NASA said the Boeing Starliner spacecraft will extend its first space mission into the summer after launching on June 5 on a flight that was supposed to last 10 days.
The Starliner spacecraft encountered helium leaks and propulsion problems during a June 6 docking with the International Space Station (ISS). The spacecraft is stable and capable of leaving the International Space Station in the event of an emergency, the pressure of Boeing and NASA leadership. But after testing the thrusters in space, NASA and Boeing said they wanted to spend more time understanding the root cause.
The test campaign will begin July 2 at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico to replicate how thrusters are used during flight, Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program Manager, said during a live update today (June 28) with reporters. Testing will take about two weeks, but this depends on what is found – and further analysis will be needed after that. As such, NASA and Boeing have not yet set a landing date for the Starliner.
“We won’t have a specific date until we finish this test, look at the fault tree, and then understand the path to it,” Stitch said.
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The Starliner’s 10-day crew flight test mission with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams, both former U.S. Navy test pilots, is a development mission that has flexibility built into it should the unexpected happen in space.
The unexpected happened on June 6 during docking, when a small, persistent helium leak and five misbehaving thrusters affected Starliner’s final approach to the International Space Station. NASA rejected the first docking attempt to ensure Starliner was ready for launch, but allowed the second attempt, which resulted in the spacecraft docking at the orbiting complex.
Additional testing and review of the helium source and five thrusters (of the 28 in the reaction control system) revealed that the leak had stabilized and most of the thrusters had recovered. However, NASA and Boeing decided not to use at least one thruster during landing due to performance concerns.
Prior to today’s conference call, the last major update from Starliner officials came on June 21, which indicated that landing would be sometime after July 2. Conference call participants noted that analysis is ongoing today, and further testing of the spacecraft may be needed depending on what was found at White Sands.
“After everything is complete, we will meet and make sure we have done everything necessary to understand the system, and then we will return home safely,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and commercial crew program manager at Boeing. Nabi stressed that the timing of what will happen next cannot be determined. “These tests are unexpected [as to] How long will they take and how successful will they be?”
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While the analysis continues on Earth, Wilmore and Williams have focused their time on other duties on the International Space Station, such as maintenance. “They know this is a test flight, they know we’re going to learn, and that’s all good,” Nabi said of the crew’s comments in recent communications with Boeing from orbit. “It’s not unexpected.”
Starliner is a new type of spacecraft from Boeing, unlike the other commercial crew provider that carries astronauts to the ISS: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which is based on the Cargo Dragon design. Starliner has flown two uncrewed missions to prepare for CFT, after the first attempt to reach the ISS in 2019 failed due to a computer glitch.
Meanwhile, Dragon had one uncrewed mission in 2019 and one astronaut test flight in 2020 before beginning operational crewed missions to the ISS every six months.
After the COVID-19 pandemic and dozens of repairs, the second uncrewed Starliner test flight arrived safely at the International Space Station in 2022 after also experiencing thruster issues during docking. One reason the CFT docked extra time was to evaluate the service module, which holds most of the fuel and will be jettisoned during landing. This test could reveal more about why Starliner’s thruster system is having problems during docking in 2022 and 2024.
