach different conclusions? “I think we’re looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, and the agency’s most senior civil servant. “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s our technical expertise and our experience that we have to balance. We balance risk across everything, not just Starliner.”
The people at the top of NASA’s decision-making tree have either flown in space before, or had front-row seats to the calamitous decision NASA made in 2003 to not seek more data on the condition of space shuttle Columbia’s left wing after the impact of a block of foam from the shuttle’s fuel tank during launch. This led to the deaths of seven astronauts, and the destruction of Columbia during reentry over East Texas. A similar normalization of technical problems, and a culture of stifling dissent, led to the loss of space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
“We lost two space shuttles as a result there not being a culture in which information could come forward,” Nelson said Saturday. “We have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection, you come forward. Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest, and even at its most routine. And a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine. So the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety.”
Now, it seems that culture may truly have changed. With SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft available to give Wilmore and Williams a ride home, this ended up being a relatively straightforward decision. Ken Bowersox, head of NASA’s space operations mission directorate, said the managers polled for their opinion all supported bringing the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without anyone onboard.
However, NASA and Boeing need to answer for how the Starliner program got to this point. The space agency approved the launch of the Starliner CFT mission in June despite knowing the spacecraft had a helium leak in its propulsion system. Those leaks multiplied once Starliner arrived in orbit, and are a serious issue on their own that will require corrective actions before the next flight. Ultimately, the thruster problems superseded the seriousness of the helium leaks, and this is where NASA and Boeing are likely to face the most difficult questions moving forward.
Enlarge/ NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station.
Boeing’s previous Starliner mission, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), successfully launched in 2022 and docked with the space station, later coming back to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico. The test flight achieved all of its major objectives, setting the stage for the Crew Flight Test mission this year. But the spacecraft suffered thruster problems on that flight, too.
Several of the reaction control system thrusters stopped working as Starliner approached the space station on the OFT-2 mission, and another one failed on the return leg of the mission. Engineers thought they fixed the problem by introducing what was essentially a software fix to adjust timing and tolerance settings on sensors in the propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne.
That didn’t work. The problem lay elsewhere, as engineers discovered during testing this summer, when Starliner was already in orbit. Thruster firings at White Stands, New Mexico, revealed a small Teflon seal in a valve can bulge when overheated, restricting the flow of oxidizer propellant to the thruster. NASA officials concluded there is a chance, however small, that the thrusters could overheat again as Starliner departs the station and flies back to Earth—or perhaps get worse.
“We are clearly operating this thruster at a higher temperature, at times, than it was designed for,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “I think that was a factor, that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully, we’re operating the thruster outside of where it should be operated at.”
Enlarge/ A high-resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite owned by Maxar captured this view of the International Space Station on June 7 with Boeing’s Starliner capsule docked at the lab’s forward port (lower right).
Senior NASA leaders, including the agency’s administrator, Bill Nelson, will meet Saturday in Houston to decide whether Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is safe enough to ferry astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth from the International Space Station.
The Flight Readiness Review (FRR) is expected to conclude with NASA’s most consequential safety decision in nearly a generation. One option is to clear the Starliner spacecraft to undock from the space station in early September with Wilmore and Williams onboard, as their flight plan initially laid out, or to bring the capsule home without its crew.
As of Thursday, the two veteran astronauts have been on the space station for 77 days, nearly 10 times longer than their planned stay of eight days. Wilmore and Williams were the first people to launch and dock at the space station aboard a Starliner spacecraft, but multiple thrusters failed and the capsule leaked helium from its propulsion system as it approached the orbiting complex on June 6.
That led to months of testing—in space and on the ground—data reviews, and modeling for engineers to try to understand the root cause of the thruster problems. Engineers believe the thrusters overheated, causing Teflon seals to bulge and block the flow of propellant to the small control jets, resulting in losing thrust. The condition of the thrusters improved once Starliner docked at the station when they weren’t repeatedly firing, as they need to do when the spacecraft is flying alone.
However, engineers and managers have not yet reached a consensus about whether the same problem could recur, or get worse, during the capsule’s journey back to Earth. In a worst-case scenario, if too many thrusters fail, the spacecraft would be unable to point in the proper direction for a critical braking burn to guide the capsule back into the atmosphere toward landing.
