NASA is worried that multiple small reaction control system thrusters could fail while the Starliner is near the space station and cause a disaster. There are combinations of Starliner thrusters failures would make it become uncontrollable and cause a collision with the space station. The thrusters are needed later in the flight back to Earth to set up the critical de-orbit burn and entry in Earth’s atmosphere.
Boeing Starliner software needs to be updated for it to be able to undock without crew onboard (even though it did this on the last test flight), and this will take a week. Boeing has DIFFERENT software for crewed and unmanned Starliner and it takes a week or more to change between the software.
NASA has been studying the possibility of crew returning in a SpaceX Dragon for over a month. As NASA and Boeing engineers have yet to identify a root cause of the thruster failure, the possibility of Wilmore and Williams returning on a Dragon spacecraft has increased in the last 10 days. NASA has consistently said that ‘crew safety’ will be its No. 1 priority in deciding how to proceed.
It is not clear what change Boeing officials made to the vehicle or its software in the two years prior to the launch of Wilmore and Williams. It is possible that the crew has to manually press an undock button in the spacecraft, or the purely autonomous software was removed from coding on board Starliner to simplify its software package. Regardless, sources described the process to update the software on Starliner as “non-trivial” and “significant,” and that it could take up to four weeks. This is what is driving the delay to launch Crew 9 later next month.
If NASA decides to return Starliner autonomously (unmanned), it must be certain the undocking software update will work.
This is absolutely wild.
– There is concern that an RCS failure during undocking could cause Starliner to crash into the ISS.
– Starliner software needs to be updated for it to be able to undock without crew onboard (even though it did this on the last test flight), and this will… https://t.co/yimzncIXLq— Ozan Bellik (@BellikOzan) August 5, 2024
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Is there anything worse than flying on a Boeing Aircraft? Why yes, a Boeing Spacecraft.
So, is it a week or 4 weeks that they need for the software update?
It takes “a week or more” and “up to four weeks,” so 1d4 weeks it is. Yes, that is a very large standard deviation.
Wow. We passed from maybe rescuing the astronauts on Dragon to evacuating the whole station and let it tumble uncontrollably back to Earth.
Silly question: can’t it be just unberthed and the arm used to push it away?
Seems the arm could take pictures of it for finding failures, surely it can grab it and shove it as far as it can.
I gather that unberthing it requires action on the side of the departing spacecraft, which actively locks itself to the station.
The mating port has pyrotechnics for an emergency departure, but that would probably permanently disable the port, and they’d be down to just one working port.
Yeah, indeed the problem seems to be they can’t make it undock and return on its own. Someone has to be onboard on the controls, and this someone will share the fate of the capsule. Unless they can undock and then do some EVA to leave it, which sounds rather dangerous.
If it’s so bricked then it would make sense to leave it there, as permanent feature of the station.
But yeah, that reduces the operational freedom a lot, with just one port remaining. And adding another section for additional ports would be far from trivial.
You make a very logical point. Yes, leave the “problem capsule” docked to the station. Use the remaining dock to get the crew off. Don’t play games. Having only one way out from any vehicle or building is never anyplace you want to be. Get everyone off, deal with the how and why it all f***** up, later.
They presently need people on board to keep the station in orbit, I gather. So it would uncontrollably deorbit if they abandoned it.