Tag: international space station

An International Space Station Leak Is Getting Worse—and Keeping NASA Up at Night

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US space officials do not like to talk about the perils of flying astronauts on the aging International Space Station, elements of which are now more than a quarter of a century old.

However, a new report confirms that NASA managers responsible for operating the space station are seriously concerned about a small Russian part of the station, essentially a tunnel that connects a larger module to a docking port, which is leaking.

Russian and US officials have known that this small PrK module, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module, has been leaking since September 2019. A new report, published Thursday by NASA’s inspector general, provides details not previously released by the space agency that underline the severity of the problem.

New Details About the Leak

For example, in February of this year NASA identified an increase in the leak rate from less than 1 pound of atmosphere a day to 2.4 pounds a day, and in April this rate increased to 3.7 pounds a day. Despite years of investigation, neither Russian nor US officials have identified the underlying cause of the leak.

“Although the root cause of the leak remains unknown, both agencies have narrowed their focus to internal and external welds,” the report, signed by Deputy Inspector General George A. Scott, states.

The plan to mitigate the risk is to keep the hatch on the Zvezda module leading to the PrK tunnel closed. Eventually, if the leak worsens further, this hatch might need to be closed permanently, reducing the number of Russian docking ports on the space station from four to three.

Publicly, NASA has sought to minimize concerns about the cracking issue because it remains, to date, confined to the PrK tunnel and has not spread to other parts of the station. Nevertheless, Ars reported in June that the cracking issue has reached the highest level of concern on the space agency’s 5×5 “risk matrix” to classify the likelihood and consequence of risks to spaceflight activities. The Russian leaks are now classified as a “5” both in terms of high likelihood and high consequence.

At the time, NASA would not comment on, or confirm, the space agency’s concerns about the risk matrix rating. However, the new report confirms the agency’s concerns.

“In May and June 2024, ISS Program and Roscosmos officials met to discuss heightened concerns with the increased leak rate,” the inspector general’s report states. “The ISS Program subsequently elevated the Service Module Transfer Tunnel leak risk to the highest level of risk in its risk management system. According to NASA, Roscosmos is confident they will be able to monitor and close the hatch to the Service Module prior to the leak rate reaching an untenable level. However, NASA and Roscosmos have not reached an agreement on the point at which the leak rate is untenable.”

An Uncertain Future in Low Earth Orbit

The report comes as NASA is considering the future of the space station. The US space agency and Russia have an agreement to continue flying the station through 2028, and NASA would like to extend operations to 2030. NASA had anticipated that it would agree to this extension more than a year ago, but as of yet no agreement has been finalized.

Once the station reaches the end of its life, NASA intends to transition its activities in low Earth orbit onto private space stations, and it has funded initial development work by Axiom Space, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin, and Voyager Space. Northrop has since dropped out of the competition—determining that it would not be a profitable business. There is general uncertainty as to whether any of the private space station operators will be ready in 2030.

NASA’s other potential option is extending the life of the space station beyond 2030, but this would require a lot of work to ensure the space station’s structure remains viable and yet another extension agreement with Russia. The US partnership with that nation has been severely strained by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Extending the ISS past 2030 will require significant funding to operate and maintain the station, acceptance of increased risk stemming from its components and aging structures, and assurances of continued support from NASA’s international partners,” the new report states. “Further complicating matters is the likelihood that NASA may continue to face a flat or reduced budget, inflation, and supply chain challenges.”

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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September 28, 2024
The Starliner stranding shows why NASA was wise to have a backup plan

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After any problem with a rocket launch or mission, experts echo the same refrain: space is hard. As progress in the space industry accelerates, that mantra is becoming more relevant, not less, but that is because we are facing the difficulties of space flight more frequently – and, largely, overcoming them.

The situation unfolding on the International Space Station (ISS) over the past few months is a perfect example. Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft launched for its first crewed flight on 5 June, but hardware issues meant that once it arrived at the ISS, it was unclear if it would be safe for the two NASA astronauts it carried to safely ride it back to Earth as planned.

So, after testing on the ground and much deliberation, NASA pivoted and announced that the astronauts would be extending their stay in space and coming home in February 2025 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft instead (see “Stranded ISS astronauts reveal the US space programme is not in crisis”). Thanks to the wise decision NASA made a decade ago to choose two companies to build capsules to shuttle astronauts into space instead of just one, a potentially devastating issue became a mere inconvenience. We have known the whole time that space is hard, and preparation paid off.

