Eight weeks after the Starliner spacecraft launched, NASA is still looking for possible answers to its technical issues—including the possibility of SpaceX lending a hand.
Yes, these headlines are continuing to say the astronauts are stranded, which really isn’t the case. This vehicle is working well enough to return them at any time.
The thing is, there is something weird going on with some of the thrusters (of which there are many for redundancy) and this is their only chance to investigate the issue. If they were to return with the astronauts now, it would mean leaving the thrust module to burn up in the atmosphere, and then we wouldn’t be able to test the problematic parts. We could still do that (leave now), but we’d miss out on this opportunity to test hardware and understand better why some thrusters failed.
On the other hand, this is still a huge waste of money and it’s one more example of Boeing bungling things. So I’m not saying this is a great situation, just that the astronauts are not actually “stranded”.
Pretty sure the ISS always has a Soyuz on hand to bring astronauts back, but if they use that, then all the astronauts have to go back because the “bail out” options will be gone. So troubleshooting and getting the boeing capsule working is the primary goal.
Well yes, that would suck to have to abandon the ISS for any period. Definitely not optimal. But as I said, they could leave in the Starliner right now, if they wanted, they have more than enough thrusters functional to control the craft. It just makes more sense to stay until they’ve done all the troubleshooting and know how to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
Yes, these headlines are continuing to say the astronauts are stranded, which really isn’t the case. This vehicle is working well enough to return them at any time.
The thing is, there is something weird going on with some of the thrusters (of which there are many for redundancy) and this is their only chance to investigate the issue. If they were to return with the astronauts now, it would mean leaving the thrust module to burn up in the atmosphere, and then we wouldn’t be able to test the problematic parts. We could still do that (leave now), but we’d miss out on this opportunity to test hardware and understand better why some thrusters failed.
On the other hand, this is still a huge waste of money and it’s one more example of Boeing bungling things. So I’m not saying this is a great situation, just that the astronauts are not actually “stranded”.
Pretty sure the ISS always has a Soyuz on hand to bring astronauts back, but if they use that, then all the astronauts have to go back because the “bail out” options will be gone. So troubleshooting and getting the boeing capsule working is the primary goal.
Well yes, that would suck to have to abandon the ISS for any period. Definitely not optimal. But as I said, they could leave in the Starliner right now, if they wanted, they have more than enough thrusters functional to control the craft. It just makes more sense to stay until they’ve done all the troubleshooting and know how to ensure this doesn’t happen again.