In the Wake of Crew-9 an Awkward Question

Now that Crew-9 has completed its mission, Crew-10 is on the Space Station and arguments about whether the Starliner Crew Flight Test (CFT) astronauts were stuck, stranded or pick a word are receding into completely meaningless, we come back to an old question. 

What about Starliner? 

During the various things I watched over the last few days, I think it was during the NASA press conference after the Crew-10 launch, someone asked if Boeing was still committed to Starliner and getting it fixed and flightworthy.  The answer was that Boeing had universally said yes; from the program officials working on improving Starliner to relatively new CEO Kelly Ortberg.  

Space.com is trying to understand the current situation and the directions things are heading.  They describe things as muddled.  

"We're in the process of looking at that vehicle, looking at the helium system," he added. "We've got some candidate seals that we're going to replace. We'll get into some testing here over the summer timeframe with what we call an 'integrated doghouse' at White Sands [a NASA test facility in New Mexico]."

"Doghouse" is the term NASA and Boeing use for the thruster pods on Starliner's service module. The module sports four such pods, each of which houses 12 thrusters — five of the relatively powerful "orbital maneuvering and control" (OMAC) class and seven "reaction control system" (RCS) thrusters, which are used for finer adjustments, such as those needed during docking.

The thruster issues and helium leaks were the essence of the problems with Starliner last June.  Five of the 28 RCS thrusters failed to operate properly during Starliner's approach to the ISS.  The mission team eventually was able to bring four of those five affected ones back online.  In the months since the return to the ground, the failure has been linked to overheating.  Repeated thruster firings can apparently warm up the doghouses so much that some of their Teflon seals bulge, affecting propellant flow.  

This theory is informing adjustments to Starliner's design and operations going forward, according to Stich. [Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program]

"I think we have some changes we need to make to the way we heat those thrusters, the way we fire those thrusters, and then we can test that on the next flight," he said.
...
"We need to make sure we can eliminate the helium leaks; eliminate the service module thruster issues that we had on docking," Stich said.

At this point, whether the next Starliner test flight will be manned or not is undecided, but either way, NASA wants the Starliner to be completed and capable of being a manned mission if that's decided at the last minute.  Fully flight ready, exactly like the capsule would be for a regular mission,  "to have all the systems in place that we could fly a crew with," as Steve Stich put it.  

Remember, from the Ars Technica summary of the return flight in early September that while Starliner successfully returned to the ground, it wasn't a trouble-free flight.

A couple of fresh technical problems cropped up as Starliner cruised back to Earth. One of 12 control jets on the crew module failed to ignite at any time during Starliner's flight home. These are separate thrusters from the small engines that caused trouble earlier in the Starliner mission. There was also a brief glitch in Starliner's navigation system during reentry.

It seems that little progress has happened with Starliner in the six months since the capsule returned without its crew.  The problems that affected the mission appear to still be there, and NASA is stubbornly holding onto its original plans for the crew transport systems.  

NASA plans to certify Starliner for operational, long-duration astronaut missions shortly after this next flight, if all goes well.

"We really need to get Boeing into a crewed rotation," Stich said. "Butch and Suni's return on Dragon, to me, shows how important it is to have two different crew transportation systems, the importance of Starliner and the redundancy that we're building into human spaceflight for our low Earth orbit economy."

Starliner docked to the ISS during June 2024's flight. Image credit: NASA