US astronauts stuck in space for a while

US aeronautics manufacturer Boeing, which has been on the Congress’ financial scanner, is now stuck in a mechanical lock-in as its Starliner space vehicle, which had transported astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore to the International Space Station (ISS) in June, and which was to have brought them back in eight days, developed snags.

Williams and Wilmore have overstayed in space, and space doctors say that the two would be medically vulnerable in the long term. But the astronauts have remained cheerful, and in their latest messaging expressed confidence that they will get home safely.

The glitches that Starliner had developed are quite crucial. The snags are in the propulsion system and in the thrusters. Helium leaked from one of the thrusters. NASA and Boeing are carrying out tests on ground to check whether the problem can be fixed before Starliner begins its journey back to earth. Boeing officials are now confident that Starliner can ferry back Williams and Wilmore even if the glitches are not fixed.

The situation is not dire. Russia’s Soyuz and the American private spacecraft, Space X (of Elon Musk)’s Crew Dragon are also docked to the space station, and if the need arises, they can bring back the astronauts. This is Boeing’s maiden flight of ferrying astronauts, and if it succeeds it will get the NASA certification to be a permanent part of the space flights, and will be the second private sector operator to be part of the American space mission.

Questions arise as to whether NASA took a risk with Boeing in pressing a space vehicle into service before it has been fully certified. NASA perhaps did not want to be solely dependent on Musk’s Space X, and it wanted to expand its private fleet. The question has to be asked whether the problem in the thrusters, which are part of the propulsion system, and the leakage of helium from one of the thrusters, was an unforeseen breakdown, or the checking of the systems was not thorough enough. It is to be expected that there would be issues in space flight like in any other venture. We have seen that both NASA, and later Space X, had gone through failed tests. That did not stop them from correcting the system failures, and get operationalised.

America’s new space exploration policy now hinges on opening up the segment to private sector participants. NASA does not want to hold the monopoly any more. Part of the reason is that the American government feels that it cannot any more allot the huge budgets to sustain space exploration, and it wants the private sector to share the financial burden.

During the Cold War of the 1950s, the Americans were ideologically drawn into the space race with rival Soviet Union. After the moon-landing in 1969, the Americans continued with a few moon missions before ending the programme.

But nearly after suspending as it were the space missions, there is a revived interest. And this time there are commercial as well as strategic reasons. There is the belief that the moon and Mars could be rich mineral resources. The idea of human colonies in Mars looks far-fetched though maverick Musk is willing to bet on them. He sees space colonisation as an imperative.

But the American government, including others like that of China, Russia, Japan, India, is now in the hunt for mineral resources, re-enacting the colonisation drama which took place from the 15th century onward by the Western countries. A new era of competitive space exploration has opened in this century. What shape, or what turn, it will take seems quite unpredictable. The mechanical glitches of the kind Starliner is experiencing will become par for the course.