Boeing launched its Starliner spacecraft into orbit on June 5. The plan was for the craft and its crew to dock with the International Space Station for eight days and then return to Earth safely. That didn’t quite happen, and the craft has now been stuck in space for more than 60 days and NASA is now worried that it could spiral out of control and hit the space station.
The Starliner craft and its crew of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stranded in space after leaks were detected on the spaceship’s thrusters. Engineers back on Earth have been working to find a fix for the issue for weeks and rescue plans for Wilmore and Williams have been drawn up that could see them stay in orbit until next year.
However, another problem is looming over the doomed craft. Experts are now concerned that any attempt to bring the craft back to Earth before the thrusters are fixed could result in it spinning out of control and hitting the ISS, reports Business Insider. As the site reports:
Sources previously told Ars Technica that there is concern within the agency that if the right combination of thrusters fail when Starliner undocks from the space station, the craft could spin out of control and collide with the ISS.
“If you are undocking from the space station and you lose more than a certain number of your thrusters, there’s a chance that you might be stuck drifting and or even crash into the Space Station,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Business Insider.
NASA has not officially commented on the fears that the craft could hit the beloved space station, but BI added that the agency used the word “uncertainty” almost 20 times during its last briefing on the fiasco.
Fiasco is a pretty good way to describe Boeing’s first foray into space travel, which was plagued with delays before its launch to the ISS and has been met with questions over where Boeing’s attention lies with its space-going missions. All these questions mean that NASA is now pushing back any decision on what to do with the stranded spacecraft.
NASA has now committed to a final decision on what to do with the craft by the end of August, reports Futurism. The agency is considering testing the capsule to see if it is ready for a return flight, or its backup is to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Terra Firma on a SpaceX mission that will launch in September and return in February 2025.
Once a decision on the safe return of the astronauts is made, the next question will be whether or not Boeing can be trusted with space flight once again. As Futurism adds:
To put it lightly, Boeing’s first crewed test flight of its Starliner has been, at best, a fiasco. NASA is clearly playing it safe by buying itself more and more time. The agency and its contractor have poured billions of dollars into the spacecraft’s development and likely will do everything in their might to make it work, despite the risks involved.
When asked if this could be Boeing’s last Starliner flight, Bowersox only had a vague answer.
“All I can say is that our intent is to keep pressing to have two providers,” he said, referring to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which was developed under the same Commercial Crew program as Starliner. “We got very good companies and we wanna develop two strong and capable spacecraft.”
The issues surrounding Starliner have been the latest in a long list of bad press that American aerospace company Boeing has faced so far this year. In January, one of the company’s 737 Max aircrafts blew open mid-air when a door plug failed and questions have repeatedly been raised about production and quality control at Boeing. This reached a head last month when Boeing was convicted as a felon over its handling of the 737 Max fiasco.