NASA to send Boeing Starliner astronauts home on SpaceX Crew Dragon

NASA is keeping its two astronauts who flew in Boeing’s Starliner to the International Space Station safe on board until next year to fly home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams

“NASA has decided that Butch (Wilmore) and Suni (Williams) will return with Crew-9 next February, and that Starliner will return uncrewed,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a press conference Saturday following an agency-level review of Starliner’s flight safety risk.

“This whole discussion, remember, is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past,” he added. “We lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward.”

NASA has tried to change the agency’s mentality to avoid the same errors that led to the Apollo 1, Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia disasters.

“We have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection, you come forward,” he said. “This spaceflight is risky. Even at its safest and even at its most routine, and a test flight by 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 a result of a commitment to safety. Our core value is safety, and it is our North Star.”

Starliner arrived to the ISS on June 6, one day after launching from Cape Canaveral with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board for what was supposed to be about an eight-day stay.

The spacecraft’s propulsion system, though, had five of 28 reaction control system thrusters fail on approach to the ISS while also suffering from several helium leaks. That led to delays in a decision to return home while Boeing and NASA worked to figure out the source of the problem — including running a series of tests on the ground and hot firing Starliner while still attached to the ISS.

“Our focus is on safety all the time, and this certainly is no different. The uncertainty in our margins is where we have come to make the decision,” said NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free. “That uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters, and still, we still have some work to go.”

While four of the five thrusters came back online and ground tests revealed the likely cause, there is nothing that can be done to fix the source problem now in space. So a flight home raises the specter of a repeat of thruster failures, which are needed for the spacecraft’s departure from the ISS and during its reentry burn to return to Earth.

While Boeing has been stumping for a crewed return of the spacecraft to complete the Crew Flight Test mission as planned, Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said earlier this month revealed there has been dissent among NASA officials worried about the risk involved to the astronauts.

No Boeing official was at Saturday’s press conference, but NASA officials gave them credit and said they thought the decision ultimately laid in NASA’s hands.

“We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS,” Nelson said, noting he had just spoken with Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg. “I have expressed this to this to him, I told him how well Boeing worked with our team to come to this decision, and he expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely.”

NASA revealed details about the backup plan to get Wilmore and Williams home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon next February instead, while Starliner would undock without crew and complete its landing without them.

Now, the upcoming SpaceX Crew-9 mission slated to fly to the ISS no earlier than Sept. 24, would go up with two instead of four astronauts so that Wilmore and Williams could take the remaining seats when that mission concludes.

That would stretch the Starliner astronauts’ stay on board the ISS to around 10 months.

Boeing is trying to get Starliner certified to join SpaceX as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, with the two trading off duties to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS.

The CFT mission for Starliner was delayed several times as Boeing worked through a series of issues. Its launch came more than four years after SpaceX successfully launched its first crewed test flight of Crew Dragon.

Since that launch, SpaceX has flown an additional 12 times among its fleet of four Crew Dragons, including eight operational missions to the ISS for NASA.

NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said the data ultimately drove the decision.

“Bottom line relative to bringing Starliner back is there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters,” Stich said. “If we had a model, if we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action.”

Now Starliner will leave and make room for the Crew-9 Dragon, which will bring the proper spacesuits for their eventual ride home.

ISS Program Manager Dana Weigl said the eight-month stay is not an issue since there have been some astronauts who have gone a year on board.

“While Butch and Suni are on board, they’ll be doing science station maintenance, they’ll execute the SpaceX (CRS-31) research and cargo mission, and we may have a couple spacewalks for them toward the end of their expedition,” she said. “Since they’ve been up there, they’ve been a welcome set of helping hands. They’ve already done about 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments, and they’ve helped us with some of the critical station maintenance that we’ve had on board.”

_____