BOEING STARLINER: ‘I think we’re missing something fundamental that’s going on inside the thrusters.’

The flight’s other significant problem developed on Thursday, just hours before Starliner was due to dock at the station. This was the failure of five of the vehicle’s 28 reaction-control system thrusters at certain times. These small thrusters are used for fine pointing and maneuvering, especially close to the space station.

During a troubleshooting process, in which the thrusters were essentially reset and fired again, four of the five thrusters came back online. This gave NASA confidence to allow Starliner to approach and ultimately dock with the space station.

However, this is now the second consecutive mission in which a subset of these small thrusters failed to operate during a Starliner flight. During the vehicle’s previous mission, Orbital Flight Test-2 in May 2022, some of these same thrusters failed to operate when called upon during the approach to the station. Although two small software fixes were applied after that flight, they appear not to have addressed the issue.

“I think we’re missing something fundamental that’s going on inside the thrusters,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager on Thursday. However, he and Nappi also said they believed that the failure of the thrusters was likely due to a “data issue” rather than the thruster hardware or software.

Stich declined to speculate about how long it would take to study and resolve the thruster issue as part of the certification process necessary to clear Starliner for operational crewed missions to the International Space Station. Boeing is contracted to fly six of these missions, each carrying four astronauts for six-month increments on the station between now and 2030.

At this point, I’m wondering if Boeing would rather just get out of its six ISS missions and stop bleeding money on Starliner.

Meanwhile: As leaks on the space station worsen, there’s no clear plan to deal with them.

The microscopic structural cracks are located inside the small PrK module on the Russian segment of the space station, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module. After the leak rate doubled early this year during a two-week period, the Russians experimented with keeping the hatch leading to the PrK module closed intermittently and performed other investigations. But none of these measures taken during the spring worked.
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However, there appears to be rising concern in the ISS program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The space agency often uses a 5×5 “risk matrix” to classify the likelihood and consequence of risks to spaceflight activities, and the Russian leaks are now classified as a “5” both in terms of high likelihood and high consequence. Their potential for “catastrophic failure” is discussed in meetings.

In responding to questions from Ars by email, NASA public relations officials declined to make program leaders available for an interview. The ISS program is currently managed by Dana Weigel, a former flight director. She recently replaced Joel Montalbano, who became deputy associate administrator for the agency’s Space Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

One source familiar with NASA’s efforts to address the leaks confirmed to Ars that the internal concerns about the issue are serious. “We heard that basically the program office had a runaway fire on their hands and were working to solve it,” this person said. “Joel and Dana are keeping a lid on this.”

Great reporting by Eric Berger — read the whole thing.