The first ever civilian spacewalk may well be the most dangerous spacewalk of all time

Hopefully, intense preparation will also pay off for the crew of SpaceX’s upcoming Polaris Dawn mission. If all goes well, it will include the first ever civilian spacewalk, which may well be the most dangerous spacewalk of all time (see page 8).

If the walk goes smoothly, it will be another big win for commercial space flight and for SpaceX in particular – not least because it will be the first test of the firm’s new spacesuits. Ageing suits have been a looming problem for NASA and other space agencies for decades – those in use by NASA are the same ones astronauts wore in the 1980s, and they are long past their prime. A reliable new spacesuit that even civilians can wear comfortably, with improved mobility and temperature control, would be a huge win. It would make space just a little bit less hard.

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September 4, 2024
Strange Noises Are Coming from Inside Boeing’s Starliner Spacecraft

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On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft.

“I’ve got a question about Starliner,” Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it.”

Wilmore said he was not sure if there was some oddity in the connection between the station and the spacecraft causing the noise, or something else. He asked the flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via “hardline” to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months.

Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. “Alright Butch, that one came through,” Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. “It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping.”

Listen to a recording of the noises heard by Butch Wilmore.

“I’ll do it one more time, and I’ll let y’all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. “Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out.”

A Space Oddity

A recording of this audio, and Wilmore’s conversation with Mission Control, was captured and shared by a Michigan-based meteorologist named Rob Dale.

It was not immediately clear what was causing the odd, and somewhat eerie noise. As Starliner flies to the space station, it maintains communications with the space station via a radio frequency system. Once docked, however, there is a hardline umbilical that carries audio.

Astronauts notice such oddities in space from time to time. For example, during China’s first human spaceflight int 2003, astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard what sounded like an iron bucket being knocked by a wooden hammer while in orbit. Later, scientists realized the noise was due to small deformations in the spacecraft due to a difference in pressure between its inner and outer walls.

This weekend’s sonar-like noises most likely have a benign cause, and Wilmore certainly did not sound frazzled. But the odd noises are worth noting given the challenges that Boeing and NASA have had with the debut crewed flight of Starliner, including substantial helium leaks in flight, and failing thrusters. NASA announced a week ago that, due to uncertainty about the flyability of Starliner, it would come home without its original crew of Wilmore and Suni Williams.

Starliner is now due to fly back autonomously to Earth on Friday, September 6. Wilmore and Williams will return to Earth next February, flying aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft scheduled to launch with just two astronauts later this month.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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September 2, 2024
Starliner failure: Stranded ISS astronauts reveal the US space programme is not in crisis

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Boeing’s Starliner capsule won’t shuttle astronauts home from space this year

NASA

It’s official: Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams are staying on the International Space Station (ISS) until at least February. This is a major setback for Boeing’s Starliner, the capsule that brought them there, but it doesn’t spell doom for the US space programme. Instead, it highlights the success of the move from governments providing the only rockets to space to the proliferation of commercial spaceflight options.

This is exactly the contingency NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which uses spacecraft built by private companies to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, was planned to handle. “Commercial Crew purposefully chose two providers for redundancy in case of exactly this kind of situation,” says Laura Forczyk, an independent consultant in the space industry. The two NASA astronauts were initially supposed to return to Earth about a week after they arrived at the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule on 5 June. But due to problems with the spacecraft, they will now stay for an extended mission before coming home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft instead of Starliner.

“If they had only selected one provider, it would have been Boeing, because SpaceX was the risky prospect at the time,” says Forczyk. “So in a way, this is a triumph of the Commercial Crew Program.”

This mission was Starliner’s first crewed test flight, and it was rocky from the start. Leaky valves and thruster failures during the journey into space forced NASA and Boeing to reconsider whether the craft would be safe to shuttle the astronauts home. They ran tests of the thrusters on the ground, and the results were inconclusive – there was still some risk of the thrusters failing on the way home.

The safest backup plan is for the astronauts to stay on the ISS until SpaceX’s tried-and-true Crew Dragon capsule has room to bring them home in early 2025. In the meantime, Starliner will autonomously undock from the ISS in September and return to Earth without crew, and Boeing engineers will continue troubleshooting.

“This was a test mission, but sometimes in tests, the answer is, you’ve got something you need to fix,” said retired NASA astronaut Michael Fossum in a statement. “Tests don’t always prove that everything worked perfectly.”

