Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will hitch a ride with Crew-9 next February on a SpaceX Crew Dragon after NASA deemed a Starliner journey with humans aboard too risky.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are handling a prolonged flight delay as seasoned travelers would: by booking alternate transportation home.
The duo were scheduled to return to Earth on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule. But it developed mysterious thruster problems on the way to the International Space Station after a June 5 launch, leading to multiple extensions of the astronauts’ stay on the ISS while NASA worked on the problem. It’s now been decided they will fly home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon.
“NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February and that Starliner will return uncrewed,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a press conference Saturday.
He and other agency executives said that testing and experiments on the ground left too much uncertainty over how Starliner’s thrusters might perform after undocking from the ISS and conducting a subseqent deorbit burn.
“There was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program. He said recent tests revealed swelling and heating problems in these thrusters, which are grouped in rectangular assemblies that NASA and Boeing refer to as “doghouses” around the service module that Starliner will jettison after its deorbit burn.
“Our core value is safety, and it is our North Star,” Nelson said after reminding the audience of the consequences of not defending that priority: “We lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward.”
(Nelson may feel this more personally than most: As a Democratic Congressman from Florida, he flew aboard Columbia on the STS-61C mission in January 1986, the last shuttle launch before Challenger’s doomed liftoff.