The suspect thrusters are located on Starliner’s service module, which will perform the deorbit burn and then separate from the astronaut-carrying crew module before reentry. A separate set of small engines will fine-tune Starliner’s trajectory during descent.
If NASA managers decide it’s not worth the risk, Wilmore and Williams would extend their stay on the space station until at least February of next year, when they would return to Earth inside a Dragon spacecraft provided by SpaceX, Boeing’s rival in NASA’s commercial crew program. This would eliminate the threat that thruster problems on the Starliner spacecraft might pose to the crew’s safety during the trip to Earth, but it comes with myriad side effects.
These effects include disrupting crew activities on the space station by bumping two astronauts off the next SpaceX flight, exposing Wilmore and Williams to additional radiation during their time in space, and dealing a debilitating blow to Boeing’s Starliner program.
If Boeing’s capsule cannot return to Earth with its two astronauts, NASA may not certify Starliner for operational crew missions without an additional test flight. In that case, Boeing probably wouldn’t be able to complete all six of its planned operational crew missions under a $4.2 billion NASA contract before the International Space Station is due for retirement in 2030.
FRR-eedom to speak
The Flight Readiness Review at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will begin Saturday morning. Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut and head of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, will chair the meeting. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson will participate, too. If there’s no unanimous agreement around the table at the FRR, a final decision on what to do could be elevated above Bowersox to NASA’s associate administrator, Jim Free or to Nelson.
“The agency flight readiness review is where any formal dissents are presented and reconciled,” NASA said in a statement Thursday. “Other agency leaders who routinely participate in launch and return readiness reviews for crewed missions include NASA’s administrator, deputy administrator, associate administrator, various agency center directors, the Flight Operations Directorate, and agency technical authorities.”
NASA has scheduled a press conference for no earlier than 1 pm ET (17: 00 UTC) Saturday to announce the agency’s decision and next steps, the agency said.
Lower-level managers will meet Friday in a so-called Program Control Board to discuss their findings and views before the FRR. At a previous Program Control Board meeting, managers disagreed on whether the agency was ready to sign off that the Starliner spacecraft was safe enough to return its astronauts to Earth.
There’s one new piece of information that engineers will brief to the Program Control Board on Friday:
“Engineering teams have been working to evaluate a new model that represents the thruster mechanics and is designed to more accurately predict performance during the return phase of flight,” NASA said. “This data could help teams better understand system redundancy from undock to service module separation. Ongoing efforts to complete the new modeling, characterize spacecraft performance data, refine integrated risk assessments, and determine community recommendations will fold into the agency-level review.”
Enlarge/ The two spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab’s factory in Long Beach, California.
Two NASA spacecraft built by Rocket Lab are on the road from California to Florida this weekend to begin preparations for launch on Blue Origin’s first New Glenn rocket.
These two science probes must launch between late September and mid-October to take advantage of a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that only happens once every 26 months. NASA tapped Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission with a $20 million contract.
Last November, the space agency confirmed the $79 million ESCAPADE mission will launch on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. With this piece of information, the opaque schedule for Blue Origin’s long-delayed first New Glenn mission suddenly became more clear.
The launch period opens on September 29. The two identical Mars-bound spacecraft for the ESCAPADE mission, nicknamed Blue and Gold, are now complete. Rocket Lab announced Friday that its manufacturing team packed the satellites and shipped them from their factory in Long Beach, California. Over the weekend, they arrived at a clean room facility just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians will perform final checkups and load hydrazine fuel into both spacecraft, each a little more than a half-ton in mass.
Then, if Blue Origin is ready, ground teams will connect the ESCAPADE spacecraft with the New Glenn’s launch adapter, encapsulate the probes inside the payload fairing, and mount them on top of the rocket.
“There’s a whole bunch of checking and tests to make sure everything’s OK, and then we move into fueling, and then we integrate with the launch vehicle. So it’s a big milestone,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s lead scientist from the University of California Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratory. “There have been some challenges along the way. This wasn’t easy to make happen on this schedule and for this cost. So we’re very happy to be where we are.”
