On June 5, 2024, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams boarded the Boeing Starliner and launched into space. They are the first crew to use this new spacecraft. The plan was to dock with the International Space Station and return to Earth after about two weeks.
More than two months have now passed and the crew is still stuck on the ISS. There is no concrete plan for how they will get home.
During preparations for docking with the ISS, some helium leaks were discovered on the Starliner, but they were not severe enough to prevent docking. After docking was secured, more leaks were discovered.
Boeing attempted to diagnose the problem on a spare engine on Earth. Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said in an update about a month after the ordeal began:
“We have collected an incredible amount of data about the engine that could help us better understand what is happening in flight. Next, our team has begun disassembling and inspecting the engine, which will provide us with additional insights as we analyze the results and evaluate next steps.”
They believe the helium leaks are causing the Starliner’s engines to overheat. This would obviously affect the spacecraft’s ability to bring the crew home safely. Stich explained:
“On this flight, we found that we fired the engines more frequently than we expected, and I would say more frequently. When I say frequently, I mean how close you fire a single engine pulse after the next pulse of that engine. What we’re trying to do at White Sands is to reproduce exactly what those pulses were that those engines saw, and then understand the heating effects of those pulses, and then make sure those pulses don’t have unintended consequences.”
In early August, NASA confirmed that it had reached out to SpaceX and asked them to find a way to bring the astronauts home if they could not safely use the Starliner spacecraft.
SpaceX has sent many missions to the International Space Station in the past and could undoubtedly repeat that in this case. While there are no concrete plans yet, it looks like if NASA chooses SpaceX, it will simply launch its next mission using its Crew Dragon spacecraft with two empty seats. When the mission is complete, Wilmore and Williams will be brought home as part of the Crew Dragon.
While that sounds like a good idea, NASA has already postponed the next SpaceX mission until September 24. If that mission were to proceed as planned, it would not return to Earth until February 2025, which would mean Wilmore and Williams’ two-week mission would be extended by 8 months.
If it is decided that Starliner cannot be used to bring the astronauts home, the spacecraft will be detached from the ISS and fly back to Earth on its own. There it will splash down in the ocean and hopefully be recovered and further studied.
This whole ordeal sounds like a modern-day introduction to Gilligan’s Island. Hopefully these astronauts are better trained.
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