After over two months in space, constant ground testing, and general back and forth between the agency and Boeing, a decision was finally made. SpaceX is now responsible for returning Butch and Suni from the ISS, the two astronauts who launched on Boeing’s Starliner apart of the spacecraft’s first crewed flight test.
During a news conference held earlier today, NASA confirmed the decision and provided additional context into exactly what it means. Here I will go more in-depth into the switch, NASA’s reasoning, what this means for Starliner, and more.
Starliner To SpaceX
This morning NASA held the long-awaited media briefing regarding Boeing’s Crewed flight test status. For context, after Starliner launched back on June 5th there were a number of issues that arose, including multiple thruster failures that delayed the initial docking. Since then, they have been performing in-space tests along with ground testing to try and replicate what’s going on. There was a lot of debate as to whether or not the astronauts should return on this vehicle and today we finally got an answer.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a quote, “NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew 9 next February, and that Starliner will return uncrewed. When he says Crew 9 he’s referring to an upcoming SpaceX Dragon launch set to return early next year. That also means the crew will stay in space for another 6 months or so, combining to a total mission duration of around 8 months. He went on to praise Boeing for their cooperation and help throughout the decision process.
As far as how they came to the decision, Ken Bowersox, the associate administrator at NASA said, “Our intent today was to have the first part of a flight readiness review. The goal of that review was to come up with a NASA recommendation on whether we should proceed with the crew flight test, either crewed or uncrewed. Our Boeing partners told us that they would be able to execute either option and they thought the call belonged to NASA because of our wider view of all the risks involved. We conducted a poll, all of the organizations on the polling sheet indicated that they thought we should proceed uncrewed with the flight test” he said.
This statement makes it clear how the agency came to its decision and the strong lean toward using SpaceX and Dragon rather than Starliner. In addition to these comments, we heard from Steve Stich who as the NASA commercial crew program manager, has been very busy over the last few months.
He was quoted saying, “It’s been a long summer, its been a long summer for our team. We are dealing with a very complex issue with the thrusters, it’s challenging to predict, it’s challenging to predict the temperatures we’ll see. And so that’s why it’s been tough and it’s taken time ever since we docked back on June 6th to get to this point.”
He went on to say, “Determining the position to bring Starliner back uncrewed was very difficult for me personally. We’re all committed to the mission which we started out which was to bring Butch and Suni back. But as we got more and more data over the summer, and understood the uncertainty of that data, it became very clear to us that the best course of action was to return Starliner uncrewed.”
He then went more in-depth saying, “You know, the bottom line relative to bringing Starliner back is it was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters. 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. But when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for thruster failures with a crew on board, and then getting into this very tight sequence of finishing the deorbit burn which puts the vehicle on entry and then immediately maneuvering from that to a sep sequence to separate the service module and crew module, it was just too much risk for the crew so we decided to pursue the uncrewed option” he said.
In terms of what to expect in the future, NASA is currently planning to undock Starliner around early September, or in just a few weeks. However, before that point, they have to make some alterations and preparations considering the change in plans. Stich commented, “The path forward now is to, as Ken said, work toward the flight readiness review part 2. What we review now, we know the scope of the mission, we know it’s an uncrewed test flight, we’re changing the separation sequence that we planned, and we’ll review those aspects at the readiness review.”
“We’re going to go with the simplified separation technique to get away from the station a little more quickly. We’ll get to the deorbit burn and execute that nominally. We have a good setup in terms of the opportunities into the White Sands Space Harbor for a number of opportunities in September. We’ll land or undock in early September, and then we have a lot of work to do relative to the rest of the mission. Butch and Suni stay on the space station for some time and may return on Crew 9. We’re configuring that spacecraft with a couple extra, or two different seats. So we’ll have two crew members on that vehicle and then we’ll have it ready to bring Butch and Suni home.
“We also have to work to reconfigure the crew 8 vehicle. When Starliner undocks, it will undock first and then the Crew 8 vehicle will serve as the lifeboat for Butch and Suni. We have a configuration on the cargo pallet that we’ll put in place. So again we’ll get Calypso (The Starliner currently docked) home when ready to do so and we’re gonna take our time taking the steps along the way. We’ll have an important simulation ahead of that flight readiness review with the flight control team” he said. It’s important to point out that the team has been preparing for the last few years for a crewed undocking of Starliner. This new change now adds some additional factors that need to be accounted for which will take place over the next few weeks and even months.
When asked during the news conference about the mood in the room Steve Stich said, “I think everybody is professional and did their jobs but there is a sense of not accomplishing the mission that we set out to do. And even for myself personally that is a hard thing to go through, it’s a little bit of a situation of loss and feeling like you lost something. In the ultimate long-term view, we haven’t lost anything as Boeing is committed to finding the solution and flying Starliner again. But I probably can’t express in words what it’s like when you commit to a mission, you work on a mission so long, and then we make a fairly dramatic change which we have not done in human spaceflight in a long time. So there’s a feeling of loss and we’ll work with our team to make sure we talk about that and we move forward from here, cause we need this team to focus not only on returning Starliner safely, but we have a Crew 8 mission to return and reconfigure, we have a crew 9 launch coming up as well and we need to focus on all those things” he said.
In another question regarding flight risk and the decision, Ken Bowersox said, “If you look at it, we knew going in that the crewed flight test was probably a little higher risk than a typical rotation with Dragon where we’ve flown multiple flights, that’s why we called it a flight test. We had the issues coming uphill and that raised our risk level and our uncertainty in how much more risk there was. Any time you change from your nominal plan that you spent years developing you increase risk on the other side” he said. Here he’s referring to risks like the crew not trying on suits on the ground for Dragon which also raises the risk on that side. Still, they believe it’s the better option to go with Dragon and have the crew extend their mission.
In one final question I want to highlight, the NASA Administrator was asked how certain he was that Boeing would ever launch Starliner with crew aboard it again, his answer was 100%. He went on list reasons, saying, “the extensive cooperative working relationship between NASA and Boeing, of finding the problem but knowing that the uncertainties are what held up the crew getting on Starliner to go home. A certainty on my part that we will find out the uncertainty and Boeing’s willingness to carry through on this program” he said. While NASA believes the future outlook for the Starliner program is promising, it doesn’t change the fact that right now the program is not in a good position. It’s going to take a lot of time and work before another Staliner launches with humans aboard. It also needs to complete an uncrewed reentry, something we can expect to see in a few weeks.
Looking at the spacecraft’s history, this recent development only joins a list of other complications. Both of the first two uncrewed flight tests had at least one issue, some being more significant than the others. For example, one the first flight test to the ISS, an 11-hour offset in the mission clock of Starliner caused the spacecraft to compute that “it was in an orbital insertion burn”, when it was not. This caused the attitude control thrusters to consume more fuel than planned. Consequently, this ended up stopping the spacecraft from being able to dock to the ISS at all. On the second uncrewed flight test, two Orbital Maneuvering and Attitude Control System (OMACS) thrusters failed during the orbital insertion burn, but the spacecraft was able to compensate using the remaining OMACS thrusters with the addition of the Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters. Now on the third flight and first crewed mission, the vehicle had to return uncrewed.
Conclusion
After months of testing and back and forth, NASA officially decided that the Starliner crew should return on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. With this now in place, Starliner will return uncrewed early next month and Butch and Suni will stay on the station until early next year before leaving on a Dragon.