Heads of NASA and Boeing commercial crew efforts held a teleconference on Wednesday to discuss the ongoing Crew Flight Test of the Starliner capsule.
The event featured NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich and Boeing Commercial Crew Program Vice President and Program Manager Mark Nappi.
Stich said that Hurricane Beryl proved to be a bit of a hiccup — interrupting some in Texas from their work in the flight test, including him — and reported there was not much other “big news” to discuss Wednesday.
“What we’re doing is not unusual for a new spacecraft,” he said. “(...) Now that we have the ability to power the spacecraft from ISS, we have a nice opportunity to almost use the International Space Station as a temporary hangar to take our time and understand the spacecraft before we undock and return. We don’t have a lot of big news to talk about today, but we wanted to spend a little time to update you on the testing and the work that’s going on.”
Boeing’s Starliner launched June 5 with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board for a week-long stay at the International Space Station. Since then, three potential landing dates have been called off and the flight home remains on hold.
NASA and Boeing are still evaluating Starliner’s propulsion system, as well as five helium leaks in the spacecraft’s service module, according to a statement dated Monday. Upon completion of ground testing and associated data analysis, an agency-level review will be conducted ahead of Starliner’s return to Earth, the statement reads.
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For one, NASA has sought more time to study problems in Starliner’s propulsion system while the capsule is still at the space station because the system is designed to separate from the capsule and burn up upon reentry. As far as the helium — which is used to pressurize the fuel lines of the propulsion system — mission managers say there’s enough left.
“We don’t understand these issues well enough to fix them permanently, and the only way that we can do that is take the time in this unique environment and go and get more data, run more tests,” Nappi said at a teleconference in June.
According to Stich, Wilmore and Williams have proven it’s possible to power up Starliner, close the hatch and have it ready to go in case of an emergency at the space station, making note of how the capsule was used as a safe haven on June 26 when there was a satellite breakup.
“I want to make it clear — Butch and Suni are not stranded in space,” Stich said during the teleconference. “Our plan is to continue to return them on Starliner and return them home at the right time. We’ll have a lot more work to do to get there for the final return, but they’re safe on the space station.”
Wednesday, Stich expounded on the concept and viability of Starliner’s potential role in an emergency situation, assuring listeners the capsule was ready to go despite the standard review processes it’s otherwise scheduled to undergo.
“Starliner is go to return in an emergency. If the crew needed to return at any point in time, it’s go for return for any kind of emergency on board the station. We’re going to work methodically through our process, including a return flight readiness review with the agency before we get the go to proceed toward undocking and landing. This is a very standard process which we use for all of our Dragon missions. We used that for Demo-2 and we use it for every single Dragon mission that we’re going to go fly, including the one coming up,” Stich said.
Nappi on Wednesday said that remaining engineering tasks for Starliner are scheduled to be completed by the end of the week, remarking too that Hurricane Beryl was an unplanned event that impacted resources in Houston for a short while. What was expected from the get-go, however, was that the crewed flight test would be a learning experience, he said.
“We knew that there’d be some learning from this flight test. We’ve learned a great deal from how the hardware works, how our processes work and how we can improve,” Nappi said. “(...) All this learning has been pretty valuable, and we’ve made some adjustments, and we’ll continue to make more after we land.”
Listen to Wednesday’s teleconference again in the video player below or by clicking here.
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