Boeing Revealed What Happened To Starliner During Return: Thruster Failed!
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Boeing Revealed What Happened To Starliner During Return: Thruster Failed!
Finally TOUCHED DOWN!
At 12 AM ET on Saturday, 7 September, Boeing Star liner landed safely at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, ending 12 weeks in space.
Despite what was deemed a safe re-entry, as we can see, propulsion issues on the Star liner continue to persist.
So, should we consider this a successful landing of the vehicle?
Find out everything in today’s Techmap episode.
But before we begin, let’s subscribe to the channel to stay up-to-date with the latest space news.
At 6:04 PM EDT on September 6, Boeing’s uncrewed Star liner spacecraft was undocked from the International Space Station.
Engineers used Calypso’s forward thrusters, avoiding the problematic thrusters that had previously malfunctioned. As a result, the undocking process went quite smoothly, except that as Star liner was backing away from the station, one of the thrusters did not fire as expected. In Nasa’s words, although this means a slight loss of redundancy, it shouldn’t keep Star liner from getting through reentry and landing as expected.
Boeing Revealed What Happened To Starliner During Return: Thruster Failed!
About four hours after Undocking, mission control confirmed Star liner had completed its deorbit burn and jettisoned its service module to burn up over the Pacific Ocean.
Star liner’s crew module, without its crew, continued to fly by itself, heading for a landing in New Mexico.
To avoid any potential risk, the Star liner crew module uses a different set of thrusters from those that caused trouble during Star liner’s flight.
But another problem happened as one of the 12 control thrusters on the crew module failed in a test earlier in the evening. A single thruster failure isn’t expected to be an issue for entry.
Luckily, at 12:00 AM ET on Saturday, Star liner landed at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams will remain onboard the International Space Station as members of Expedition 71/72 before their return onboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft no earlier than February 2025.
Boeing Revealed What Happened To Starliner During Return: Thruster Failed!
Despite being deemed to be a safe landing, as we can see, there are still thruster problems that happened during the journey. Nasa might have predicted these problems, thus, Star liner’s departure from the station was set to be different from what was originally planned when it would have astronauts on board.
The spacecraft would make a relatively rapid departure from the vicinity of the station, called a “breakout burn,” rather than a more gradual separation that would include a flyaround of the station.
This maneuver was designed to minimize stress on the thrusters, particularly the aft-facing ones that had experienced problems in June.
Once Star liner is away from the vicinity of the station, though, controllers plan to test-fire several of the thrusters. Nasa’s Steve Stich said engineers were still choosing what thrusters to test, but that they may involve some of the aft thrusters that experienced problems, including one that appeared to lose all thrust on approach to the station and did not recover in subsequent tests.
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