One of the Starliner ship astronauts has revealed that Houston skipped the regulation to save them: “They are heroes”

NASA Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are already at home After nine months of extended mission In the International Space Station. Although they have avoided participating in the political controversies surrounding your caseWilmore had a revealing interview with Ars Technica in which he explains that the failure of the Starliner ship was more tense than they had told us.

The delays prior to the launch. Everything was ready to launch the Starliner ship in early May. Butch and Suni had begun their quarantine, a usual practice to reduce the risk of infecting a virus or infectious disease to other crew members of the International Space Station.

However, a problem with a valve in the Centaur stage of the Atlas V and A helium leak in Starliner herself They delayed the launch for weeks. Butch Wilmore, ship’s pilot, asked NASA to return to Houston to continue practicing in the simulator, because he felt that his knowledge was no longer fresh. Finally, they took off on June 5, 2024.

Cold aboard the ship. The launch of the Starliner was soft and very precise. Even more than the astronauts expected, since it did not require the typical trajectory corrections they had seen in the simulator or in previous experiences such as NASA astronauts.

Butch and Suni felt, on the other hand, something for which the simulator had not prepared them: a booth too cold. Designed to carry four astronauts (or up to seven crew In missions outside NASA), the temperature aboard the Starliner, with only two inhabitants in this first test mission, fell below the 10 ºC, Wilmore recalls. Both went cold and ended up sleeping with their space costumes to heat a little.

They begin to lose propellants. The problems that would mark the fate of the mission began on the second day. While approaching autonomously to the International Space Station, the Starliner began to lose propellants.

The Boeing ship has 28 reaction control propellants to maneuver in orbit. Oriented backwards, forward and in three radio directions, they control their position and guidance both to secure a port of the ISS and to exorbit, on its return, towards the landing place.

A tense approach to ISS. There were some problems with the performance of the propellants during A crew test in May 2022and Butch Wilmore worried him that they could reappear. It was just what happened.

In its final approximation to the ISS, the ship lost two thrusters and Butch had to take manual control to maintain its trajectory. The thing would not end there. With Wilmore at the controls, the ship lost a third propeller and shortly after the room. At that time they stopped being able to promote themselves in one of the directions necessary for the approach.

A decision against the regulation. According to official procedures, at that point they had to abort the approach to the International Space Station and return to Earth, since the attempt to coupch was too risky. Not only for them, but also for the ISS crew and for the orbital laboratory of 100,000 million dollars.

At the same time, Butch and Suni thought that turning with so much failures would be equally dangerous. “I don’t know if we can return to earth,” said Butch Wilmore. “In fact, I think we probably can’t.”

To top it off, they had been below the ISS, so they were traveling faster than the station and were moving away from it. Then, NASA’s mission control center, and more specifically flight director Ed Van Cise, decided to move forward with the coupling, against the manual.

Heroes. “These people are heroes,” says Wilmore in the interview. “The heroes put on the tank, run to a flame building and take people out of there. The heroes also spend decades in their cubicles studying their systems and knowing them perfectly.”

“And when there is no time to evaluate a situation, to talk to people and ask them what they think, they know their system so well that they devise a plan on the march. That is a hero. And there are several of them in mission control.”

Have you tried to turn it off and turn it on? Houston informed Wilmore of the Plan, he released the controls and, immediately afterwards, the mission controllers sent a command to the Starliner to restart their systems.

Turn off and turn on the ship resulted. They managed to recover the propelants and the control of the Starliner, Although then a fifth propeller failed that never recovered. With the help of the Mission Control Center, the ship managed to return to the autonomous mode and attach to the International Space Station.

Now NASA’s decision is understood. If Butch had lost the fifth propeller while sailing manually with four less, the ship would have run out of the redundant maneuver necessary to control its reentry. It would have been potentially catastrophic.

Even if Boeing collaborated with the investigation in the later months and expressed his confidence in the Starliner, the decision that the ship returned empty and the two crew remained in the ISS until the next rotation of astronauts In a spacex crew dragon It makes a lot of sense.

The future of Starliner. The ship is still not certified for manned flights to the International Space Station. Boeing has lost $ 1.6 billion in its developmentbut NASA has hired six flights and maintains its intention to certify it for operational trips to the ISS next year.

Although helium leaks seem solved with new stamps, propulsion failures are still not closed, so NASA and Boeing engineers will perform a series of exhaustive tests at the agency’s facilities in White Sands (New Mexico) to validate possible modifications, such as thermal barriers or changes in propulsion pulses.

The next flight of the CST-100 Starliner ship to the International Space Station will not occur until the end of this year or principles that come, According to NASA. A new demonstration is needed in flight because Boeing could not recover the service module where the controversies were.

By design (as with the Crew Dragon and other spacecraft), the service module is not designed for the reentry, and emerges from the ship before returning to the earth. Boeing believes that the propellants failed for the formation of corrosion and accumulation of moisture, and blames its manufacturer: Aerget Rocketdyne. But the tests burned in the atmosphere shortly after the return of the ship.

Image | POT

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