NASA has just finished a press conference on the problem of returning the Boeing Starliner crew stuck on the ISS. After weighing all the pros and cons, the agency’s management decided to return the Boeing ship to Earth unmanned. The crew of two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will remain on duty at the ISS until February 2025.
A film-worthy story about those stuck in space. Image source: NASA
The return of the Boeing Starliner will take place in early September. As explained earlier, he needs to change the firmware from manual control to autopilot. The autopilot program had not been updated in more than two years since the Starliner’s previous automatic flight to the station. You need to not only install it, but also make sure that the systems that may have received a hardware update during this time are working. This takes time and the work may have already begun.
In order for Wilmore and Williams to return home normally on SpaceX’s Dragon, the Crew-9 mission ship will launch into orbit no earlier than September 24 with two crew members instead of the usual four. To do this, the capsule must be prepared. It is necessary to reconfigure the two vacant seats for Wilmore and Williams, and put flight suits for them in the capsule, as well as personal belongings for a long watch for another six months in orbit.
The return of the Boeing Starliner to Earth without a crew will allow us to collect additional data on correction engine failures without risk to people. This will also give Boeing information for further planning of work on the Starliner program, if it continues after all that has happened, because the ISS clock is also ticking and after 2030 the need for Boeing ships to deliver crews to the station will automatically disappear.