Well then.
Empty Handed
NASA has officially made the decision to have Boeing’s plagued Starliner spacecraft return without a crew on board. Instead, its two stranded astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore will return on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in February. That means their stay on board the International Space Station has been extended from what was originally designed to be an eight-day mission to a whopping eight-month odyssey.
The agency has been weighing its options for many weeks now. Officials only recently started changing their tune considerably, casting further doubt on Starliner’s ability to safely return its two astronauts — and now, NASA’s decision comes as a major black eye for Boeing.
“NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with (SpaceX’s) Crew-9 next February, and that Starliner will return uncrewed,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson of the decision.
PR Nightmare
The decision shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given Boeing’s troubles in pinpointing the technical problems haunting its spacecraft’s propulsion system. Before Williams and Wilmore’s journey to the ISS even began in early June, engineers detected several helium leaks but opted to launch anyway.
Then, en route to the station, more leaks were found and the spacecraft started having trouble with its thrusters as well. The mission fell into a strange liminal state as NASA pondered its next move; in a worst case scenario, officials feared, the spacecraft could’ve even spun out of control and crashed into the station after undocking.
NASA will now be required to make changes to Starliner’s onboard software to enable it to autonomously undock and reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.
The decision to ditch Starliner likely didn’t come easy, and signifies a major vote of no confidence in one of NASA’s biggest contractors. It’s a PR nightmare for the space agency, which has already sunk billions of dollars into the development of Boeing’s spacecraft.
The uncomfortable truth is that NASA doesn’t technically need Boeing’s Starliner to send crews up to the aging orbital outpost. The capsule was developed under the same Commercial Crew contract as SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which has already completed just shy of a dozen crewed flights to the space station.
Whether Boeing will get another chance at delivering and returning astronauts on board its spacecraft remains to be seen.
More on Starliner: NASA Fears Another Tragedy If Astronauts Return on Starliner
