NASA gave another non-update to the media on its crewed Boeing CST-100 Starliner mission. The agency still doesn’t know when astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore will come home from the International Space Station, and it doesn’t have a firm date for when it will make a decision on the matter. However, NASA did let slip a development that could potentially crank up a massive source of embarrassment for Boeing.
Last week, NASA said that if it can’t send its crew home on the Starliner, it might have to send them back on a SpaceX Dragon vessel — in February! — and if that happens, the photos of the crew walking on Earth could feature Boeing’s arch-rival’s space suits instead of the get-ups they launched with.
“From a suit standpoint, they’re really not interchangeable,” said Joel Montalbano, the deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. “You can’t have a Boeing suit in a SpaceX [vehicle], or a SpaceX suit in a Boeing vehicle. So that would not be the plan.” Boeing representatives were not present on the call.
Speculation continues to mount that the Starliner mission is already a failure — there are fears the ship might not even be able to undock from the International Space Station without its crew — but NASA has not conceded that point yet. For weeks, it has been testing and reviewing data about its thrusters to assess the vulnerabilities created by helium leaks. The gas is used to control the thrusters, and though NASA has said there is plenty of helium on board to get them home, it has yet to commit to a return mission.