{"id":5990,"date":"2024-07-27T23:13:47","date_gmt":"2024-07-27T17:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/?p=5990"},"modified":"2024-07-27T23:13:47","modified_gmt":"2024-07-27T17:28:47","slug":"nasa-says-no-return-date-yet-for-astronauts-and-troubled-boeing-capsule-at-space-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/nasa-says-no-return-date-yet-for-astronauts-and-troubled-boeing-capsule-at-space-station\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA says no return date yet for astronauts and troubled Boeing capsule at space station"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Already more than a month late getting back, two NASA astronauts will remain at the International Space Station until engineers finish working on problems plaguing their Boeing capsule, officials said Thursday.<\/p>\n

Test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were supposed to visit the orbiting lab for about a week and return in mid-June, but thruster failures and helium leaks on Boeing\u2019s new Starliner capsule prompted NASA and Boeing to keep them up longer.<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said mission managers are not ready to announce a return date. The goal is to bring Wilmore and Williams back aboard Starliner, he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll come home when we\u2019re ready,\u201d Stich said.<\/p>\n

Stich acknowledged that backup options are under review. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule is another means of getting NASA astronauts to and from the space station.<\/p>\n

\u201cNASA always has contingency options,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Engineers last week completed testing on a spare thruster in the New Mexico desert and will rip it apart to try to understand what went wrong ahead of the Starliner\u2019s docking. Five thrusters failed as the capsule approached the space station on June 6, a day after liftoff. Four have since been reactivated.<\/p>\n

Each of the 28 maneuvering thrusters can fit in a hand and weighs 2 pounds (1 kilogram). The capsule is also outfitted with bigger engines for dropping out of orbit at flight\u2019s end. All these are part of a segment that is discarded before landing, which means nothing to study for future flights.<\/p>\n

After the space shuttles retired, NASA hired private companies for astronaut rides to the space station, paying Boeing and SpaceX billions of dollars.<\/p>\n

This was the Boeing\u2019s first test flight with a crew aboard. The initial demo in 2019, flying empty, never made it to the space station because of bad software, and Boeing repeated the test in 2022. More issues later cropped up.<\/p>\n

SpaceX has been ferrying astronauts since 2020. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rockets have been grounded for the past two weeks because of an upper-stage failure on a satellite-delivery mission. The longer the stand-down continues, the more likely upcoming crew flights will be delayed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Already more than a month late getting back, two NASA astronauts will remain at the International Space Station until engineers finish working on problems plaguing their Boeing capsule, officials said Thursday. Test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were supposed to visit the orbiting lab for about a week and return in mid-June, but thruster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":983,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5991,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990\/revisions\/5991"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}