Racing to the finish line
But there’s a lot for Blue Origin to accomplish in the next couple of months if the New Glenn rocket is going to be ready to send the ESCAPADE mission toward Mars in this year’s launch period. Blue Origin has not fully exercised a New Glenn rocket during a launch countdown, hasn’t pumped a full load of cryogenic propellants into the launch vehicle, and hasn’t test-fired a full complement of first stage or second stage engines.
These activities typically take place months before the first launch of a large new orbital-class rocket. For comparison, SpaceX test-fired its first fully assembled Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad about three months before its first flight in 2010. United Launch Alliance completed a hot-fire test of its new Vulcan rocket on the launch pad last year, about seven months before its inaugural flight.
However, Blue Origin is making visible progress toward the first flight of New Glenn, after years of speculation and few outward signs of advancement. Earlier this year, the company raised a full-scale, 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and loaded it with liquid nitrogen, a cryogenic substitute for the methane and liquid hydrogen fuel it will burn in flight.
Enlarge/ Astroscale’s ADRAS-J spacecraft captured these views of the H-IIA rocket upper stage on July 15.
There are more than 2,000 mostly intact dead rockets circling the Earth, but until this year, no one ever launched a satellite to go see what one looked like after many years of tumbling around the planet.
In February, a Japanese company named Astroscale sent a small satellite into low-Earth orbit on top of a Rocket Lab launcher. A couple of months later, Astroscale’s ADRAS-J (Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan) spacecraft completed its pursuit of a Japanese rocket stuck in orbit for more than 15 years.
ADRAS-J photographed the upper stage of an H-IIA rocket from a range of several hundred meters and then backed away. This was the first publicly released image of space debris captured from another spacecraft using rendezvous and proximity operations.
Since then, Astroscale has pulled off more complex maneuvers around the H-IIA upper stage, which hasn’t been controlled since it deployed a Japanese climate research satellite in January 2009. Astroscale attempted to complete a 360-degree fly-around of the H-IIA rocket last month, but the spacecraft triggered an autonomous abort one-third through the maneuver after detecting an attitude anomaly.
ADRAS-J flew away from the H-IIA rocket for several weeks. After engineers determined the cause of the glitch that triggered the abort, ADRAS-J fired thrusters to approach the upper stage again this month. The ADRAS-J spacecraft is about the size of a kitchen oven, while the H-IIA rocket it’s visiting is nearly the size of a city bus.
Astroscale’s satellite completed two fly-around maneuvers of the H-IIA upper stage on July 15 and 16, examining all sides of the rocket as it soared more than 350 miles (560 kilometers) above the planet. Engineers also wanted to measure the upper stage’s spin rate and spin axis. At first glance, the upper stage appears remarkably similar to the way it looked when it launched. Despite exposure to the harsh conditions of space, the rocket’s outer skin remains covered in orange foam insulation, and the engine nozzle still shines as if it were new.
ADRAS-J autonomously maneuvered around the rocket at a distance of about 50 meters (164 feet), using navigation data from a light detection and ranging sensor and Astroscale’s custom-developed guidance algorithms to control its position as the vehicles moved around Earth at nearly 4.7 miles per second (7.6 kilometers per second). This is the crux of the challenge for ADRAS-J because the rocket is unpowered and unable to hold position. The upper stage also lacks laser reflectors and targets that would aid an approaching spacecraft.
This is a first
These types of complex maneuvers, known as rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), are common for crew and cargo spacecraft around the International Space Station. Other commercial satellites have demonstrated formation-flying and even docking with a spacecraft that wasn’t designed to connect with another vehicle in orbit.
Military satellites from the United States, Russia, and China also have RPO capabilities, but as far as we know, these spacecraft have only maneuvered in ultra-close range around so-called “cooperative” objects designed to receive them. In 2003, the Air Force Research Laboratory launched a small satellite named XSS-10 to inspect the upper stage of a Delta II rocket in orbit, but it had a head start. XSS-10 maneuvered around the same rocket that deployed it, rather than pursuing a separate target.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Strainer spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station in this picture taken July 3.
