NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were supposed to be on an eight-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner. But problems with the Starliner’s thrusters have meant that, while they did arrive safely, NASA officials have been hesitant for them to use the vehicle to return to Earth, and the pair have now been in space for over two months. Now, the pair could travel home in a SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle in February 2025.
NASA has previously said it was focused on getting the astronauts home using the Starliner. But as the problems with the vehicle have dragged on, the agency is now considering using a different vehicle for their safe return.
“We’ve got multiple options. We don’t just have to bring a crew back on Starliner, for example, we could bring them back on another vehicle. That’s something that we’re going to have to deal with in the future,” said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, in a briefing today.
He emphasized that this type of situation was why NASA is so keen to have multiple vehicles available: “We could find ourselves in a situation where we need to bring a [SpaceX] Dragon crew or a [Russian] Soyuz crew back on a Starliner. That’s why we want multiple vehicles, so that we have that option.”
In terms of the internal discussion about whether to keep working on getting the pair home or whether to switch to using the Dragon, Bowersox said, “We could take either path” and that the agency was “getting more serious” about evaluating other options than the Starliner.
NASA has insisted that the astronauts are not stranded and that they are not in any danger, and that they could use the Starliner in an emergency. For now, the pair are helping to perform jobs on the ISS, but they are also using up extra resources, so there is a balance to be struck in keeping them at the station. Also, presumably, the two astronauts who thought they were going to space for just over a week but have now been there for over two months would like to return home at some point — although astronauts are used to plans changing, especially on a test flight, and are unlikely to object to getting more time in space.
If the pair were to use a Dragon for the return leg of their trip, it would require NASA to send just two astronauts on the Crew-9 mission, set to launch in September, instead of the usual four. Then Wilmore and Williams could join them for their return to Earth in February next year. The issues with the Starliner have already caused the launch of the Crew-9 mission to be delayed from this month to next month.
NASA says it has reached out to SpaceX to discuss options for using the Dragon for the return of the Starliner crew, but the agency has not yet made an announcement about definite future plans.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.