Astronauts stranded in space due to multiple issues with Boeing's Starliner — and the window for a return flight is closing

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Astronauts stranded in space due to multiple issues with Boeing's Starliner — and the window for a return flight is closing​

Two NASA astronauts who rode to orbit on Boeing's Starliner are currently stranded in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after engineers discovered numerous issues with the Boeing spacecraft. Teams on the ground are now racing to assess Starliner's status.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were originally scheduled to return to Earth on June 13 after a week on the ISS, but their stay has been extended for a second time due to the ongoing issues. The astronauts will now return home no sooner than June 26th, according to NASA.



After years of delays, Boeing's Starliner capsule successfully blasted offon its inaugural crewed flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. EDT on June 5. But during the 25-hour flight, engineers discovered five separate helium leaks to the spacecraft's thruster system.

Now, to give engineers time to troubleshoot the faults, NASA has announced it will push back the perilous return flight, extending the crew's stay on the space station to at least three weeks.

"We've learned that our helium system is not performing as designed," Mark Nappi, Boeing's Starliner program manager, said at a news conference on June 18. "Albeit manageable, it's still not working like we designed it. So we've got to go figure that out."

The return module of the Starliner spacecraft is currently docked to the ISS's Harmony module as NASA and Boeing engineers assess the vital hardware issues aboard the vessel, including five helium leaks to the system that pressurizes the spacecraft's propulsion system, and five thruster failures to its reaction-control system.

After powering the thrusters up on June 15, engineers found that most of these issues appeared to be at least partially resolved, but their exact causes remain unknown.

However, the Harmony module's limited fuel means Starliner can only stay docked for 45 days, so the window for a safe return flight is narrowing.

The issues are the latest in a long list of setbacks and headaches for Boeing's spacecraft. The company built the Starliner capsule as a part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a partnership between the agency and private companies to ferry astronauts into low Earth orbit following the retirement of NASA's space shuttles in 2011. SpaceX's Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has racked up 12 crewed flights since it began operating in 2020.

But Starliner's first uncrewed test flight in 2019 was scuppered by a software fault that placed it in the wrong orbit, and a second attempt was held back by issues with a fuel valve. After more reviews last year, the company had to fix issues with the capsule's parachutes and remove around a mile (1.6 kilometers) of tape that was found to be flammable.

The current mission is Boeing's third attempt to take the crew to the ISS. The previous two were scrubbed by a vibrating oxygen valve on the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket on which Starliner was mounted (and which was developed by Lockheed Martin) and a computer glitch in a ground launch sequencer, respectively.

 

[Not A Bunny]

Probably boils down to bureaucratic paralysis for why it's taking until February to get them back to Earth, but I cannot help thinking NASA is still desperately trying to give Boeing a chance to correct their clusterfuck and avoid giving SpaceX further legitimacy.

Stranding two people in space for months is something any normal organization would treat as an emergency worthy of assembling a rescue party, even if it's one headed by Musk.

I have a rant that could last at least a couple of hours about this very problem.

In short: everyone who goes around wearing a NASA t-shirt probably wouldn't if they gave about five seconds' thought about the fact that NASA hasn't accomplished fuck all in terms of advancing human exploration of space. We have people in space, right now, but the fact that it's been decades and we haven't even been on the moon again says a metric fuckton about what kind of administration (ahem) that NASA is under as a government entity.

The Government can't get shit done because they've handed the responsibility of knowing shit to contractors. Government people are spoiled, sad little trolls that play solitaire all day long but because they have a clearance, it means they're allowed to think they know something. Meanwhile, we get further and further from people working on projects thinking there are actual end users that will look at something produced by someone in a cushy office half a world away (or in this case, on the other side of the fucking atmosphere) and wondering what the hell those people were thinking when they built it, and anyone with any good intentions but no actual authority or power (because those poor souls are under the delusion that they can change the whole system from their cubicle, and by the time they actually get the power to do something, they'll be so fucking tired of the system, that they'll sign for just about anything, including what some idiot congresscritter thinks will make them look good because they're too old to fight the good fight anymore, or they'll have been so corrupted that they would have never done the good thing that 20-something-them would have done, because they're so afraid it would torpedo their comfortable career).

