NASA is at a crossroads when it comes to completing the Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test. The agency will announce its decision on whether NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams will return on the Starliner as originally planned or on a SpaceX Crew Dragon.
The decision will be formalized following the conclusion of an agency-level meeting called a flight readiness review on Saturday. A press conference is tentatively scheduled for 1 p.m. EDT (1700 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will report live on the decision approximately 30 minutes before the press conference begins.
The review is intended to serve as a final overview of the findings of the past two months related to multiple helium leaks in the Starliner service module and problems with five engines discovered during rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station following the mission’s launch on June 5.
In its most recent comments on the matter, in a blog post on August 2, Boeing argued that its “extensive testing of its propulsion system in space and on the ground” gave it “high” confidence in its ability to safely return Wilmore and Williams on Starliner as originally planned.
“Our confidence is based on this wealth of valuable testing from Boeing and NASA. The testing has confirmed that 27 of 28 RCS engines are intact and fully operational again,” Boeing wrote in its post. “The Starliner’s propulsion system is also redundant and helium levels remain stable. The data also supports the root cause analysis of the helium and engine problems and the flight justification for the return of the Starliner and its crew to Earth.”
In conference calls over the past month, NASA officials have not explicitly indicated that they are leaning one way or the other, but each press conference has provided more information about what a scenario involving a return on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft instead of the Starliner would look like.
“With the Starliner crew flight test, we have the option of bringing the crew home either on Starliner or on another vehicle. We could go either way, and reasonable people could choose either way, depending on how they assess our position in terms of the uncertainty limit that we have for the data that we have on the engine and propulsion system,” said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, in an Aug. 7 conference call.
“So we’re trying to reduce that uncertainty and see if we can get more consensus within our team. At the same time, we’re looking more seriously at our other options.”
Bowersox is a former astronaut who knows firsthand the need for spacecraft conversion. He was aboard the International Space Station in 2003 when the Columbia disaster occurred and returned to Earth on a Soyuz spacecraft after NASA decided to retire the space shuttle fleet.
He said that while NASA’s safety culture two decades ago enabled input through the NASA Safety Reporting System, the impact of input from a wide range of different sources is even greater today.
“If you see something that is not good, you should raise it and something could be brought up immediately. But our current process increases the amount of input from the technical authorities, the safety people, the engineers, the flight crew and the centers and gives us a formal way to encourage, analyze and make a decision on dissenting opinions,” Bowersox said during an Aug. 14 conference call.
“So there’s one more point where it all comes together, and that’s at the top. That way, the person at the top has a chance to get the best information when the decision is made.”
The current chief, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, will be in charge of all analyses of the Starliner conducted over the past two months, both in orbit and during testing at various sites on Earth.
If the agency chooses the Crew Dragon contingency plan, SpaceX would launch the spacecraft on its Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than Sept. 24 with only two of the original four crew members on board. It would also carry two flight suits for Wilmore and Williams to support a return flight in February 2025.
This decision would extend their planned week-long journey to nearly 270 days in orbit. In this scenario, the Starliner spacecraft would undock autonomously and unmanned in early September and land in White Sands, New Mexico, similar to the unmanned Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2) in 2022.
