This Saturday, Crew-9 takes off from Cape Caaveral at 1:17 p.m. EDT (7:17 p.m. in Spain), a mission, in principle, routine for SpaceX in which it will transport a new batch of astronauts to the International Space Station its acronym in English), as happens every, more or less, six months. However, the trip has ended up becoming the ‘rescue plan’ for the astronauts trapped in space, Suni Williams and Butch Willmore, who arrived with another ship that, after registering several failures, finally ended up returning empty at the beginning of September. . Quite a ‘space soap opera’ that has made headlines around the world this summer and that this Saturday signs its last (although not definitive) chapter.
It all started on June 5, shortly after Wilmore and Williams took off Starliner, the Boeing ship that is proposed as an alternative to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon (owned by the always controversial Elon Musk). It was the first manned test flight, so the teams were prepared for not everything to go perfect. However, since its arrival in orbit, the Starliner had problems: first several helium leaks (which were added to those found before launch and which delayed takeoff for a month) and then with the engines: 5 of the 28 thrusters failed, which caused problems when docking at the ISS, the ship’s destination. Their trip, scheduled for a week, dragged on for months.
After the entire summer of tests – both in the damaged ship and in the NASA facilities in White Sands (New Mexico) with replicas of the propellants, and press conferences in which no specific date was given for the return of the trapped astronauts – at the end of August NASA announced that Williams and Wilmore would not return on the Starliner, but on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The Starliner, for its part, will return home alone.
Space flight is risky, even in its safest and most routine forms. A test flight, by nature, is neither safe nor routine – Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, noted at the press conference. The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring home the uncrewed Boeing Starliner is the result of our commitment to safety, our core value.
The consequences of NASA’s decision
And that decision had consequences. The first was the one-month delay of the launch of Crew-9, the next rotation mission to the ISS. Until the Starliner undocked from the orbital laboratory, the new crew could not dock. And when NASA finally decided that Williams and Wilmore would return home on Crew Dragon, the Crew-9 crew, consisting of NASA astronauts Nick Hage, Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, plus Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, will be reduced from four to two to make room for the two trapped. Thus, Cardman and Wilson were left out and Hague and Gorbunov will fly as planned to the ISS this Saturday, returning with Williams and Wilmore next February.
The decision for the trapped astronauts to stay longer and not return immediately is motivated by the complicated rotations on the ISS: launching each ship back and forth involves a non-negligible cost, in addition to planning in terms of resources and supplies. In fact, it is not the first time that it has been decided to extend a space mission: the last time was just a year ago, when NASA astronaut Frank Rubio had to stay six more months (one year in total) after several escapes. registered on different Russian Soyuz ships.
It would have been a safe landing
After the Starliner returned to Earth with an almost perfect trip, during the press conference the manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, Steve Stich, acknowledged that it would also have been a safe and successful landing with the crew on board. However, remembering the lessons learned from the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, NASA stressed that it does not want to put astronauts at risk any more than necessary. The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring home the unmanned Boeing Starliner is the result of a commitment to safety, said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. Since then, NASA has worked hard to create an atmosphere where people are encouraged to come forward and speak their minds, and I think today is a good example of that.
In addition to being a rescue mission of sorts, Crew-9 will be hysterical for other reasons. It will be the first crewed launch to take off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Caaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and only the second crewed launch from the Space Force site overall, after the test launch of the Starliner in June.