Now that I'm done telling on myself, the fun thing in all of this is they had to go to Musk. I fucking love that. I fucking love that all this time they spent trying to make him into an illegitimate and incompetent shit-stirrer, they actually have to fucking admit that he can do something more useful than their incestuous little cronies. I haven't been this sexually gratified since Biden having to own up that holes at the border were a fucking catastrophic problem in progress.

 

[Toolbox]

Can they not decouple this thing via spacewalk? Just let it burn up at this point.

Boeing STILL wants to recoup their investment in it, and that means attempting to recover it. Despite EVERYTHING they still think the program is recoverable.

 

[AN/ALR56]

Boeing STILL wants to recoup their investment in it, and that means attempting to recover it. Despite EVERYTHING they still think the program is recoverable.

They have no fucking choice.
If starliner dies, it's the final nail in their coffin, it's another round of Congressional hearings, it's the DoD never giving Boeing any good contracts, ever.
Honestly? They should be taken over by the government like GM was in 08, clear house, put a engineer back in the seat, fire all diversity and pajeet hires.
Won't happen, but that's what's going to be needed.

I don't see boeing going, it's a gigantic high paying job anchor for the American economy, if it goes it means the aerospace industry in america will never recover.

 

[AllieKat]

They have no fucking choice.
If starliner dies, it's the final nail in their coffin, it's another round of Congressional hearings, it's the DoD never giving Boeing any good contracts, ever.
Honestly? They should be taken over by the government like GM was in 08, clear house, put a engineer back in the seat, fire all diversity and pajeet hires.
Won't happen, but that's what's going to be needed.

I don't see boeing going, it's a gigantic high paying job anchor for the American economy, if it goes it means the aerospace industry in america will never recover.

Someone told me this and it came off as a schizo boomer theory, but what if the Chinese are behind the downfall of Boeing to replace them in the commercial aerospace sphere?

 

[AN/ALR56]

Someone told me this and it came off as a schizo boomer theory, but what if the Chinese are behind the downfall of Boeing to replace them in the commercial aerospace sphere?

Nah, It's all due to management since 1997.
Clinton forced McDonell Douglas to merge with boeing after a string of failures.
McDonell started the "fast and cheap" method, they always re-released modernized planes, and if they started new projects, they released the planes before they were actually finished.
DC-10 was the 787 of the 70s, a good plane that was released early to get the drop on Lockheed and Boeing, it started crashing, never got a reputation for safety or being easy to fly (although it was fun to fly in a "I love challenge way")
MD-11 was the 737 max of the 1990s, a old plane with modernized engines desperately attempting to get the drop on Boeing and Airbus (who was starting to quickly grow into the giant that it is now), they couldn't fund development of a new more efficient wing, so they get desperate to lower drag, they cut down the horizontal stabilizer by 1/3, and add a computer system to make thousands of pitch correction a second to compensate, imagine having a car with front wheel too small to safely drive in a highway without the wheels going left or right like a bad shopping cart, but the car has a boosted power steering to make it feel like it has proper steering.

Again, it's a dud, the plane handles like a fighter jet and you don't want a comercial airliner to handle like one, you want something reliable and safe, you don't want twitchy controls when you have passengers and cargo and a bus isn't supposed to do sharp turns anyway.

Then Boeing gets it right with the 777, it's 4 years late, but no one cares, they test the shit out of it, it's perfect, a quantum leap in aviation, modern, safe, economical, it's a bmw 7 series vs a 1980s Cadillac.

It never crashed due to design flaws or being hard to fly, only to being shot down by missiles or having bad pilots or going Bermuda triangle.
It's a success, it can't be built fast enough.

It's no coincidence the last decent Boeing civilian or military plane first flew 3 years before the merger and nothing since 1997 has been a smooth launch.

 

[The best and greatest]

Now that I'm done telling on myself, the fun thing in all of this is they had to go to Musk. I fucking love that. I fucking love that all this time they spent trying to make him into an illegitimate and incompetent shit-stirrer, they actually have to fucking admit that he can do something more useful than their incestuous little cronies. I haven't been this sexually gratified since Biden having to own up that holes at the border were a fucking catastrophic problem in progress.