In a 24 August press conference, NASA administrator Bill Nelson was adamant that Starliner will get another shot at flying a crew to the ISS, but others aren’t so sure. Boeing’s contract states that the craft cannot be certified for real missions until it has had a successful test flight – which this was not. If NASA requires Starliner to do another test flight, it could push the first operational flight until 2026 at the earliest, says Forczyk. With the ISS slated to close up shop around 2030, getting Starliner ready for active duty may just not be worth it.

Without the redundancy of the Commercial Crew Program, Starliner’s failure could have left the US wholly without a launch provider. As it is, SpaceX will continue shuttling astronauts to and from the ISS. Wilmore and Williams will have to stay on the ISS a bit longer, but they are veteran astronauts and have the experience and equipment to jump right into daily life in space until they can be brought safely back to Earth.

It is even possible the hard work and inconvenience of an extended stay might not outweigh the excitement of life in orbit for Wilmore and Williams. “I know them really well, and in a way, I think they were a little disappointed to fly in space with such a short amount of time,” said Fossum. “They both also have done long duration missions on the space station before… and they both loved it.”

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August 28, 2024
The Boeing Starliner Astronauts Will Come Home on SpaceX’s Dragon Next Year

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NASA has announced that astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams will return to Earth next February aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.

The announcement at a press conference today caps off months of speculation about the best plan to safely bring the astronauts home after malfunctions with their ride, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, postponed their departure from the International Space Station in June. Now, NASA has decided that Starliner will return home without Wilmore and Williams, who will stay on with the existing station crew and will return on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission next year.

“Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said at the briefing. “We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS.”

Wilmore and Williams launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 5, becoming the first astronauts to perform a crewed test flight of Starliner, a capsule developed by Boeing to ferry people to and from the ISS.

During the approach to the station, five of Starliner’s 28 thrusters failed to function. The crew was able to restore four of them and safely docked with the station, where they discovered Starliner’s propulsion system was also leaking helium from multiple places.

Wilmore and Williams were originally scheduled to stay onboard the ISS for about a week before returning to Earth in Starliner. But their return has been delayed for more than two months as mission planners struggled to isolate the cause of the thruster problems and assess the risks of using Starliner for the flight home. NASA’s plan will leave them on ISS for a total of eight months, longer than the typical six-month stay but not unprecedented.

Instead of sending a four-person crew to the ISS onboard SpaceX’s Dragon in September as planned, two of the seats on the capsule will be left open for Wilmore and Williams. New Dragon spacesuits for the astronauts, along with other necessary supplies, will be brought to the station in the coming months.

NASA has emphasized that Wilmore and Williams have not been “stranded,” nor are they in any danger. Likewise, the astronauts have publicly approached the extended stay as a lucky break that lets them rack up more time in space.

“We are having a great time here on ISS,” Williams told reporters in a July call from the ISS. “You know, Butch and I have been up here before, and it feels like coming back home. It feels good to float around. It feels good to be in space and work up here with the International Space Station team.”

Cargo ships regularly dock with the ISS, providing enough supplies for all crew members onboard, and NASA considers Starliner to be safe enough for the astronauts to use in the case of an emergency evacuation of the ISS. NASA and Boeing have disagreed in recent weeks on the safety of Starliner. Whereas NASA has decided that the unresolved questions about Starliner require a crew and spacecraft shuffle, Boeing has maintained that Starliner is up to the safety standards required to complete the crewed mission.

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August 24, 2024
Starliner: Two NASA astronauts may be stuck on the space station until February

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Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams on the International Space Station

NASA

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams may be stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) until February 2025 after issues cropped up with the spacecraft they rode to the station. This was the first crewed test flight of that capsule, Boeing’s Starliner, and it is not yet clear whether it will be safe for Wilmore and Williams to use it to get home.

Starliner launched on 5 June, with the intention of spending about a week docked to the ISS before shuttling the astronauts back to Earth. The launch had been delayed by a myriad of small problems with the spacecraft, and even on the day of lift-off the craft experienced minor helium leaks that engineers decided were not enough of a problem for another delay.

But by the time it reached the ISS, more helium leaks had sprung and five of Starliner’s 28 thrusters had failed. Wilmore and Williams boarded the ISS safely – but it is now a month beyond their planned return to Earth, and the next move is uncertain.

“When we started this mission, it was a test mission,” said Ken Bowersox at NASA during a 7 August press conference. “We knew that it potentially had a higher risk than a flight on a vehicle that has more experience.” Now, he says there are disagreements within NASA as to whether the risk of more leaks and thruster failure during a return flight is too high to put people back on board Starliner.

