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NASA and Boeing still have yet to set a return date for the aerospace company’s space taxi docked at the space station, adding to the growing uncertainty over when the vehicle’s two astronauts will be able to come home.
NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams have been on the International Space Station since June 6, when their space capsule, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, docked at the orbiting research laboratory.
Their return date, however, has been in limbo as NASA and Boeing investigate several technical issues that cropped up when Starliner launched.
“We don’t have a major announcement today relative to a return date,” Steve Stich, a NASA program manager, told reporters on Thursday. “We’re making great progress, but we’re just not quite ready to do that.”
Wilmore and Williams are the first astronauts to fly on Starliner, part of a critical flight test meant to prove the vehicle is safe to carry future astronauts to and from the International Space Station on routine trips. Their stay in space was supposed to last roughly a week but they’ve now been living in orbit for nearly two months.
During the trip, NASA and Boeing have been analyzing a series of helium leaks and issues with Starliner’s thrusters — tiny engines the capsule uses to maneuver through space. Engineers at both entities recently finished up testing a Starliner thruster on the ground at NASA’s White Sands facility in New Mexico, to see how the hardware might behave during different phases of the capsule’s flight in space.
The testing revealed that seals made out of Teflon may be to blame for some of the thruster issues. After performing additional in-space tests this weekend, NASA and Boeing plan to do a major review, potentially late next week, to determine if teams are ready to bring Wilmore and Williams home on Starliner. If that review goes well, the mission teams will set a time for Starliner to leave the station.
NASA and Boeing maintain that the primary plan is for Starliner to return the two astronauts, but they also indicated that they’ve been looking at backup options. One possibility is to tap NASA’s other commercial partner, SpaceX, to use its Dragon space capsule. However, Stich declined to say more about the likelihood of that contingency scenario.
“We have two different systems that we’re flying; obviously the backup option is to use a different system,” Stich said. “I would rather not go into all those details,” he added.
In the meantime, NASA re-certified Starliner’s battery to last for as long as 90 days in orbit, up from an original certification of 45 days. That means the capsule could stay docked at the station up until early September if needed.