Please hold!
Battery Blues
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who traveled to the International Space Station on board Boeing’s ill-fated Starliner last summer, are still stuck there, patiently awaiting their ride back home.
And while SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently blamed the Biden administration for the more-than-eight-month delay, his space company is encountering serious issues while securing the spacecraft for their return flight.
As Ars Technica‘s Eric Berger reports, engineers ran into battery problems plaguing the fifth-and-final generation Crew Dragon spacecraft, dubbed C213, which was supposed to make its maiden voyage to take the two stranded astronauts home sometime next month.
Instead, it now sounds like SpaceX’s current-generation “Endurance” spacecraft, which returned from the space station in March, will take Wilmore and Williams home as early as March 19 — roughly two weeks earlier than expected, so it’s not making a particularly immense difference at this point.
In other words, Musk and president Donald Trump have both politicized the issue — despite SpaceX and NASA’s ongoing struggles to develop the C213 Crew Dragon spacecraft being the real reason behind the delay at this point.
Scoring Points
To be clear, none of this has much to do with the Trump administration swooping in to heroically rescue Wilmore and Williams. As Berger points out, the pair’s return journey was already ratified in August, over five months ago. Even the contingency plan to use a different vehicle in case C213 wasn’t ready was set in motion before Trump took office.
According to Berger, time could soon be running out. The station could eventually approach “redlines” on vital supplies, including food and water, if a crew rotation mission doesn’t happen soon.
It remains to be seen how Trump and Musk will attempt to spin the development. Will Musk admit that SpaceX’s next-gen vehicle isn’t ready yet? Or will the pair trumpet the two-week advance as a triumph?
Either way, given the way Trump has already attempted to obfuscate reality by furthering racist ideologies and conspiracy theories, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear him declare a victory.
Meanwhile, instead of prioritizing the advancement of space exploration and cutting-edge research, NASA has been relegated to scrap key terms from its websites related to accessibility, women, and Indigenous people.
More on Starliner: Boeing Has Lost a Staggering Amount of Money on Its Starliner Catastrophe
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