The biggest problem NASA has relates to this; the best people no longer work at NASA, they work private sector now.
NASA made sense when space was purely the realm of nation-states looking to plant flags and dunk on each other. Now that space is being commercialized this means the best and brightest have options with generous compensation packages. Nowadays, the only people NASA can get are the same kind of people who become public school teachers.

 

[Not A Bunny]

Nowadays, the only people NASA can get are the same kind of people who become public school teachers.

Worse than that. They're the same kind of people that cruised through college, probably spending more time whining to the teacher that graded them badly than actually putting in the work to get good grades and then in the real world got whatever bullshit certifications the Government told them to and that's it. Have you ever met a useful PMP that got one of their own decision rather than someone who only did it because someone from a certification mill convinced the Government to write some high-level moron a blank check so now everyone has to go sole-source to that same cert mill?

Those same people, once the have the piece of paper, will gladly lord it over the PhDs in the area. Not because they know something useful, but because they're the gatekeepers of the process. They got the good-boy points. They don't have intellectual curiosity or desire for greater things. They did the bare minimum that the job description told them to because damn it, they deserve cookies for showing up.

They're not even teachers; they can't accomplish that much. They're hall monitors.

 

[Otterly]

Have you ever met a useful PMP that got one of their own decision rather than someone who only did it because someone from a certification mill convinced the Government to write some high-level moron a blank check so now everyone has to go sole-source to that same cert mill?

Those same people, once the have the piece of paper, will gladly lord it over the PhDs in the area

I have a PhD , run projects and work keep nagging me to do the PMP. They won’t pay for it though. There is no way I am doing it unless they do, it’s purely a scam to say ‘x% of our people are PMP/PhD qualified.’ I’ve looked through the materials, it’s all ‘no shit Sherlock’ and if you’ve been doing the damn job for however many years you do t learn anything new. Of it teaches me something new, or better ways to do things I already do, I’d be up for it.
That kind of tick box managerialism kills companies. The people who are curious and passionate and capable get crushed and the people who tick the boxes get ahead.
It suggests to me that the management style at space X is far superior to that at either nasa or boing.
It would be a LOT of fun to be given free rein, genuinely free rein, to turn such a company around, and it’s completely doable if you are given the latitude to do so.
Find the people who used to work there when it was good. Bring them back regardless of cost. Fire the dross and the actively subversive. Put engineering and safety as absolute priority and relegate admin functions to admin.
HR, admin, all that stuff should be quietly there in the background to SERVE other functions . Instead it’s taken over.

 

[Not A Bunny]

Instead it’s taken over.

Well, yeah. That's how you get assholes in some semblance of authority who think DEI is important: because the optics of who is doing the job are somehow more effective than the substance of what is being done.

 

[Cuckoman]

Boeing STILL wants to recoup their investment in it, and that means attempting to recover it. Despite EVERYTHING they still think the program is recoverable.

They just need to send a guy with a gun up on the next supply mission. And explain how important it is to go down in the star-shit capsule. Or else.
Then either the capsule explodes on re-entry and they die or they land and immediately suicide after appologizing to the board of Boeing for the shame they brougth.
And everyone clapped.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

How long do you reckon the average human could be isolated in a floating tinbox listening to the sonar-pulse noise, 24/7, before they alluha ackbar the space station into the pentagon?

 

[Car Won't Crank]

How long do you reckon the average human could be isolated in a floating tinbox listening to the sonar-pulse noise, 24/7, before they alluha ackbar the space station into the pentagon?

Depends on the person. If it's your average person, probably 10 months. If it's your battle hardened NEET who's used to days of solitude with nothing but his thoughts and something mentally stimulating, several years.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

Depends on the person. If it's your average person, probably 10 months. If it's your battle hardened NEET who's used to days of solitude with nothing but his thoughts and something mentally stimulating, several years.

I suppose niggers can last years due to their conditioning by the constant chirping of the ceiling bird.

For realz though, Is this China trying to audibly water-board the nasastraughts?

