Astronauts trapped on the space station will have a new ship starting this weekend

It all started on June 5, shortly after Wilmore and Williams lifted off Starliner, Boeing’s proposed replacement for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon (owned by the ever-controversial Elon Musk). It was the first crewed test flight, so the team was prepared for not everything to go well. However, since its arrival in orbit, the Starliner has had problems: first several helium leaks (which were added to those found before launch and which delayed take-off by a month) and then with the engines: 5 of the 28 thrusters failed, causing problems at docking On the International Space Station, the ship’s destination. Their trip, scheduled for a week, lasted for several months.

After a whole summer of tests – both in the damaged ship and at NASA’s facilities in White Sands (New Mexico) with replicas of the propulsion devices, and press conferences in which no specific date was set for the return of the trapped astronauts – at the end of August, the agency announced NASA announced that Williams and Wilmore will not return on the Starliner, but on the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. For its part, the Starliner will return home on its own.

“Space flight is risky, even in its safest and most routine forms. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the press conference that the test flight is inherently neither safe nor routine. “The decision to keep Butch and Sonny aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home without a crew is a result of our commitment to safety, which is our core value.”

Consequences of NASA’s decision

This decision had consequences. The first was to delay by one month the launch of Crew-9, the next rotation mission to the International Space Station. Until the Starliner separated from the orbiting laboratory, the new crew was unable to dock. When NASA finally decides that Williams and Wilmore will return home aboard Crew Dragon, the Crew-9 crew, made up of NASA astronauts Nick Haag, Zina Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, plus Roscosmos astronaut Alexander Gorbunov, will be reduced from four to two. Room for two trapped people. Thus, Cardman and Wilson have been ruled out, and Hague and Gorbunov will travel as planned to the ISS on Saturday, returning with Williams and Willmore next February.

The decision of the trapped astronauts to stay longer and not return immediately is due to the complex cycles on the ISS: launching each ship back and forth involves a significant cost, as well as planning in terms of resources and supplies. In fact, this is not the first time that a decision has been made to extend a space mission: the last time was just a year ago, when NASA astronaut Frank Rubio had to stay another six months (one year in total) after several escape flights. Recorded on various Russian Soyuz ships.

“It would have been a safe landing.”

After Starliner returned to Earth with a near-perfect flight, Steve Stich, director of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, acknowledged during the press conference that it, too, “would have been a safe and successful landing with the crew on board.” However, recalling the lessons learned from the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, NASA stressed that it does not want to expose astronauts to more danger than necessary. “The decision to keep Butch and Sonny aboard the International Space Station and bring the unmanned Boeing Starliner vehicle home is the result of a commitment to safety,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. “Since then, NASA has worked hard to create an atmosphere where people are encouraged to come forward and express their opinions, and I think today is a good example of that.”

In addition to being a “rescue mission” of sorts, Crew-9 will be historic for other reasons. This will be the first crewed launch from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and only the second crewed launch from the Space Force site overall, following the Starliner test launch in June.