The first astronaut on board a commercial space taxi service: Can Boeing and NASA remove the tongue of the astrophysics from the Starliner mission?
Only three of Boeing’s potential operational Starliner missions have been given “Authority To Proceed” by NASA. In contracting terminology, this is a decision point where a customer places a firm order for a deliverable. NASA told the public that it awards task orders around two to three years prior to a mission’s launch.
Officially, NASA has penciled in Starliner’s first operational mission for August 2025. The agency set the schedule before realizing that Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne would need to redesign seals and parts of their propulsion system.
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NASA gave less money to be used for a commercial space taxi service, yet still managed to develop a vehicle that has been taking astronauts to and from the station for years.
Boeing and NASA will analyze the thrusters to see if modifying the craft or how it’s flown could keep them from overheating in the future.
After Starliner returned to Earth, mission managers put the astronauts through their paces and they were able to make a safe landing in New Mexico.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard Starliner on June 5, closed the spacecraft’s hatch Thursday in preparation for departure Friday. But it wasn’t what they envisioned when they left Earth on Starliner three months ago. The front door to Starliners was put in place from the space station’s side of the docking port.
When the gumdrop-shaped space capsule plummeted down to Earth, it only carried cargo and its first crew remained safe on the space station.
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Leaving them there “was a tough decision to make. The program manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program told reporters that deciding whether to be uncrewed was hard.
There was enough uncertainty about how the swerving would perform that NASA preferred to keep a low profile. The space agency is still haunted by the loss of the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger.
After Starliners launched on June 5, Boeing and NASA said their test flight would last about eight days.
Instead, the mission stretched out for weeks as Boeing and NASA workers tried to understand why some thrusters had failed as Starliner approached the station.
NASA puts astronauts through training on the space station since they know this is a test flight, and they are helping out with chores. “We had them well prepared to move into this role.”
NASA had to make some changes to their plan so that two seats would be free in that SpaceX capsule.
In case there is an emergency where the space station needs to be evacuated before the capsule arrives, they had to jerry-rig two extra seats in a different spaceship that was currently docked there.
The purpose of the commercial crew program was to give the industry the chance to take over the job of ferrying astronauts and cargo so that NASA could focus on its next goal of returning to the moon.