Boeing’s Starliner Leaves Astronauts Stuck On The Space Station

IRA FLATOW: Back in June, you might remember that Boeing Starliner capsule that successfully flew astronaut Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station on its maiden voyage. Remember? That flight, of course, was not without its drama, with problems arising with its thrusters.

The mission was supposed to be an eight-day tour, but now it’s August, and Williams and Wilmore are still on the space station. It turns out that Starliner had more issues than Boeing thought, and NASA is now trying to figure out how to get those astronauts safely back to Earth, but it could take a while.

Here’s how NASA’s Ken Bowersox explained it this week.

KEN BOWERSOX: We know that, at some point, we need to bring Butch and Suni home. While they’re up there, we have extra crews. We have extra hands. They can do a lot more work, but they’re also using up more supplies. So we have to maintain that balance, and at some point, we need to bring those folks home and get back to a normal crew size on the ISS.

IRA FLATOW: I’m sure they do. Umair Irfan is here with that story and other top stories of the week. He’s senior correspondent at Vox. Welcome back to Science Friday.

UMAIR IRFAN: Hey, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: So just for folks who don’t know the beginnings of that story, what’s the drama here?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, these astronauts– you mentioned, Butch and Suni– were supposed to only stay at the ISS for about eight days. They arrived in June and were just supposed to hang out there because they were testing the first crewed mission with Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft, and this was initially just supposed to be a test run.

But as you noted, on the way to the station, they had some drama. There were some damage to thrusters or thrusters that malfunctioned and some helium leaks. And so once they arrived at the space station, they spent a lot of time trying to diagnose the problem.

The concern is that, while NASA engineers and Boeing engineers say that the spacecraft is safe to return to Earth, they worry that a lot of the equipment that they’re trying to analyze might be damaged on the return flight, and they won’t have this chance to sort of analyze the problem. And so the concern right now is that they want to be able to figure out what went wrong to help protect future missions.

IRA FLATOW: Is there a backup spacecraft that they might use?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, the International Space Station, they have lifeboats, and NASA does object to the term stuck or stranded. They always are keen to point out that they do have a way to get home. But they also don’t want to use up those lifeboats unnecessarily, and so right now, what they’re doing is scheduling another mission using the SpaceX Dragon capsule to arrive at the ISS and then arranging for those two astronauts to return home on that mission.

IRA FLATOW: Now, I’m sure that, politically speaking with Boeing, that would be a black eye for them.

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. Yeah. Boeing is part of this new generation of spaceflight with NASA where they’re trying to find private contractors to help ferry astronauts back and forth on these space missions. So SpaceX has been able to deliver astronauts successfully, but NASA also wants to have another company involved as well as a competitor but also to have a backup plan. And so that’s part of why they’re so vested in the success of this Boeing mission as well, even though they have a private contractor that already has been able to do this mission. And so it’s a true test of this sort of change in ideology or this change in approach to how we’re doing science and space missions.

IRA FLATOW: And how long might they be up there, if they have to have this backup plan?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, if they’re going to return home with the SpaceX mission, that flight is not scheduled to return until February. So they may be up there for a few more months. Now, NASA says that they are resupplying the Space Station with food and equipment, so they’re not going to run out of provisions. But as they said that, this is a crew that’s initially supposed to be seven people, and right now there’s nine people on the space station, and so it’s a little bit crowded up there.

IRA FLATOW: All right, let’s move from drama in space to drama at the Olympics. As I’ve been watching the Olympics, I’ve noticed how hot they keep saying it is there. I mean, that tennis match looked grueling, and you have reported about how organizers are dealing with this. Please tell us about that.

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. You may recall the Tokyo Olympics back in 2021. Those were considered to be some of the hottest Olympics ever held on record, and organizers were paying close attention to the lessons that they learned there and were trying to make sure that they applied them to the Paris Games because they were concerned that it was also going to be extremely hot in Paris.

Now, the organizers got a little lucky that the major heat wave in Europe in July sort of settled down a little bit before the Games began, but it has been intensely hot. So one of the key things that organizers tried to emphasize with athletes was the role of acclimatization, basically getting athletes used to heat before they arrive at the game. They put together a protocol for how to start introducing heat into your training regimen, and that includes practicing more outside, or if you live in a cool-weather climate, to do things like wear extra clothes, wear extra layers, and try to work indoors in a high-humidity, high-heat environment.

And then they’ve also developed emergency techniques to help athletes who suffer from heat exhaustion and heat stroke, in particular the use of ice-water baths that they’re going to be using to treat anybody who does have heat stroke. So far, they haven’t had to use that, but now they have this sort of emergency mechanism to help ensure that nobody gets seriously ill or harmed by the heat.

