NASA has decided the lives of two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station will be in SpaceX’s hands after weeks of intense deliberation and serious safety concerns.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson made the announcement during a press conference on Saturday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, have been on the ISS for 11 weeks. Their mission was originally supposed to last eight days.
The ordeal began when five of Starliner’s 28 reaction control system thrusters failed as it traveled to the ISS in June. The spacecraft’s helium system was also leaking.
Mission controllers have been working to resolve the issues and test the spacecraft ever since in the hopes they — and not someone else — could safely bring the astronauts home.
NASA leadership held an internal meeting earlier today to review whether Williams and Wilmore could safely return to Earth on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft or if they should rely on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon instead.
NASA’s decision to trust SpaceX to complete the mission could significantly impact the future of Boeing’s space program.
During a July press conference, a NASA official acknowledged that relying on SpaceX to retrieve the astronauts was an option but declined to provide details.
NASA confirmed its SpaceX backup plan this month and postponed the company’s next launch to September 24. The delay allows Wilmore and Williams to fly home with the SpaceX crew on its four-person spacecraft in February, about eight months later than their initial schedule.
The SpaceX plan isn’t without flaws.
Wilmore and Wiliams arrived at the ISS in spacesuits compatible with Boeing’s Starliner — not the Crew Dragon spaceship. Williams and Wilmore will have to travel to Earth without suits on the Crew Dragon spaceship, which does not guarantee as much protection for them, according to Fortune.
This is possibly the biggest safety decision NASA has had to make in decades. The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, during which seven astronauts died, has weighed heavily on the minds of the Starliner mission managers, many of whom were involved in that failed flight, Ars Technica reported.
“I’ve been very hyper-focused lately on this concept of combating organizational silence. If you look at both, unfortunately, Challenger and Columbia, you can see cases where people had the right data or a valid position to put forward, but the environment just didn’t allow it,” Russ DeLoach, the chief of NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance said in a briefing about the Starliner mission on August 14.
NASA funneled $4.2 billion into Starliner’s development. The contract is part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, an effort to give NASA multiple US-based options for human spaceflight rather than depending on Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The Starliner’s original mission was meant to prove that it could safely ferry astronauts to and from the ISS regularly.
Both Boeing and SpaceX have spent a decade working with NASA on their Starliner and Crew Dragon vehicles, respectively.
NASA always insisted the program was not a competition or a race, but if it had been, SpaceX would’ve won by a landslide. Not only did the company complete its first crewed test flight four years ago, as CEO Elon Musk pointed out ahead of Williams’ and Wilmore’s launch — it did it for cheaper, only costing NASA $2.6 billion.
After years of delays, technical issues, and rising costs, this Crew Flight Test was the last hurdle Boeing had to clear for NASA to certify Starliner for human spaceflight.
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