A little more than a day after launching into space, Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft flew up to the International Space Station and docked with the orbiting laboratory on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The journey through space was not always easy. In the immediate hours after launch on Wednesday, the spacecraft was beset by two helium leaks in its propulsion system. Then, on Thursday, several of Starliner\u2019s spacecraft thrusters went offline for a time. Far more often than originally planned, spacecraft commander Butch Wilmore had to take manual control of Starliner while engineers on the ground worked on these and other issues.<\/p>\n
However, at 1:34 pm ET on Thursday, Wilmore and the mission\u2019s other crew member, Suni Williams, successfully docked with the space station. A couple of hours later, they floated through the hatch, making a triumphant entry onto the station\u2014and making history.<\/p>\n
With Thursday\u2019s success, Boeing became only the second private company to build and fly a human orbital spacecraft, joining an elite club of just three nations: Russia, the United States, and China, alongside SpaceX. For the first time in history, three different crewed vehicles, Starliner, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon, and Russia\u2019s Soyuz, were all simultaneously docked at the station.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe accomplished a lot, and really more than expected,\u201d said Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, during a post-docking news conference. \u201cWe just had an outstanding day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Wednesday\u2019s launch, Boeing and NASA were already managing a helium leak in one of the eight manifolds that pressurize Starliner\u2019s propulsion system. However, several hours after launch, two more leaks were discovered. Then, another one was found after Starliner reached the space station.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
During the news conference, officials were at pains to explain that Starliner still had a considerable excess of helium on board and that they were not concerned about these issues affecting Starliner\u2019s flight back to Earth. However, they acknowledged that these leaks appeared to be a more systemic problem than originally believed.<\/p>\n
NASA and Boeing engineers, prior to launch, said the initial leak was likely due to a defective gasket and that changing a seal would fix it. Boeing opted not to do this because it would have delayed the launch for several weeks, and they worked to convince NASA it was a manageable issue.<\/p>\n
Now, with four separate leaks, Nappi acknowledged that Boeing may not fully understand the root cause of the problem. \u201cThey\u2019re very similar in the way that they\u2019re behaving, so there\u2019s a good reason to believe that they may be similar,\u201d he said Thursday. The company has already begun investigating the issue with similar hardware on the ground.<\/p>\n
The flight\u2019s other significant problem developed on Thursday, just hours before Starliner was due to dock at the station. This was the failure of five of the vehicle\u2019s 28 reaction-control system thrusters at certain times. These small thrusters are used for fine pointing and maneuvering, especially close to the space station.<\/p>\n
During a troubleshooting process, in which the thrusters were essentially reset and fired again, four of the five thrusters came back online. This gave NASA confidence to allow Starliner to approach and ultimately dock with the space station.<\/p>\n
However, this is now the second consecutive mission in which a subset of these small thrusters failed to operate during a Starliner flight. During the vehicle\u2019s previous mission, Orbital Flight Test-2 in May 2022, some of these same thrusters failed to operate when called upon during the approach to the station. Although two small software fixes were applied after that flight, they appear not to have addressed the issue.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019re missing something fundamental that\u2019s going on inside the thrusters,\u201d said Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager on Thursday. However, he and Nappi also said they believed that the failure of the thrusters was likely due to a \u201cdata issue\u201d rather than the thruster hardware or software. <\/p>\n
Stich declined to speculate about how long it would take to study and resolve the thruster issue as part of the certification process necessary to clear Starliner for operational crewed missions to the International Space Station. Boeing is contracted to fly six of these missions, each carrying four astronauts for six-month increments on the station between now and 2030.<\/p>\n
NASA and Boeing want to spend the next couple of days assessing data collected during Starliner\u2019s flight to the station to determine whether any additional tests are needed before Starliner undocks and returns to Earth with Wilmore and Williams. This could happen as soon as June 14 but could also be delayed, Stich said.<\/p>\n
Undocking, initiating a de-orbit burn, and surviving reentry through Earth\u2019s atmosphere will be one of the most challenging parts of the Starliner mission. Two sources told Ars on Thursday evening that NASA had a lot of issues to work through before Starliner would be cleared to fly home. Both helium supplies and the reaction-control thrusters are necessary for a successful departure from the station and entry into Earth\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n
However, the Boeing official speaking to reporters on Thursday, Nappi, sought to downplay the severity of the issues confronted by Starliner and its flight controllers. There are two primary problems, he said, the helium leak and the intermittent thruster problems.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose are pretty small, really, issues to deal with,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ll figure them out for the next mission. I don\u2019t see these as significant at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A little more than a day after launching into space, Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft flew up to the International Space Station and docked with the orbiting laboratory on Thursday. The journey through space was not always easy. In the immediate hours after launch on Wednesday, the spacecraft was beset by two helium leaks in its propulsion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[670,21,1306],"class_list":["post-45138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-boeing","tag-space","tag-starliner"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}