IRA FLATOW: Speaking of heat, I mean, the next Summer Games are happening in LA in 2028. We can expect it to be pretty hot there too, right?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, exactly. And so organizers are now contending with the fact that perhaps it’s going to be really difficult to host the Olympics in any one city in particular because the conditions just won’t be right. And so during the Tokyo Olympics, for instance, they held the marathon in Sapporo, Japan, which is about 600 miles north of Tokyo. During the Paris Olympics, they’re scheduling the marathon to begin at 8:00 AM on August 10. And so we’re seeing a lot more of the rescheduling to the earlier and later times of day for these high-endurance events. And increasingly for future Olympics, they’re going to be taking more of these precautions and having to sort of expand the scope of where they can hold the Games in order to keep people comfortable and safe and at their peak of performance.

IRA FLATOW: Continuing with our human-health theme this morning, it looks like the West Nile virus is gaining ground in the US this week. What’s happening?

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. Health officials have now reported cases in Massachusetts, in Wisconsin, and several deaths now, including a death this week in Dallas, Texas. West Nile virus is a virus that sort of springs up every now and then every few years. It tends to be concentrated towards the southern part of the US. But increasingly, we’re seeing that the vectors, the mosquitoes that spread this disease, are moving further and further north every year. While we don’t see big outbreaks every year, the conditions get more and more ripe. Think of the conditions for a forest fire. The temperature and the conditions for breeding the mosquitoes become ripe, and then what it just needs is a spark.

And so we’ve seen this year, for instance, already big cases of dengue, which is also a mosquito-borne disease. And then last year we saw malaria being spread domestically in the US for the first time in decades. And this is all part of a trend of people moving back and forth from areas where these diseases are endemic but also the fact that we have such ripe conditions for mosquitoes to grow and spread that it causes these diseases to gain ground and take root here in the US over time.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s move on to the Environmental Protection Agency this week putting out an emergency order to ban a weed killer. Why did that happen?

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. This is sort of a rare move by the Environmental Protection Agency. They don’t typically put out emergency orders, but they did for this chemical known as DCPA or Dacthal. It’s used to treat vegetables like broccoli. It’s fairly common, but it can also cause birth defects and impaired development in children. It’s made by a company called the AMVAC Chemical Corporation.

But the strange thing with this weedkiller is that it’s actually been banned in Europe since 2009. There’s actually been a long history of reports of health effects from this particular pesticide. And the EPA says that it was actually waiting for the company to submit its own data about the health risks and then, after getting frustrated with the company for a period of time, decided to put out this emergency order and is now engaging in the process of banning this permanently.

IRA FLATOW: So the Supreme Court ended the Chevron deference a couple of months ago, which could weaken orders like these from the EPA, right? How could orders like this be affected in the future?

UMAIR IRFAN: So the Supreme Court decision on the Chevron doctrine basically undermines the deference that Congress tends to give to federal agencies to make rulings on specific chemicals like this. And so while the EPA could potentially still issue these kinds of emergency stop orders, it opens the door to litigation from the companies to try to push back or block these kinds of regulations or creates opportunities for them to weaken the EPA’s ability to regulate these chemicals. And that is a major concern now after that decision that a lot of the regulations the EPA is imposing may not be guaranteed.

IRA FLATOW: Finally, some good news, Umair. Let’s get to that. There’s new research out this week, and scientists have figured out a technique to regrow cartilage. Wow. We arthritics could certainly use that. How are they doing this?

UMAIR IRFAN: Right. What they’ve developed is what they call this bioactive gel that contains natural substances and polymers, polysaccharides, as well as synthetic structures. And what they do is that they are injected into the joint, and they induce the cells in the cartilage to grow and provide them with scaffolding that helps provide the structure.

See, the challenge with cartilage is that it typically isn’t vascularized. It doesn’t have blood vessels in it, and so it’s hard to get nutrients to the tissue. And the other challenge is that cartilage is structural. It has to hold up your knees, your elbows, and it’s hard to just simply grow cells and have them be able to withstand that.

And so what they’ve developed is a technique that doesn’t use cells but, rather, induces the cells already in the joints to grow and to rebuild itself. They’ve tested this successfully in sheep, and they want to move this into human trials as soon as possible.

IRA FLATOW: And to wrap up, scientists are learning some new things about what the moon’s atmosphere is made of. And yes, it does have an atmosphere. What did they find, Umair?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, the Apollo astronauts who went there and scientists who have been monitoring the moon have noticed that there is something up there, but the moon’s atmosphere is so thin that they actually put it in a different category called an exosphere, basically that it’s so thin that atoms in the moon’s atmosphere don’t collide very often, and so it doesn’t give us a lot of signal as to what they’re actually made out of.

But researchers started looking at soil samples collected during the Apollo missions, and they found that, historically in the early days of the moon, this atmosphere was seeded by massive meteorite strikes, and then it’s been continuously replenished by micro meteoroids, basically tiny rocks that are kicking up dust constantly into the moon and vaporizing it on contact. And because the moon’s atmosphere is so thin, those meteorites don’t vaporize. And because the gravity of the moon is so low, that dust get kicked up really high into the moon’s atmosphere, and that helps keep a thin layer of this sort of moon dust that sticks around the planetoid or the moon.

IRA FLATOW: Always interesting to have you on the show, Umair. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, my pleasure to be here, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox based in Washington, DC.

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