NASA plans to complete two reviews before deciding whether astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams can leave the International Space Station before 2025.
The space agency will conduct a Program Control Board review and an Agency Flight Readiness Review before determining how Wilmore and Williams will return to Earth, either on the Boeing-built Starliner spacecraft that they rode up with or in two empty seats on the SpaceX Dragon capsule to be used in the upcoming Crew-9 mission, the latter set to return as late as February 2025.
The decision is expected to be made by the end of August, according to NASA.
Wilmore and Williams launched from Florida to the International Space Station on June 5 for what was to be a week-long stay. Multiple landing dates have since been called off as NASA and Boeing evaluate the capsule’s propulsion system; at least five instances of leaking helium have been noted, which is used to pressurize the propulsion system’s fuel lines.
“The major piece of analysis that we’re waiting for is a kind of a detailed 3D model of the system inside the valve to see if we can model the effects. That’ll feed into the program board and discussion,” Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said earlier this month. “They’ll go through all the data they’ve gotten so far and then the program will make a recommendation. Our tech authorities, some of the other organizations may want to have their own reviews if they’re not satisfied with the work at the control board, and then that would bring a recommendation from the control board forward to that management-level review.”
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At a teleconference July 10, NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich and Boeing Commercial Crew Program Vice President and Program Manager Mark Nappi said that Starliner’s problem-plagued propulsion system is designed to detach from Starliner and burn up upon reentry, stressing that mission managers thus have had this one chance to study it in the hard-to-reach environment and are being advantageous in keeping the capsule attached to the space station in order to do more testing.
NASA and Boeing leadership have otherwise repeatedly assured that Wilmore and Williams are safe and could theoretically leave at any time.
“The main thing we’re looking at is the propulsion system and the kind of information we’re getting is there’s a lot of folks out there that have worked with similar thrusters and have seen similar issues, and so we’ve gotten feedback on what we’re seeing and a lot of it is confirming what we thought was causing the signatures that we were observing on orbit,” Bowersox said on Aug. 14. “It’s really tough when you don’t have the actual hardware to look at, right, when it’s up in space. So we brought in folks from our robotic space flight community at Glenn and at the Goddard Space Flight Center and JPL, they’re used to analyzing propulsion systems when spacecraft are millions of miles away and they provided some useful input to us.”
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