Sunita Williams stuck in space: Is it all over for Boeing?

Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore are still stuck in space. A trip to the International Space Station, which was supposed to last just over a week, has left the two astronauts stranded in space for over two months, with no confirmed return date, as of now.

We are hearing reports that NASA and Boeing are conducting over 1,00,000 computer model simulations to find the best possible way to bring the “Suni” and “Butch” back to Earth, but have been unable to find a concrete solution to undock the Boeing Starliner from the International Space Station safely and allow it to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and land.

Meanwhile, Sunita Williams’ is allegedly facing eyesight issues, a common occurrence due to long exposure to microgravity.

So, what went wrong?

On May 6, the day the Starliner was initially scheduled for launch, after years in the making, it was called off within a few hours of liftoff when the technicians and engineers discovered an abnormality on the pressure regulation valve in the liquid oxygen tank of the rocket.

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Mission experts and engineers then worked on the Starliner for a few more weeks while the next launch date was scheduled for June 1. However, again a software glitch delayed the mission, till June 5 when the Starliner finally took off with Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore, ready to power onwards to the International Space Station.

On June 6 at 1.34 pm, the Starliner successfully docked on the front-facing port of the Harmony module of the International Space Station. The good news was marred by the news that NASA had discovered further helium leaks on the Starliner after its arrival in orbit.

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On June 9 NASA announced that there would be a delay in the return date of the two astronauts who were meant to spend only a week at the ISS, as engineers were looking into system checkouts of the Starliner. On June 14, a second delay was announced, with the astronauts scheduled to now undock from the ISS on June 25.

On June 21, the return date for the spacecraft and the astronauts was shifted to July. On July 10, after unease began to set in the minds of the general public, hoping for the safe and quick return of their beloved space conquerors, Williams and Wilmore appeared in a reassuring telecast by NASA, while their experts and scientists laboured through tests to gain a better understanding of the issues that occurred during the Starliner’s launch and flight.

We are now in August with reassuring updates and statements from NASA, but no actual date of return.

Boeing is feeling scorching heat, as a company hit by massive scandals in the recent past, with a string of problems one after the other with its 737 MAX aircraft, deaths of whistleblowers, and now this.

Boeing and SpaceX have been in a space race since 2019. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program saw Boeing being given a contract worth $4.8 billion while SpaceX was given $3.1 billion to develop their respective space machines. However, SpaceX has managed to edge past Boeing in recent years, with Boeing’s space projects racking up $1.5 billion in unplanned costs in the past few years due to a series of technical mishaps and woes.

This has caused Boeing to go severely over budget and caused major delivery delays. This tardy and laid-back approach in a sector as sensitive as space aviation is unpardonable. If this was the private sector, they would have been fired by now, with SpaceX stepping in to make the capsules.

Boeing and NASA had set in motion two unmanned test flights many years ago. While the first one was a near disaster, the second was just about passable.

The third flight manned by Sunita and Barry, launched in June, whose safe return is currently in the daily prayers of most, especially the astronauts’ families.

Though NASA and Boeing are repeatedly issuing confident statements, problems have now come to a head when it has been revealed that NASA hasn’t approved the Starliner to fly under “non-emergency circumstances”.

Over the last few days, the possibility of the crew returning on Boeing’s arch nemesis, SpaceX’s capsule Dragon, has gone from a “No Way!” to “We’re looking into it.”

With NASA continuing to delay the exact return date, though the astronauts aren’t “stranded”, they can’t leave yet. Their ride up was by all accounts compromised and the ride down is either the “as of now unsafe” Starliner or the SpaceX Dragon which has not reached them yet.

The optics of having the Dragon bring the astronauts down is going to be awful for Boeing. This would not be the most favourable option for NASA either, since the entire reason they approved the crew capsules is that the Starliner has a high level of redundancy with its 28 RCS thrusters. This meant that despite one complete thruster failure, scientists and engineers have managed to bring four dysfunctional thrusters back online to ensure the safety of docking and undocking. All said and done, at the end of the day, the safety of the astronauts is the ultimate priority.

Can the Starliner bring the astronauts back safely? Most likely, yes.

In space aviation, re-entry is much less complicated than the extraordinarily precise docking process a spacecraft has to go through to get onto the International Space Station to begin with. Also, the complicated bits of the re-entry process are not something that this test flight has had any issues with, yet.

However, just a “most likely” is not enough to greenlight a space mission with a crew involved that has already run into many problems. Especially, since they have a proven alternative in SpaceX’s Dragon.

Also, Boeing’s long history of failures to get the thrusters working properly, despite years of well-documented issues, does not inspire great confidence. Ultimately whether it’s a Russian Soyuz, the SpaceX Dragon, or the greenlit Starliner, we hope political or corporate conflicts can be ignored in favour of the safety of the astronauts and we see them back on Earth as soon as possible!

Maybe, it is time NASA overhauled its programme and looked beyond its immediate pastures, at ISRO’s Gaganyaan or the Dream Chaser spacecraft in development.

For a global population, now being exposed on a daily basis to dreams and ambitions of extensive space exploration and possible human colonisation of Mars and the Moon, maybe it’s time for Boeing to gracefully exit the space aviation sector. Meanwhile, we wait with bated breath for the two astronauts to give us their signature thumbs up as they crawl out of their return capsule once it hits the good old-fashioned soil of Earth.

The author is a freelance journalist and features writer based out of Delhi. Her main areas of focus are politics, social issues, climate change and lifestyle-related topics. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.