Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is coming back to Earth… without its crew:
NASA officials announced on Saturday that the troubled Boeing Starliner spacecraft that shuttled two astronauts to space in June will return to earth without them.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stuck in space after engineers discovered helium leaks and issues involving thrusters shortly after Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner docked with the International Space Station, which prompted NASA and Boeing to investigate.
The uncrewed return allows NASA and Boeing to continue gathering testing data on Starliner during its upcoming flight back to earth, while also not accepting more risk than necessary for its crew, NASA officials said.
This is a major embarrassment for Boeing, at one time considered the most reliable company in aerospace. That two astronauts should be stuck in space for a time yet to be determined calls to mind a certain movie of years ago. I have no hard data on the subject, but I certainly hope the International Space Station’s (ISS) environmental systems won’t be under excessive strain supporting two unexpected long-term residents until SpaceX can mount a rescue mission.
Space travel still has considerable glamor even today, when space seems a conquered frontier. To be blunt, it’s not. We’re still using chemical rockets to get up there, and still bound by Newton’s Third Law in the design of any craft that must travel to or through space. Life support in space is a partially solved problem: only on conditions, and only for a limited time. We’re still a great distance from establishing enduring beachheads in space, or on other planets or moons.
In short, we still don’t know enough to take the “high frontier” casually. Certainly we mustn’t take it for granted. My prayers this night are for Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, and for their eventual safe return to the home of Mankind.
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I know this decision was tough, so I’m glad that one of the people making it was a Bowersox. 🙂
Specifically, Ken Bowersox, now head of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. He’s a former astronaut himself, having flown two Shuttle missions as pilot, two as commander, and then was in command of the Station for Expedition 6, which was when Columbia went down, so he wound up coming home on a Soyuz…and even then, the capsule chose to make a ballistic reentry for some reason and landed him and his crew hundreds of miles off target. So I’d say he knows a thing or two about wonky spacecraft.
He’s not a close relative, but all of us with that last name are related in some fashion or another.