It's startling, I know, but NASA and Boeing say the Starliner is doing so well it can stay there another 45 days, making the original 8 day mission into 90 days. The Space.com article is a bit long and roundabout, but the money quote is here:
"We've been looking at those batteries and their performance on orbit. They're getting recharged by station, and that risk hasn't really changed. So the risk for the next 45 days is essentially the same as the first 45 days," he said.
The article references the extended thruster testing mentioned Monday, in which they'll test the thrusters in as close to flight usage as they can get on the ground. That was talked about as starting as early as Tuesday the 2nd but there's no news confirming that or updating in any way.
The big obstacle is that these thrusters are in the Service Module which will be jettisoned and burned up on reentry, so that it's not possible to examine the actual thrusters that had the problem. That means to be as thorough troubleshooting as they want, they need to do as much as possible before they jettison the SM.
In operation, Starliner will fly the six month missions that Crew Dragon flies, technically rated at 210 days, so extending this to 90 days shouldn't be an issue as long as there aren't things they do differently to Starliner for those longer flights. As for the batteries themselves:
When Space.com asked how long the mission could continue, Stich said, "We haven't decided how long to extend it yet." Starliner has 12 different batteries, he explained. Before this flight, similar batteries sat on the ground for a year and were then tested to make sure there were no defects, and none were found.
"What we really are doing now is looking at the performance of the battery in flight. We don't see any degradation in any of the cells where the batteries are," he added.
Starliner docked to the ISS. Image credit: NASA
It seems like we may as well stop tracking this. There's no mention of a target date for the end of the mission, another 45 days, or 90 from June 6, sounds like early September. All we can do is just wait and see what they tell us next.
Speaking of dates, I see that on July 3rd, SpaceX and Jared Isaacman announced a target date for the Polaris Dawn mission that will feature the world's first space walk by a non-military or government astronaut. The date is July 31. Another feature of the mission is that it will fly higher than any manned flights since the end of the Apollo era. Polaris Dawn's orbit will take the mission about 435 miles above the Earth. For comparison, the ISS orbits around 250 miles up.
There must be a good deal of sweating going on at headquarters. If they haven't reached an informed conclusion at this time, they are afraid of that the whole thing is in the dumpster, and putting of the inevitable as long as possible. I suppose the next step is to select a guilty entity and present the ritual suicide at a appropriate moment.
ReplyDeleteOle Grump
"Yeah, we're leaking helium and other things but we're going to stay another 45 days, at least, to make sure we still have helium and other things and power in the batteries and fuel cells."
ReplyDeleteYeah, sure, okay, right.
Fun times, looks like fun times.
I didn't know the stuff that caused the problem will be jettisoned. They really need to learn what they can now.
ReplyDeleteHave they done any space walks,looking at it?
Don't know about you, Justin, but examining thrusters that are internally located is something you do on the ground, NOT during a spacewalk. Just sayin'
DeleteThere's also that thing about something keeping the ISS crew from doing space walks. I think it was a suit leak issue or something weird like that.
DeleteI ran the Boeing quotes through Google Translate, going from Boeing B.S. to English. This is what it came up with:
ReplyDelete"Starliner is definitely f**ked. We don't really know how f**ked it is, but after holding all the engineers at gunpoint, waterboarding them and browbeating them in hours-long struggle sessions, we've determined that leaving everything right where it is for another 45 days gets us another 45 days to try and figure out where and why Starliner is so f**ked, with an infinitesimally small chance that lightning will strike (not literally, we're just being rhetorical), and we might figure out why it's f**ked, and if we're really lucky, maybe we can either fix it, or at least let the evidence burn up on re-entry so there's no physical evidence and we can't be credibly blamed for f**king it up. For the hat trick, we can maybe do all this without killing the crew off in the process, but that's a distant second place to getting ourselves off the hook. "
Any speculation on the psychological effects on Stayliner's astrosnots and their families?
ReplyDeleteFWIW (not much) the only things I've read from the crew is that this is a "test pilot's dream flight" and they love that idea. They expect to have to put the capsule through a lot conditions, most (all?) of them pushing it to the limit of what it can do.
DeleteThey probably didn't think "Return to Earth safely" would be pushing the capsule's limits to the breaking point, though.
ReplyDelete