Tag: starliner

NASA reveals date for attempted return flight of Starliner

Posted on by faz_business



NASA is targeting Friday, September 6, for the return flight of Boeing Space’s troubled Starliner spacecraft, the agency revealed on Thursday.

The vehicle will come home from the International Space Station (ISS) nearly three months later than originally planned and without the crew that it arrived with. The flight, the outcome of which could determine the Starliner’s future, is expected to take about six hours, NASA said in a blog post on Thursday.

“After undocking [at 6:04 p.m. ET], the Starliner will take about six hours to reach the landing zone at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico,” NASA said in the post. “The spacecraft will touch down about 12:03 a.m. on Saturday, September 7, descending under parachutes and with inflated airbags to cushion the impact.”

The Starliner has been docked at the ISS since early June after completing its first-ever crewed flight, with NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore taking the ride.

But as it approached the ISS on June 6, issues emerged with some of the spacecraft’s thrusters. Several helium leaks were also detected.

The thrusters are key in guiding the Starliner toward its reentry point into Earth’s atmosphere for the trip home, and so NASA paused the return voyage to give it time to learn more about the issue and to confirm if it was safe to put Williams and Wilmore inside the capsule for the return journey.

After much research and deliberation, NASA announced last week that out of an abundance of caution, the two astronauts would instead fly home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in February 2025, with the Starliner returning empty.

And now we have a target date for what’s set to be a crucial flight for Boeing’s space vehicle.

In Thursday’s blog post, NASA said that all being well, the uncrewed Starliner spacecraft will perform a fully autonomous return overseen by flight controllers at Starliner Mission Control in Houston and at Boeing Mission Control Center in Florida.

It added that if the Starliner fails to perform as expected, teams on the ground will be able to remotely command the spacecraft through the necessary maneuvers for a safe undocking, re-entry, and parachute-assisted landing.

But clearly it’s not so confident that it’s willing to put Williams and Wilmore aboard the spacecraft for the journey home.

The current mission is the Starliner’s third flight to date. The first one in December 2019 ended in failure when the vehicle was unable to reach the ISS, though it returned safely. Its second test flight, in 2022, managed to successfully dock with the ISS and also return home.






Starliner astronauts will come home in February on a SpaceX Crew Dragon

Posted on by faz_business


After more than two months of tests and discussions, NASA has decided that astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will come home in February 2025 on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, and the Boeing Starliner they flew to the International Space Station on in June will return uncrewed. In a press conference on Saturday, Steve Stich, manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said “there was too much uncertainty” around the predictions for Starliner’s thrusters to move forward with a crewed return flight.

The plan now is that Starliner’s first crew will return with SpaceX’s Crew-9, which is scheduled to launch to the ISS at the end of September. Crew-9 was initially supposed to carry four crew members, but will instead have to go ahead with two, so as to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the way back. That spacecraft is being reconfigured with seats for the two astronauts, and Dragon spacesuits will be added to its cargo for them to wear home. By the time Wilmore and Williams depart, the duo will have been on the space station for about eight months. The Starliner flight test was only supposed to last a little over a week.

The next step is to get Starliner ready for undocking and wrap up as an uncrewed flight test. The agency plans to conduct the second part of its readiness review for the process this coming week, and expects undocking to take place around early next month. “We are changing the separation sequence that we planned and we will review those aspects at the readiness review,” Stich said. “We’re going to go with a simplified separation technique to get away from the station a little more quickly.”

The issue with Starliner’s thrusters has been “very complex,” Stich said, and their performance has been “challenging to predict.” Without being able to accurately predict how the thrusters would perform from undocking through the deorbit burn, the potential risks for the astronauts were just too high, he explained.

“We have had mistakes in the past,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We have lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information can come forward.” With that context looming over the discussions, he said, “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 and its most routine, and a test flight by its nature is neither safe nor routine. And so the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety.”