The return trip to Earth for two NASA astronauts who rode to orbit on the trouble-plagued company’s Starliner has been delayed for a third time as of Saturday — with Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams cooling their heels at the International Space Station (ISS) while engineers on the ground race against time to fix numerous issues with the spacecraft.
They have a reported 45-day window to bring them back, according to officials.
The return trip to Earth for two NASA astronauts who rode to orbit on the trouble-plagued company’s Starliner has been delayed for a third time as of Saturday. AP
The return module of the Starliner spacecraft is docked to the ISS’s Harmony module, but Harmony has limited fuel leaving the window for a safe return flight increasingly narrow, officials said.
Wilmore and Williams were supposed to come home June 13 after a week on the ISS.
“You can lose a few thrusters and still be OK because there are many of them but still this is the propulsion system and you want to understand everything that’s going on,” he said.
During the 25-hour flight, however, engineers found hardware issues including five separate helium leaks involving the crafts’ thrusters that are part of the Starliner’s propulsion system and five thruster failures in its reaction-control system.
“We’ve learned that our helium system is not performing as designed,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, said Tuesday.
“Albeit manageable, it’s still not working like we designed it. So we’ve got to go figure that out.”
Engineers are not sure what caused the problems.
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