By: Ethan Chau

At the start of June, two brave astronauts traveled to the International Space Station to complete a test flight for Boeing’s spacecraft, Starliner. However, their return to Earth was delayed after NASA and Boeing engineers discovered an issue with five of the Starliner’s thrusters.

With the two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, temporarily stuck on the I.S.S., officials like Mark Nappi, the program manager at Boeing for Starliner, and Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, are making it clear that they are not stranded, nor trapped on the station. During a news conference on Friday, Mark Nappi claimed that the crew wasn’t in danger.

Moreover, Steve Stich stepped in and said, “I want to make it very clear that Butch and Suni are not stranded in space.”

Currently, four out of the five defective boosters are functioning, and the fifth won’t be used on the trip to Earth. Mission managers believe the Starliner can unload from the space station and take Wilmore and Williams back home, but the cause of the malfunction remains unknown.

Mission managers have learned from the past disasters to be cautious when something wasn’t right, such as the loss of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles. Because of the issues with Starliner’s thrusters, engineers have decided to run ground tests at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility next week in New Mexico. They’ll use thrusters that replicate the ones the Starliner used. Mr. Stich estimates that these tests will take a couple of weeks to complete, and he believes that it will allow officials at NASA and Boeing to understand thruster performance. He also thinks it could ensure that everything seen on the orbit has been normal.

At the moment, the Starliner incident isn’t NASA’s only problem. Monday, the government agency called off a spacewalk when water started leaking out of an umbilical cord while astronauts were in the airlock. However, like the Starliner’s damaged thrusters, engineers are confused about how the water leak happened.

Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/science/boeing-starliner-nasa-astronauts.html