Boeing's Starliner capsule could have completed its mission as planned if time had been on its side.
Starliner launched June 5 on its first crewed flight, a test flight that sent Agency astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station (ISS). The duo were supposed to live on the orbiting lab for just a week or so, but Agency extended their stay to about three months while they studied problems with the thrusters that arose during Starliner’s encounter with the ISS.
Ultimately, the agency concluded that bringing Williams and Wilmore home on Starliner was too risky, so the capsule returned to Earth uncrewed on Sept. 6; its former crew will return home next February on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. But that decision was made under some time pressure, Wilmore said, noting that 12 astronauts currently live and work on the ISS.
Seven of those 12 astronauts are from Agency; the other five work for the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. Six of the Americans, including Williams and Wilmore, have been at the station since June or earlier, posing a challenge for Agency’s ISS team. (Agency’s seventh astronaut, Don Pettit, arrived at the station with two Russian colleagues on Sept. 11.)
“To staff the space station with six [NASA] “We've done it. I think we've done well over the last few months, but it's not set up for the long term. So we had to make some decisions on a timeline,” Wilmore said during a call with reporters that he and Williams held from the International Space Station today (Sept. 13).
“There came a point where we had to decide whether Starliner would come back with us or without us,” he added. “And we just didn't have enough time to get to the end of that runway where we could say we were going to come back with it. I think we would have made it, but we ran out of time.”
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Wilmore said he and Williams were involved in discussions between Boeing and Agency about the booster issues and Starliner's return-home plans.
“I was really impressed,” Williams said of those meetings. “There were a lot of opinions. There was a lot of data coming in at different times and a lot of people trying to digest it, understand it and apply it.”
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Williams and Wilmore said they aren’t disappointed about spending all that extra time in space. Both astronauts stressed that the Starliner mission was a test flight, so some issues were to be expected, and dealing with the unexpected is a big part of being a Agency astronaut (as well as a Navy test pilot, which Williams and Wilmore also were).
Both astronauts said they will miss their families and friends during their extended stay in orbit, but both highlighted the positives. Williams, for example, described space as her “happy place” and highlighted the benefits of returning to Earth in a different way.
“We're excited to fly on two different spacecraft. We're testers, that's what we do,” Williams said.
“We wanted to complete the Starliner mission and have it land back on solid ground, but we have to move on and think about the next opportunity,” he added. “We will come back with an assessment of both spacecraft and I think we are very fortunate for that.”