A major part of assessing that risk has been attempting to recreate the issues that Starliner has seen in space with tests on the ground, said NASA’s Steve Stich during the press conference. He said there has been some progress, but not yet enough to significantly lower the uncertainty in how Starliner will perform on its way back to Earth. “We can’t totally prove with certainty [that] what we’re seeing on orbit is exactly what we’re seeing on the ground,” said Stich.

Of course, this does not mean that Wilmore and Williams will be stuck aboard the ISS forever – there are contingency plans. If NASA does decide that the risks with Starliner are too high, Starliner’s software will have to be reconfigured for an autonomous, uncrewed return to Earth. Then, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule currently docked to the ISS will be reconfigured to carry two extra astronauts.

But that isn’t the main option. There is another plan to bring the astronauts home using the next Crew Dragon that is launched. The date for that launch was just delayed to September – it was originally intended to carry four astronauts to the ISS, but it may carry only two, leaving room for Wilmore and Williams when the mission is over in February 2025.

Wilmore and Williams are trained to perform all of the planned activities for that mission, including spacewalks, but this plan would extend their stay in space from the scheduled eight days to nearly eight months. NASA has already directed SpaceX and Boeing to start working on the updates needed to make either plan happen, but a choice has not been made yet.

“Those are backup contingency plans,” said ISS manager Dana Weigel at the press conference. “We have not made any decisions at all in terms of anchoring to a specific plan.” Stich said that a decision is likely to be made in mid-August. The greater impacts of this struggle on NASA’s Commercial Crew Program remain to be seen.

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August 7, 2024
Critics of the International Space Station are missing the point
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The International Space Station (ISS) is reaching the end of its life, with agencies around the world planning for its demise in around 2030. This orbiting behemoth has been continuously occupied for nearly 24 years by astronauts and cosmonauts from the US, Russia, Europe, Japan, Canada and many other regions, but it is getting old. It is nearly time to bring it down (see “Inside NASA’s ambitious plan to bring the ISS crashing back to Earth”) before its ageing parts take it out in a much more dangerous way.

The endeavour of keeping such a huge laboratory in orbit has been controversial, with some saying that it has been a waste of money or that it should have been deorbited long ago. Critics claim it hasn’t lived up to all of its promises and the scientific results from studies on the station haven’t done enough to help matters on Earth. Those criticisms may or may not be true, but they are missing the point.

The ISS, as a global collaboration on a very difficult venture in space, has always represented the possibility of a better world, one of peace and cooperation. Its two primary stakeholders, the US and Russia, have long been at odds on the ground, but that hasn’t deterred astronauts and cosmonauts from working together aboard the station in an effort to increase global knowledge and reach into the solar system. It is a symbol of humanity striving towards a common goal.

Once the ISS goes, we are vanishingly unlikely to see anything like it again. NASA and other space agencies are focusing on the moon, and the possibility of building an international astronaut village there, while an exciting prospect, is a pipe dream for now. Our prime example of international cooperation will burn up in the atmosphere and plunge into the ocean, and that loss will resonate beyond space science. It represents a withering of global collaboration, just the sort of thing we need to meet the grand challenges the world is facing now, such as climate change – and that is a loss we should all lament.
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August 7, 2024
Five of the most important International Space Station experiments

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It’s not all eating bits of food floating in mid-air and introducing suction toilets to fascinated Earthlings – crews on the International Space Station (ISS), which will be coming to an end soon, have serious work to do.

Since the station’s inception, astronauts and cosmonauts have performed more than 3000 experiments in the microgravity and heightened radiation of low-Earth orbit. These have ranged from confirming that fertility levels remain unaltered (in mice, not crew members) to testing the prospects of using lunar soil to make concrete to help build future moon bases. Here are four more of the most impressive bits of ISS research.

Artificial retinas

For millions of people with degenerative conditions affecting the retina – the layer of light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye – there is no cure, only treatments that slow progression. However, an implant that mimics the function of the retina might be the solution, and US-based company LambdaVision has had some success making one by depositing layer upon layer of a light-activated protein known as bacteriorhodopsin. On Earth, solutions of it tended to clump together, leading to poor deposition, but much better results came early this decade in the microgravity aboard the ISS. LambdaVision is now trying to scale up space manufacturing of the artificial retinas and claims these are among the first technologies evaluated on the ISS that have the potential for clinical use.

