NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced today that U.S. astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore have spent more than 80 years aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The queen will return on the SpaceX Crew-9 mission in February next year.
“As we got more and more data over the summer and understood the uncertainties in that data, it became very clear that the best course of action was to return Starliner unmanned,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. He said NASA found “there was too much uncertainty in the thruster predictions.”
“If we had a way to actually predict what the thrusters would do during undocking, deorbit burn and separation, I think we would take a different course of action. But when we look at the data and consider the possibility of thruster failure with the crew on board … It was too risky for the crew, so we decided to do an unmanned test flight.
In response to a press question about how NASA could trust Boeing again, NASA Associate Administrator Ken Bowersox said: “We had a lot of intense discussions, right? Because the call was so close, there was a lot of investment in both options. Emotionally, that gives you a healthy discussion. But after that, you have to do some work to keep your team together, right?
“I acknowledge we still have some work to do. That’s natural when you make tough decisions.” Bowersox said NASA remains “committed to working with Boeing.”
“Boeing has done a great job building the model,” Stich said. “The question is, ‘Is this model good enough to predict crew performance?’ That’s where it ends, I would say, it’s close. Very close; it’s just Depends on how you assess the risk. Our approach to crews is slightly different than Boeing’s approach.
As access to spacecraft docked to the International Space Station is restricted, tests at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility have shown that deformed Teflon seals may be one of the reasons for the failure of the spacecraft’s thrusters. But without conclusive answers, NASA awaits a decision on whether to send astronauts back to Earth on Starliner or work with SpaceX to bring them back early next year aboard the Crew-9 mission, which is scheduled to launch in late September. to the International Space Station.
