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TwoNASAastronauts who depend on to orbit on Boeing ’s Starliner are currently stranded in space aboard the International Space Station ( ISS ) after locomotive engineer discovered numerous issue with the Boeing spacecraft . Teams on the ground are now step on it to tax Starliner ’s status .
cosmonaut Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were originally scheduled to return to Earth on June 13 after a week on the ISS , but their check has been extend for a third time due to the ongoing issues . The astronaut will now return home no sooner than June 26th , grant to NASA .
An artist’s rendition shows Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner heading for a rendezvous with the International Space Station.
After years of delays , Boeing ’s Starliner capsulesuccessfully blasted offon its inaugural crewed flight from Florida ’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. EDT on June 5 . But during the 25 - hour flight , engineer find five separatehelium leaksto the spacecraft ’s pusher organization .
Now , to give engineer meter to troubleshoot the faults , NASA has announced it will push back the touch-and-go riposte flight , extending the crew ’s hitch on the infinite station to at least three weeks .
" We ’ve learned that our helium system is not perform as design , " Mark Nappi , Boeing ’s Starliner program handler , said at a news league on June 18 . " Albeit doable , it ’s still not working like we design it . So we ’ve acquire to go figure that out . "
The restitution module of the Starliner ballistic capsule is presently docked to the ISS ’s Harmony module as NASA and Boeing engineers assess the critical hardware issues aboard the vas , let in five atomic number 2 leaks to the system that pressurize the space vehicle ’s actuation system , and five thruster failures to its response - ascendancy system .
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After power the thrusters up on June 15 , engineers found that most of these issues appeared to be at least part dissolve , but their exact cause rest unknown .
However , the Harmony faculty ’s circumscribed fuel mean Starliner can only stay tail for 45 days , so the windowpane for a safe return flight is peg down .
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The topic are the in style in a long tilt of setbacks and headaches for Boeing ’s space vehicle . The company built the Starliner abridgement as a part of NASA ’s Commercial Crew Program , a partnership between the agency and secret fellowship to ferry cosmonaut into low Earth orbit follow the retirement of NASA ’s space shuttles in 2011.SpaceX ’s Crew Dragon also came from this initiative and has racked up12 crewed flightssince it began operate in 2020 .
But Starliner ’s first uncrewed exam flight in 2019 was scuppered by a software package fault that placed it in the incorrect orbit , and a second attempt was held back by issue with a fuel valve . After more reviews last year , the company had to determine matter with the capsule ’s parachutes and dispatch around a mi ( 1.6 klick ) of tapeline that was find to be inflammable .
The current mission is Boeing ’s third endeavour to take the gang to the ISS . The previous two were scrubbedby a vibrating atomic number 8 valveon the United Launch Alliance ’s Atlas quint roquette on which Starliner was mounted ( and which was germinate by Lockheed Martin ) and a computer bug in a ground launch sequencer , severally .