The astronauts who rode Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station last month still don’t know when they will return to Earth.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been in space for 51 days, six weeks longer than originally planned, as engineers on the groundwork through problems with Starliner’s propulsion system.
The problems are twofold. The spacecraft’s reaction control thrusters overheated, and some of them shut off as Starliner approached the space station June 6. A separate, although perhaps related, problem involves helium leaks in the craft’s propulsion system.
On Thursday, NASA and Boeing managers said they still plan to bring Wilmore and Williams home on the Starliner spacecraft. In the last few weeks, ground teams completed testing of a thruster on a test stand at White Sands, New Mexico. This weekend, Boeing and NASA plan to fire the spacecraft’s thrusters in orbit to check their performance while docked at the space station.
“I think we’re starting to close in on those final pieces of flight rationale to make sure that we can come home safely, and that’s our primary focus right now,” Stich said.
The problems have led to speculation that NASA might decide to return Wilmore and Williams to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. There’s one Crew Dragon currently docked at the station, and another one is slated to launch with a fresh crew next month. Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said the agency has looked at backup plans to bring the Starliner crew home on a SpaceX capsule, but the main focus is still to have the astronauts fly home aboard Starliner.
“Our prime option is to complete the mission,” Stich said. “There are a lot of good reasons to complete this mission and bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner. Starliner was designed, as a spacecraft, to have the crew in the cockpit.”
Starliner launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5. Wilmore and Williams are the first astronauts to fly into space on Boeing’s commercial crew capsule, and this test flight is intended to pave the way for future operational flights to rotate crews of four to and from the International Space Station.
Once NASA fully certifies Starliner for operational missions, the agency will have two human-rated spaceships for flights to the station. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has been flying astronauts since 2020.
Tests, tests, and more tests
NASA has extended the duration of the Starliner test flight to conduct tests and analyze data in an effort to gain confidence in the spacecraft’s ability to safely bring its crew home and to better understand the root causes of the overheating thrusters and helium leaks. These problems are inside Starliner’s service module, which is jettisoned to burn up in the atmosphere during reentry, while the reusable crew module, with the astronauts inside, parachutes to an airbag-cushioned landing.
The most important of these tests was a series of test-firings of a Starliner thruster on the ground. This thruster was taken from a set of hardware slated to fly on a future Starlink mission, and engineers put it through a stress test, firing it numerous times to replicate the sequence of pulses it would see in flight. The testing simulated two sequences of flying up to the space station, and five sequences the thruster would execute during undocking and a deorbit burn for return to Earth.
“This thruster has seen quite a bit of pulses, maybe even more than what we would anticipate we would see during a flight, and more aggressive in terms of two uphills and five downhills,” Stich said. “What we did see in the thruster is the same kind of thrust degradation that we’re seeing on orbit. In a number of the thrusters (on Starliner), we’re seeing reduced thrust, which is important.”
Starliner’s flight computer shut off five of the spacecraft’s 28 reaction control system thrusters, produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne, during the rendezvous with the space station last month. Four of the five thrusters were recovered after overheating and losing thrust, but officials have declared one of the thrusters unusable.
The thruster tested on the ground showed similar behavior. Inspections of the thruster at White Sands showed bulging in a Teflon seal in an oxidizer valve, which could restrict the flow of nitrogen tetroxide propellant. The thrusters, each generating about 85 pounds of thrust, consume the nitrogen tetroxide, or NTO, oxidizer and mix it with hydrazine fuel for combustion.
A poppet valve, similar to an inflation valve on a tire, is designed to open and close to allow nitrogen tetroxide to flow into the thruster.
“That poppet has a Teflon seal at the end of it,” Nappi said. “Through the heating and natural vacuum that occurs with the thruster firing, that poppet seal was deformed and actually bulged out a little bit.”
Stich said engineers are evaluating the integrity of the Teflon seal to determine if it could remain intact through the undocking and deorbit burn of the Starliner spacecraft. The thrusters aren’t needed while Starliner is attached to the space station.
“Could that particular seal survive the rest of the flight? That’s the important part,” Stich said.