 

[clipartfan92]

Arstechnica updated the article about the noises:

Sept. 2 Update: NASA issued the following explanation on Monday for the strange noises: "A pulsing sound from a speaker in Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft heard by NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore aboard the International Space Station has stopped. The feedback from the speaker was the result of an audio configuration between the space station and Starliner. The space station audio system is complex, allowing multiple spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is common to experience noise and feedback."

article (a)

 

[TrinityReformed]

Arstechnica updated the article about the noises:

article (a)

If it was common, then they wouldn't be asking Mission Control what the hell is it, no?

 

[Jump]

Arstechnica updated the article about the noises:

article (a)

I think the only outcome of this is that NASA is going to move to encrypted comms and for the time being any new issues will be communicated via email. Basically the same thing that happened when people started posting satellite tv "wild feeds" clips to the internet and then the scanner hobby. Im sure the old timers who have enjoyed eavesdropping on the comms for decades arn't happy with this guy posting it for clout.

The source of the audio clip is from this post

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=61434.0

The guy has a twitter link on his forum pfp

https://x.com/therobdale/with_replies

 

[Quence]

AN/ANR56 said:
Then Boeing gets it right with the 777, it's 4 years late, but no one cares, they test the sh*t out of it, it's perfect, a quantum leap in aviation, modern, safe, economical, it's a bmw 7 series vs a 1980s Cadillac.

https://youtu.be/xzOxcnz78cc

One thing is very apparent in that video: 99% of the many engineers and technicians in it were white men.

 

[Hitman One]

It never crashed due to design flaws or being hard to fly only to being shot down by missiles or having bad pilots or going Bermuda triangle.

A 777-200ER (reg. G-YMMM) operating BA38 (Beijing-Heathrow) crashed short of the runway at LHR after ice forming in the heat exchangers restricted flow to the engines when the autopilot demanded thrust on approach. This was strictly an issue with the Rolls-Royce engines to be fair and the aircraft retained structural integrity sufficiently that nobody died.

British Airways pilots are, without doubt or reservation, the best trained and most risk averse commercial airline pilots in the sky and it's only due to the flight crew's actions that the aircraft was able to glide to just within the perimeter fence and land on the grass instead of ploughing into the A30 road or streets full of houses. BA's cabin crew are also highly skilled and were able to calmly and safely evacuate the passengers in an orderly fashion.

This incident also tells us how safe the 777 is. BA38 took place in 2008 and was the type's very first hull loss since it began passenger service in 1995. I have absolutely no reservations about flying in a Boeing aircraft up to and including the 777-300ER. I will not board anything newer - not only are A380s and A350s significantly more pleasant and comfortable, they are also not falling out of the sky.

 

[MadStan]

There is an awful lot of ignorance being expressed by some about "How dumb NASA is" and that they have "no technical knowledge anymore". Astounding. Even NK can make a rocket - and so can India, in fact, many can. It isn't the rocket that is the feat, it is the payloads.

Like JWST, or the living quarters to house astronauts in space. Rockets may carry those parts into space, but you won't see Space X actually making technically state-of-the-art components.

NASA is a government department, and if they are being guided to use contractors for various things, then that is it, they are being guided and do what they are told. If NASA was given a mandate to develop all technologies - and provided the actual funding needed - then they would. What NASA does today isn't the same as what it did 40 years ago, the mandates have changed, that is all.

They had to struggle to get 10 Billion OKed for the JWST which is the most advanced machine ever made by Humans - but we give about that a month it seems to Israel for blowing up civilians. If the USA is actually interested in conquering space then they can - they simply do not fund it or mandate it.

There is some good to come from empowering people like Musk and others to develop private technologies for space travel - as they can offer commercial services like tourism and misc which drives the development of technology - which NASA obviously could not do.

As usual, the government takes the first step and then hands it off to the private sector for full embellishment of the technology, much like Military and other things. It is logical.

 

[Rei is Shit.]

NASA is a government department, and if they are being guided to use contractors for various things, then that is it, they are being guided and do what they are told. If NASA was given a mandate to develop all technologies - and provided the actual funding needed - then they would. What NASA does today isn't the same as what it did 40 years ago, the mandates have changed, that is all.

They have always used contractors for building most things. The lunar lander was Grumman, Mercury capsule was McDonnell, ect ect.