In this photo provided by NASA, astronauts Butch Wilmore, left, and Suni Williams inspect safety hardware aboard the International Space Station on August 9, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

NASA decided on Saturday (August 24, 2024) it’s too risky to bring two astronauts back to Earth in Boeing’s troubled new capsule, and they’ll have to wait until next year for a ride home with SpaceX. What should have been a weeklong test flight for the pair will now last more than eight months.

The seasoned pilots have been stuck at the International Space Station since the beginning of June. A cascade of vexing thruster failures and helium leaks in the new capsule marred their trip to the space station, and they ended up in a holding pattern as engineers conducted tests and debated what to do about the trip back.

After almost three months, the decision finally came down from NASA’s highest ranks on Saturday (August 24, 2024). Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams will come back in a SpaceX spacecraft in February. Their empty Starliner capsule will undock in early September and attempt to return on autopilot.

As Starliner’s test pilots, the pair should have overseen this critical last leg of the journey, with touchdown in the U.S. desert.

“A test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine,” said NASA Administration Bill Nelson. “And so the decision… is a commitment to safety.”

“This has not been an easy decision, but it is absolutely the right one,” added NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free.

It was a blow to Boeing, adding to the safety concerns plaguing the company on its airplane side. Boeing had counted on Starliner’s first crew trip to revive the troubled program after years of delays and ballooning costs. The company had insisted Starliner was safe based on all the recent thruster tests both in space and on the ground.

Boeing did not participate in Saturday’s news conference by NASA but released a statement: “Boeing continues to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft. We are executing the mission as determined by NASA, and we are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return.”

Retired Navy captains with previous long-duration spaceflight experience, Wilmore, 61, and Williams, 58, anticipated surprises when they accepted the shakedown cruise of a new spacecraft, although not quite to this extent.

Before their June 5 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, they said their families bought into the uncertainty and stress of their professional careers decades ago. During their lone orbital news conference last month, they said they had trust in the thruster testing being conducted. They had no complaints, they added, and enjoyed pitching in with space station work.

Wilmore’s wife, Deanna, was equally stoic in an interview earlier this month with WVLT-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, their home state. She was already bracing for a delay until next February: “You just sort of have to roll with it.”

There were few options.

The SpaceX capsule currently parked at the space station is reserved for the four residents who have been there since March. They will return in late September, their stay extended a month by the Starliner dilemma. NASA said it would be unsafe to squeeze two more into the capsule, except in an emergency.

The docked Russian Soyuz capsule is even tighter, capable of flying only three — two of them Russians wrapping up a yearlong stint.

So Wilmore and Williams will wait for SpaceX’s next taxi flight. It’s due to launch in late September with two astronauts instead of the usual four for a routine six-month stay. NASA yanked two to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return flight in late February.

NASA said no serious consideration was given to asking SpaceX for a quick stand-alone rescue. Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for three men whose original craft was damaged by space junk. The switch pushed their mission beyond a year, a U.S. space endurance record still held by Frank Rubio.

Starliner’s woes began long before its latest flight.

Bad software fouled the first test flight without a crew in 2019, prompting a do-over in 2022. Then parachute and other issues cropped up, including a helium leak in the capsule’s propellant system that nixed a launch attempt in May. The leak eventually was deemed to be isolated and small enough to pose no concern. But more leaks sprouted following liftoff, and five thrusters also failed.

All but one of those small thrusters restarted in flight. But engineers remain perplexed as to why some thruster seals appear to swell, obstructing the propellant lines, then revert to their normal size.

These 28 thrusters are vital. Besides needed for space station rendezvous, they keep the capsule pointed in the right direction at flight’s end as bigger engines steer the craft out of orbit. Coming in crooked could result in catastrophe.

With the Columbia disaster still fresh in many minds — the shuttle broke apart during reentry in 2003, killing all seven aboard — NASA embraced open debate over Starliner’s return capability. Dissenting views were stifled during Columbia’s doomed flight, just as they were during Challenger’s in 1986.

Despite Saturday’s decision, NASA isn’t giving up on Boeing.

NASA went into its commercial crew program a decade ago wanting two competing U.S. companies ferrying astronauts in the post-shuttle era. Boeing won the bigger contract: more than $4 billion, compared with SpaceX’s $2.6 billion.

With station supply runs already under its belt, SpaceX aced its first of now nine astronaut flights in 2020, while Boeing got bogged down in design flaws that set the company back more than $1 billion. NASA officials still hold out hope that Starliner’s problems can be corrected in time for another crew flight in another year or so.

An astronaut is shown in this handout photo provided by NASA participating in a spacewalk that took place on December 24, 2013, released on December 27, 2013.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Research in the expanding field of space medicine has identified many ways in which a microgravity environment and other factors can meddle with the human body during space missions. A new study has added to the field by showing that astronauts are more likely to experience headaches in space than previously known.

The study involved 24 astronauts from the U.S., European and Japanese space agencies who traveled aboard the International Space Station for up to 26 weeks. All but two of them reported experiencing headaches in space.

This was a larger proportion than the researchers had expected based on prior anecdotal evidence. The headaches – some resembling migraines and others resembling tension headaches – occurred not only during the first couple of weeks in space as the body goes through the process of adapting to microgravity, but also later.

The headaches occurring during the early period often present as migraine-like while those experienced later in space travel present more like a tension headache, the study found.

“We hypothesize that different mechanisms are involved for the early headache episodes – the first one to two weeks in space – versus later headache episodes,” said neurologist WPJ van Oosterhout of Zaans Medical Center and the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Neurology.

“In the first week, the body has to adapt to the lack of gravity, known as space adaptation syndrome. This phenomenon is similar to motion sickness, and can cause nausea, vomiting and dizziness, and headaches,” Van Oosterhout said. “The later headaches could result from an increase in intracranial pressure. Due to microgravity, there is more fluid accumulating in the upper part of the body and head, resulting in higher pressure in the skull.”

Migraines experienced on Earth are often throbbing and pulsating headaches lasting four to seven hours, accompanied by symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and hypersensitivity to light and sound, Van Oosterhout said. Tension-type headaches on Earth usually are a more dull pain felt over the entire head without those other symptoms, Van Oosterhout added.

The astronauts – 23 men and one woman, with an average age of about 47 – were aboard the International Space Station for missions that took place from November 2011 to June 2018, with a total of 378 headaches reported by 22 of the 24 astronauts during a total of 3,596 days in orbit. None of the 24 reported headaches in the three months after returning to Earth.

Thirteen of the astronauts were from NASA, six from the European Space Agency, two from Japan’s JAXA and one from the Canadian Space Agency. None had ever been diagnosed with migraines prior to their space missions and none had a history of recurrent headaches.

Various documented effects of space travel include bone and muscle atrophy, changes in the brain, cardiovascular system and immune system, issues with the balance system in the inner ear and a syndrome involving the eyes. Cancer risk from greater radiation exposure in space is another concern.

Experts are unsure of how much of a barrier these effects might be on human space travel over extended periods, for instance for journeys to our neighboring planet Mars or beyond.

“The honest answer is that we don’t know the effects of long-duration space travel – possibly years – on the human body,” Van Oosterhout said. “It is clear that even short-term – days or weeks – to medium-term – weeks or months – duration exposure to microgravity already has some effects, mostly reversible, on the human body. This is a clear task for the field of space medicine.”