Enlarge/ The core stage for NASA’s second Space Launch System rocket rolls aboard a barge that will take it from New Orleans to Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Welcome to Edition 7.03 of the Rocket Report! One week ago, SpaceX suffered a rare failure of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. In fact, it was the first time the latest version of the Falcon 9, known as the Block 5, has ever failed on its prime mission after nearly 300 launches. The world’s launch pads have been silent since the grounding of the Falcon 9 fleet after last week’s failure. This isn’t surprising, but it’s noteworthy. After all, the Falcon 9 has flown more this year than all of the world’s other rockets combined and is fundamental to much of what the world does in space.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Astra finally goes private, again. A long-simmering deal for Astra’s founders to take the company private has been finalized, the company announced Thursday, capping the rocket launch company’s descent from blank-check darling to delisting in three years, Bloomberg reports. The launch company’s valuation peaked at $3.9 billion in 2021, the year it went public, and was worth about $12.2 million at the end of March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Astra’s chief executive officer, Chris Kemp, and chief technology officer, Adam London, founded the company in 2016 with the goal of essentially commoditizing launch services for small satellites. But Astra’s rockets failed to deliver and fell short of orbit five times in seven tries.
Spiraling … Astra’s stock price tanked after the spate of launch failures, drying up its funding spigot as Kemp tried to pivot toward a slightly larger, more reliable rocket. Astra acquired a company named Apollo Fusion in 2021, entering a new business segment to produce electric thrusters for small satellites. But Astra’s launch business faltered, and last November Kemp and London submitted an offer to retake ownership of the company. Astra announced the closure of the take-private deal Thursday, with Kemp and London acquiring the company’s outstanding shares for 50 cents per share in cash, below the stock’s final listing price of 53 cents. “We will now focus all of our attention on a successful launch of Rocket 4, delivering satellite engines to our customers, and building a company of consequence,” Kemp said. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)
Firefly chief leaves company. Launch startup Firefly Aerospace parted ways with CEO Bill Weber, Payload reports. The announcement of Weber’s departure late Wednesday came two days after Payload reported Firefly was investigating claims of an alleged inappropriate relationship between him and a female employee. “Firefly Aerospace’s Board of Directors announced that Bill Weber is no longer serving as CEO of the company, effective immediately,” the company said in a statement Wednesday night. Peter Schumacher takes over as interim CEO while Firefly searches for a new permanent chief executive. Schumacher was an interim CEO at Firefly before Weber’s hiring in 2022.
Two days and gone … Payload published the first report of Weber’s alleged improper relationship with a female employee Monday. Two days later, Weber was gone. Payload reported an executive brought his concerns about the alleged relationship to Firefly’s board and resigned because he lost confidence in leadership at the company. Citing four current and former employees, Payload reported Firefly’s culture became “chaotic” since Weber took the helm in 2022 after its acquisition by AE Industrial Partners. The Texas-based company achieved some success during Weber’s tenure, with four orbital launches of its Alpha rocket, although two of the flights ended up in lower-than-planned orbits. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
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Themis hop tests delayed to next year. The initial hop tests of the European Themis reusable booster, developed by ArianeGroup and funded by ESA, won’t start until next year, European Spaceflight reports. The Swedish Space Corporation, which operates the space center in Sweden where Themis will initially fly, confirmed the schedule change. Once ArianeGroup moves on to higher altitude flights, the testing will be moved to the Guiana Space Center. ESA awarded the first development contract for the Themis booster in 2019, and the first hop tests were then scheduled for 2022. Themis’ hops will be similar to SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket, which performed a series of up-and-down atmospheric test flights before SpaceX started recovering and reusing Falcon 9 boosters.
Fate of Themis … The Themis booster is powered by the methane-fueled Prometheus engine, also funded by ESA. A large European reusable rocket is unlikely to fly until the 2030s, but a subsidiary of ArianeGroup named MaiaSpace is developing a smaller partially reusable two-stage rocket slated to debut as soon as next year. The Maia rocket will use a modified Themis booster as its first stage. “As a result, for MaiaSpace, the continued and rapid development of the Themis program is essential to ensure it can hit its projected target of an inaugural flight of Maia in 2025,” European Spaceflight reports. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
