Everybody Knows Today's News

If everyone knows it I suppose that means it's not news. The NASA/Boeing team announced today that Butch and Suni will return on the Crew-9 Dragon capsule. This will be in February, after they serve as half of Crew 9, turning their 8 day mission into an 8 month mission. As we talked about before, this means that September's launch of the Crew-9 mission will be with two of the four pictured astronauts in that post and the other two will presumably be reassigned to another mission. 

This has been a tough decision and the final vote was a poll between NASA administrator Bill Nelson, deputy administrator Pam Melroy, the Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich, Boeing's Commercial Crew Program Manager and Vice President Mark Nappi.

Therefore, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will undock from the station early next month—the tentative date, according to a source, is September 6—and attempt to make an autonomous return to Earth and land in a desert in the southwestern United States.

Then, no earlier than September 24, a Crew Dragon spacecraft will launch with two astronauts (NASA has not named the two crew members yet) to the space station with two empty seats. Wilmore and Williams will join these two Crew-9 astronauts for their previously scheduled six-month increment on the space station. All four will then return to Earth on the Crew Dragon vehicle.

The Starliner program itself is still ongoing and there will be more changes to the spacecraft. They weren't shy about saying they were surprised at things they discovered during their investigations including the duplicate thruster system tested at White Sands. This was taken from the capsule intended for the next manned Starliner flight and showed the same problems as the one at the ISS.

"I would say the White Sands testing did give us a surprise," Stich said Saturday. "It was this piece of Teflon that swells up and got in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the thruster the way it needs to. That's what caused the degradation of thrust. When we saw that, I think that's when things changed a bit for us."

When NASA took this finding to the thruster's manufacturer, Aerojet Rocketdyne, the propulsion company said it had never seen this phenomenon before. It was at this point that agency engineers started to believe that it might not be possible to identify the root cause of the problem in a timely manner and become comfortable enough with the physics to be sure that the thruster problem would not occur during Starliner's return to Earth.

It sounds to me like that system needs either to be re-designed, or there are problems with how its handled or how it's stored on the ground. It was also determined that environment seen by the thrusters was more severe than specified; in particular, one thruster in its "doghouse" portion of the system was hotter than the system was specified to work in.  

Of course, this means SpaceX helps out Boeing, nominally a competitor, but the whole idea of having two commercial crew providers was to deal with situations like one of them being unable to fly or get a crew home.

It won't be the first time that SpaceX has helped a competitor recently. In the last two years SpaceX has launched satellites for a low-Earth orbit Internet competitor, OneWeb, after Russia's space program squeezed the company; it has launched Europe's sovereign Galileo satellites after delays to the Ariane 6 rocket; and it has launched the Cygnus spacecraft built by NASA's other space station cargo services provider, Northrop Grumman, multiple times. Now SpaceX will help out Boeing, a crew competitor.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams at the docking port entry to the ISS, back around their June 6th arrival at the ISS. Image credit: NASA 

Oh, and that talk about the spacesuits not being compatible? There's already one spare Dragon suit onboard the ISS, the two tried it on and it fit one of them (the video conference didn't say which of them it was). The Crew-9 flight in September will bring a suit for the other. Somebody in the process knew how to specify that suit to SpaceX.