Boeing’s Starliner capsule returns to Earth without astronauts, new issues found

The Boeing Starliner capsule returned to Earth without any astronauts. It left the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday and landed in New Mexico on Saturday.

This move marks an end to the Crew Flight Test (CFT), which was Starliner’s first-ever crewed mission. Reports claimed that the Starliner had experienced some problems regarding its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters.

This happened soon after CFT’s June 5 liftoff. Following this, NASA decided that astronauts Sunita Williams and Wilmore won’t use the capsule to come back to Earth.

Both astronauts are expected to return to Earth in February 2025 in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. This capsule is also likely to fly the company’s Crew-9 mission, which is set to launch on September 24. However, what follows is pretty much unclear.

Starliner’s previous uncrewed missions faced setbacks

At the beginning, SpaceX flew a Crew Dragon test mission in 2019 without any astronauts aboard and passed all its tests. This allowed it to launch its debut astronaut test flight in 2020.

It was a successful one. In its first mission, Starliner saw an uncrewed test flight in December 2019 which failed to reach the ISS owing to software glitches. However, it saw its success the second time in May 2022, but a few issues still persisted.

There were some problems with the CFT as well. These were helium leaks and thruster issues. The mission was supposed to be ten days long but NASA had kept the Starliner at the ISS for three months. The reason being that NASA found some thruster problems.

Overheating seemed to cause most of these issues Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program said , “I think we’ll see where we’re at in another month or so, and have a little bit better idea of what the overall schedule will be.”

NASA focuses on fixing Starliner’s thruster overheating issues

Stich added that it’s probably too early to think about exactly what the next flight looks like. He revealed they want the next step to go look at all the data.

“We’ve got some things we know we’ve got to go work on,” he added. “And we’ll go do that and fix those things, and then go fly when we’re ready.”

It’s expected that most of the work will focus on the RCS thruster overheating issue, and mostly how to mitigate it. Stitch further revealed that right now the team needs to go and take a thruster at White Sands [Test Facility in New Mexico] and make sure they understand the exact pulse sequences that cause the heating.

He also mentioned that it is also important to look at software changes to reduce the number of demands on the thrusters.

However, amid all the negatives Stitch added there were positives as well. One of them was Starliner’s good performance during its entry, decent, as well as their landing.

All things said and done and despite all the efforts it seems like things did not work out in a couple of instances. However, the experts at NASA stated that the mission was a test one and that there was a lot to learn from it.