After weeks of troubleshooting, NASA and Boeing officials say they better understand the issues plaguing the Starliner spacecraft, but still aren’t ready to name a return date.
tl;dr
Heat building up inside the thrusters may be causing Teflon seals to bulge, restricting the flow of propellant.
48 days and counting, three days longer than Starliner’s initial 45 day limit set by NASA and 40 days longer than the initially planned mission return.
The current plan is the same as the old plan, for Butch and Suni to ride Starliner back home for a safe landing in the desert. The 45 day limit was initially set due to lack of knowledge on how Starliner’s batteries would perform in space, due to their extended stay they have had ample time to test the batteries and they are currently testing and acting nominally thus allowing for the extended stay. Their stay has been extended for NASA and Boeing to do as much testing as possible on the trunk of Starliner, the part of Starliner that had all of the issues. The reason for the stay is that once Butch and Suni depart from the ISS in Starliner and head for home the trunk will separate from Starliner and burn up (hopefully) on reentry thus making any testing on the main culprit of all issues that Starliner had impossible. This is getting to a diatribe so I will end it here. If you have more questions just ask.
Thanks for the abstract. Is Boeing paying for the extra docking hours at the ISS? Isn’t the docking schedule pretty important to ISS operations? I figured it’s like a train station: precision and efficiency above all, otherwise arrivals stack up and cause cascade failures?
Are they still up there? I’d kind of forgotten about them.
48 days and counting, three days longer than Starliner’s initial 45 day limit set by NASA and 40 days longer than the initially planned mission return.
So what’s the current plan?
The current plan is the same as the old plan, for Butch and Suni to ride Starliner back home for a safe landing in the desert. The 45 day limit was initially set due to lack of knowledge on how Starliner’s batteries would perform in space, due to their extended stay they have had ample time to test the batteries and they are currently testing and acting nominally thus allowing for the extended stay. Their stay has been extended for NASA and Boeing to do as much testing as possible on the trunk of Starliner, the part of Starliner that had all of the issues. The reason for the stay is that once Butch and Suni depart from the ISS in Starliner and head for home the trunk will separate from Starliner and burn up (hopefully) on reentry thus making any testing on the main culprit of all issues that Starliner had impossible. This is getting to a diatribe so I will end it here. If you have more questions just ask.
Thank you!
Thanks for the abstract. Is Boeing paying for the extra docking hours at the ISS? Isn’t the docking schedule pretty important to ISS operations? I figured it’s like a train station: precision and efficiency above all, otherwise arrivals stack up and cause cascade failures?
Good question.