Starliner Collapse: NASA Astronauts Stuck on ISS

In fact, Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams were supposed to stay on the ISS for only ten days. That could now turn into nine months. Problems with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft are to blame.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been on the International Space Station (ISS) since June 6. Until now, NASA and Boeing have downplayed the problems with their Starliner spacecraft, but now NASA is getting serious: There is a chance that Wilmore and Williams will not return in the Starliner.

Problems on the first trip

In fact, the two were “just” the test crew for the first spaceflight of Boeing’s newly developed Starliner. But that caused problems during the outbound flight to the International Space Station. When docking with the station, five of the 28 engines failed. The maneuver was only successful on the second attempt.

Astronauts stuck on the International Space Station

Instead of a return trip with Starliner, NASA is now proposing to send a half-empty spacecraft to the International Space Station. The next flight to the ISS is scheduled for late September.

If there were only two people on board instead of four, there would still be two seats available for Wilmore and Williams to occupy on the return trip to Earth. “We could put them back on another spacecraft,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s deputy director of space operations.

What’s particularly awkward for Boeing is that it’s rival Space-X’s Crew Dragon that will return Wilmore and Williams to Earth. In that case, the Starliner would have to undock from the ISS before the half-empty Crew Dragon could take off and return without a crew.

Otherwise, Wilmore and Williams’ return flight wouldn’t be able to undock from the ISS until February or March 2025 at the earliest. Instead of 10 days, the first Starliner crew’s stay at the ISS would have lasted at least nine months.

The cause of the Starliner engine failure remains unclear.

Despite all the tests conducted on identical engines in laboratories and despite all the checks conducted on the Starliner spacecraft that docked at the International Space Station weeks ago, no clear cause for the failure of the engines has been found.

One assumption is that engines tend to overheat. Therefore, the plastic parts will bend so that their paint will peel off, and the peeling off chips will then impair the function of the engines.

But not all experts see this as the critical series of errors. This is also because the Starliner’s faulty engines suddenly showed almost full power again during a test while the spacecraft was docking with the International Space Station. No one can currently explain why this spontaneous self-healing occurred.

NASA wants to play it safe.

While Boeing engineers are convinced the astronauts can safely return to Earth on the Starliner, NASA is currently saying: at most in an emergency. There is a lot of uncertainty about exactly where the problem lies.

If the assembled experts do not reach a common assessment of the safety of Boeing’s spacecraft, the decision on how to proceed will be up to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. One can assume that he will then choose the safe option.

In 1986, Nelson was scheduled to fly as an astronaut on the Space Shuttle Challenger, which exploded shortly after launch because NASA allowed the shuttle to fly despite warnings from engineers. All seven crew members were killed. It was a coincidence that astronaut and current NASA chief Nelson had been rebooked on a previous shuttle flight.

So Bill Nelson is not expected to allow the Starliner, which is suffering from unexplained engine problems, to return to Earth today.

commercial spaceships

The current situation also illustrates exactly why NASA decided to develop many spacecraft by commercial providers like Space-X and Boeing. After the Space Shuttle program ended, American astronauts had no choice but to fly into space in Russian Soyuz capsules.

A separate spacecraft, and ideally at least one more, had to be recovered in order to create redundancy for space travel. Just two spacecraft of the same type would not be enough, as problems with rockets or space capsules often resulted in all models of the defective type being grounded until the problems were identified and fixed.

So even if they had one available, NASA wouldn’t fly Wilmore and Williams on a second Starliner. The first Crew Dragon space launch in 2020 was widely celebrated as a kind of “Launch America” return to space for the United States.

With Crew Dragon and Starliner, NASA now has two different spacecraft that can replace each other in the event of a problem — as could now be the case if Crew Dragon picks up stranded Starliner astronauts from the International Space Station.