NASA-TV
After weeks of speculation, NASA finally made it official on Saturday: Two astronauts who flew to the International Space Station in June on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will not return home on that vehicle. Instead, the agency has asked SpaceX to use its Crew Dragon spacecraft to fly astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth.
“NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the start of a press conference Saturday afternoon at the Johnson Space Center.
In a sign of the magnitude of the agency's decision, both Nelson and NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy attended a flight readiness review meeting held in Houston on Saturday. During that gathering of the agency's senior officials, an informal “go/no go” poll was conducted. Those in attendance voted unanimously that Wilmore and Williams should return to Earth on Crew Dragon. The official recommendation from the Commercial Crew Program was the same, and Nelson accepted it.
Therefore, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will undock from the station early next month – the tentative date is September 6, according to one source – and attempt to return to Earth autonomously, landing in a desert in the southwestern United States.
Then, no earlier than September 24, a Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying two astronauts (NASA has not yet named the two crew members) will launch to the space station, leaving two seats open. Wilmore and Williams will join these two Crew 9 astronauts for their previously planned six-month stay on the space station. All four will then return to Earth on the Crew Dragon vehicle.
Saturday's announcement has major implications for Boeing, which joined NASA's Commercial Crew Program more than a decade ago and lent legitimacy to NASA's efforts to pay private companies to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. The company's failure — and despite NASA officials' praise during Saturday's press conference, this Starliner mission is a failure — will affect Boeing's future in spaceflight. Ars will have more on Starliner's path forward later today.
I could never get used to engine problems
For weeks after Starliner's arrival at the space station in early June, Boeing and NASA officials expressed confidence in the spacecraft's ability to fly Wilmore and Williams home. They said they just needed to collect a little more data on the performance of the vehicle's reaction control system thrusters. Five of the 28 small thrusters that control Starliner failed during the trip to the space station.
Boeing and NASA engineers tested the performance of these engines in July at a facility in White Sands, New Mexico. At first, engineers were excited to be able to replicate the failures observed during the Starliner's transport to the space station. (Replicating failures is a critical step in understanding the root cause of a hardware problem.)
However, what NASA found after dismantling the defective engines was worrying, said NASA Commercial Crew Program director Steve Stich.
“I would say the White Sands tests surprised us,” Stich said Saturday. “It was this piece of Teflon that swells up and gets into the flow path and prevents the oxidizer from getting into the engine like it should. That's what caused the thrust degradation. When we saw that, I think everything changed a little bit for us.”
When NASA presented this finding to the engine manufacturer Aerojet Rocketdyne, the company said that this phenomenon had never been observed before. At this point, the agency's engineers began to believe that it might not be possible to identify the root cause of the problem in time and understand the physics sufficiently to be sure that the engine problem would not occur when the Starliner returned to Earth.
Thank you for flying with SpaceX
The result of this uncertainty is that NASA will now turn to the other commercial crew provider, SpaceX. This is not a happy outcome for Boeing, which a decade ago viewed SpaceX with suspicion and considered it a sort of space cowboy. I have followed the space industry closely for the past 15 years, and for most of that time, Boeing was viewed by much of the industry as the blue blood of spaceflight, while SpaceX was the company that would kill astronauts due to its alleged recklessness.
Now the space agency SpaceX is de facto asking for the rescue of the Boeing astronauts who are currently on the International Space Station.
It wouldn't be the first time SpaceX has helped out a rival recently. Over the past two years, SpaceX has launched satellites for a competitor in the low-Earth internet, OneWeb, after the Russian space program put pressure on the company. It launched Europe's sovereign Galileo satellites after delays to the Ariane 6 rocket. And it has made multiple launches of the Cygnus spacecraft, built by NASA's other space station cargo provider, Northrop Grumman. Now SpaceX will help Boeing, a competitor in the crew-carrying space.
After Saturday's press conference, I asked Jim Free, NASA's top official, what he thought about the once-upstart SpaceX helping to support the rest of the Western space community. After all, without SpaceX, NASA would have no way to get crew or cargo to the International Space Station.
“They fly a lot and they're successful,” Free said. “And, you know, when they have a problem, they find a way to recover, like with the second stage problem. We had planned to have two vendors bringing the crew to the station to have options, and they gave us that option. Conversely, Boeing could have been there, and we'd still be facing the same problem if they had a systemic Dragon problem. Boeing would have to bring us back. But I can't argue with how much they flew, that's for sure, and what they flew.”