While NASA and Boeing are focused on finishing the first astronaut mission aboard the Starliner spacecraft early next month, what happens next is already on everyone's mind. mission with astronauts, with crew including NASA's Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Extra testing still remains ahead of undocking, team officials emphasized; Starliner experiencedthat extended its Crew Flight Test mission from an originally planned 10 days after launching June 5.
Starliner's first helium leak was found on the launch pad in early May, after a scrub due to a valve issue with the capsule'sAtlas V rocket. The leak was not deemed an immediate threat to launch, but NASA and Boeing uncovered a design vulnerability in which, if enough of Starliner's reaction control system thrusters go offline, the capsule's reentry could be affected.
The mission team is using the extra time in space to understand how Starliner's service module is behaving, as it contains most of the spacecraft's fuel and power and will be discarded during landing. The RCS thrusters appear to be mostly working now, while the helium leaks are"stable and less than measured ," according to Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing's commercial crew program.
"We fully intend to eliminate these, call them nuisances, for the flight," he added."The good thing about the situation that we have is that we can stay up a little bit longer, like we talked, and get as much data as we possibly can so that we can fully understand this, or understand to the best of our ability, so we can eliminate it. And our intent is to fully eliminate these issues.
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