When will Starliner return to space? NASA provides hint
The now famous ill-fated attempt to get Boeing's Starliner capsule to begin ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station was a setback, but not a fatal blow to the program, NASA leaders said Tuesday.
During a press conference to celebrate the return of test pilots Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, NASA executives Joel Montalbano and Steve Stich revealed testing on the Starliner was scheduled for this summer.
Boeing and NASA engineers identified seals that were candidates for replacement to see if it solved the helium leaks and other issues Starliner encountered last June, they explained.
Testing to see if the seal replacements correct those problems will take place in the New Mexico desert.
After those tests, they said NASA will determine when and how Starliner can return to the space rotation. Crew-11 is scheduled to blast off with a SpaceX Dragon capsule as soon as July, but they left the fate of Crew-12 up in the air.
Another option, they said, was to launch an unmanned – but fully crew-capable – Starliner capsule to the Space Station, which could be used to resupply the station or positioned as a backup return vehicle in case of an emergency.
They reaffirmed Boeing's commitment to the program, despite the mounting costs, and NASA's goal of having multiple companies capable of delivering humans into orbit.
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Read more: Hiltzik: The Pentagon's former top UFO hunter talks about COVID-19, Haitian pet-eaters and pseudoscience generally The deepest mystery about the proposed budget cuts is who drafted them. Circumstantial evidence points to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the main author of Project 2025, the infamous right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. NASA doesn't appear in Project 2025 at all. It does, however, appear in a purportedly anti-woke 2022 budget proposal Vought published through his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America. In that document, he called for a 50% cut in NASA's science programs, especially what Vought called its "misguided ... Global Climate Change programs," and a more than 15% cut in the overall NASA budget. The 47% cut in science programs and 24% overall is "very suspiciously close to what Vought said he would do" in 2022, Dreier says. 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The consequences of all this amount to an existential crisis for NASA and American space science. They may never recover from the shock. The void will be filled by others, such as China, which could hardly be Trump's dream. At the end of our conversation, I asked Dreier what will become of the 19 satellites and space telescopes that would be orphaned by the proposed budget. "You turn off the lights and they just tumble into the blackness of space," he told me. "It's easy to lose a spacecraft. That's the weird, symbolic aspect of this. They're our eyes to the cosmos. This is us metaphorically closing our eyes." Get the latest from Michael HiltzikCommentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize me up. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