Invisible flames

When you light a match, the wood burns, reacting with oxygen to produce heat and light, as well as some other products such as carbon…

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August 6, 2024
Inside NASA’s ambitious plan to bring the ISS crashing back to Earth

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dpa picture alliance archive/Alamy

The International Space Station (ISS), as well as being the most expensive object ever made, can also lay claim to being one of the most cooperative endeavours in scientific history. Since the beginning of the century, it has been continuously inhabited by a total of 280 crew members – and counting – from 23 countries. While leaders on the ground have been squabbling or even threatening war, astronauts and cosmonauts have been circling Earth unconstrained by geopolitical borders, floating in serene microgravity.

But nothing lasts forever. Sometime around 2030, the ISS project will come to an end. From its orbit about 400 kilometres above Earth, the space station will fall through the atmosphere, burning up and splintering into a thousand pieces before crashing into the Pacific Ocean. It is unlikely that any of it will ever be seen again.

Artificial satellites reenter the atmosphere all the time – almost every day, in fact. But the $150 billion ISS is no ordinary satellite. More than 100 metres long, and with the mass of a fully loaded jumbo jet, it is by far the largest and most complicated one ever built.

Managing the end of the ISS’s life is far from straightforward. How can such a cumbersome object, all 420,000 kilograms of it, be brought down and destroyed safely? Should it be destroyed at all? And will we ever see its ilk again?

The history of the station dates back to the cultural chauvinism of the 1980s, when NASA – calling it “Freedom” – intended it to challenge the Soviet space…

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August 6, 2024
Boeing’s Starliner Is Finally Ready to Launch a NASA Crew Into Space

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“It fits in with the general narrative of Boeing having lost its way,” says McDowell.

Starliner, like Crew Dragon, is a capsule-shaped spacecraft like the Apollo missions of old. Capable of carrying up to seven astronauts, the spacecraft is largely autonomous, requiring major input only in the event of an emergency. During the test mission beginning tonight, Wilmore and Williams will test out this eventuality, purposefully pointing the spacecraft off course to ensure they can manually get it back on track, as well as assessing the spacecraft’s general life support and navigation systems. While docked to the space station the vehicle will be put through further tests, including practising using it as a lifeboat in case astronauts needed to evacuate the ISS.

Starliner is reusable, with Boeing saying it can be flown on up to 10 missions. The spacecraft sports no toilet—unlike Crew Dragon—and has about the same liveable volume as an SUV, making for a relatively cozy rise to and from orbit. It has physical hand controls and switches for the astronauts to control the spacecraft, unlike the touch screens used inside Crew Dragon. On its return home, a heat shield keeps the occupants safe from temperatures of some 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, before the vehicle descends under parachute and finally touches down, with the help of air bags to cushion the fall, in one of several desert landing sites in the US.

Boeing is contracted with NASA to launch Starliner six times to the ISS after this test mission, each time carrying four or five astronauts along with cargo for six-month stays aboard the station. The spacecraft will alternate its missions with Crew Dragon, one launching around February and one around August each year. Having that redundancy is hugely beneficial, says NASA’s Steven Siceloff, public affairs specialist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “This way, if a technical issue does come up with one vehicle, it does not mean that the space station is on its own for a while,” he says. “It means that there’s alternatives.”

Laura Forczyk, founder of the space consulting firm Astralytical, notes that redundancy is “especially important now because of the unreliability of Russia.” NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, continue to cooperate on the ISS program for now, including sharing seats between Russia’s Soyuz vehicle, Crew Dragon, and now Starliner, despite the embittered political situation between the two nations.

But beyond these six missions Boeing currently has no publicized flights planned for Starliner. “If this was SpaceX, you’d already have Musk talking about three or four contracts that he had in line with famous people,” says McDowell. With the ISS also set to be deorbited in 2030, this could mean Starliner—despite a decade of development and billions of dollars spent—faces the prospect of flying only a handful of times. “We don’t know whether Boeing has the capacity to do additional commercial missions at this time,” says Forczyk.

NASA has been trying to spur the development of new commercial space stations, in the same manner as this commercial crew program, in the hopes they can fill the orbital research void left when the ISS ends. These commercial stations could be destinations for Starliner and Crew Dragon, if they come to fruition, but the exact appetite for this endeavor remains uncertain for now. “Is there enough of a market to sustain two entities doing this?” says McDowell. “I remain skeptical of commercial space stations. But if they do succeed, you’re going to want multiple options to get up and down.”

Before it grapples with that future, Boeing will simply be hoping for a smooth and successful first crewed flight of Starliner. Once it’s finally in the skies with humans on board, the spacecraft can start to play the role it has long been touted for.

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May 6, 2024