We ca n’t admit failure yet, which is a different situation from” an abundance of caution” and” we ca n’t admit failure yet,” but I have the impression that NASA is only going to show us what it is a few weeks later. If anything, that is what NASA’s Thursday media event should be.  ,
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The ground crew continue to do everything in their power to bring Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth aboard their disturbed Starliner space capsule on Day 50 of their weekly stay on board the International Space Station.
Although this particular Starliner was only intended for a 45-day remain, it appears to have decided it’s better to extend the batteries out for the extra time rather than risking Wimore and Williams returning home. NASA then says 90 times.
We only need to go back to May to briefly summarize how we arrived, or, to be more specific, how Wilmore and Williams got stuck off it. That’s when Starliner’s long-delayed second guarded test flight got scrubbed for the first time, due to a small gas leak in one of the company device’s 28 moving jets. Four more leakage and four more troubling, four failed jets were discovered when the object eventually arrived at the ISS.  ,
Several readers here have pointed out that Starliner has been insisted on by NASA that Wilmore and Williams can be brought home if an emergency calls for it, which is n’t exactly a vote of confidence. That’s the thin reed on which the space agency hangs its insistence that the explorers are n’t” stranded” on the ISS.
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Although it took a while before NASA was able to restart and bring two of the jets up electronically, Starliner was still delayed embarrassingly in getting it docked with ISS. Engineers have since developed new protocols to deal with an improbable set of circumstances that may cause the thrusters to malfunction seriously enough to seriously harm the team on the return trip. And NASA and Boeing engineers have just finished a number of jet testing at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, which are supposed to aid in understanding what went wrong and what might go bad with Starliner in place.
I had anticipated that NASA Commercial Crew Program Director Steve Stich would have something interesting to reveal now that the White Sands tests are finished. But at Thursday’s press conference, Stich said… not much, as it turned out.
” We’re going to fire all those thrusters to a number of pulses to make sure the whole system works as we anticipated and as it did last time we checked it,” he said, which would be expected. They’ll also take a look at the helium situation. ” We’ll pressurize manifold by manifold, and then hot-fire the thrusters, and then we’ll get a chance to look at the helium leak rates and verify that the system is stable”.
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How long will that take? Willie and Williams will return home when? On that point, Stich had nothing new to say. They’ll be up there indefinitely.  ,
The only thing that is of particular interest is the fact that the ground tests revealed degradations in the thrusters still in use here on Earth, which could explain the peculiar behavior of those in orbit. If I had to guess, the years that Boeing spent putting Starliner on the ground caused subcontractor Aerojet’s thrusters to be stretched past their best-by date.
Since it has been so long since the last one, Stich felt like he needed to hold a press conference to share some positive news, it was not the one he desired.
