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In a press talk earlier today, NASA appears to be more 'open' towards bringing astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on SpaceX's Crew Dragon. NASA's associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox shared that the agency is "getting more serious about evaluating our other options," including bringing Williams and Wilmore home on SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

The agency's commercial crew program manager, Steve Stich, added that NASA has worked with SpaceX to ensure that it can work with NASA in case the astronauts must be brought back on the Crew 9 Dragon that is currently slated to lift off next month. However, the agency still believes that in case of an emergency on the ISS, the best course of action will be to bring the crew back in Starliner.

NASA & Boeing Currently Analyzing Thruster Teflon To Determine Behavior During Return

While NASA is now working with SpaceX to keep its options open to bringing the crew home on a Dragon spacecraft, Bowersox added later that this analysis is part of options that could also lead to future work "where we need to bring a Dragon crew or a Soyuz crew back on a Starliner." The key variable holding NASA back from bringing Wilmore and Williams is the "uncertainty bound" for the data for the ship's propulsion and thruster systems.

Stich provided more color for this 'bound' when he explained the work NASA and Boeing are doing and the agency's SpaceX contingency. According to him, the key factor currently limiting NASA's decision is the Teflon seal in the thruster system that initially stopped fuel flow and led to a thrust loss.

The NASA official explained that not only were all thrusters fired during a hot fire test last weekend at nominal levels, but the one in which NASA saw the most thrust degradation (or loss) in was at about 80% degradation before the test but after the test it's at 98% thrust level. This has led NASA to speculate that "somehow that, that piece of Teflon must have contracted and is now not blocking the flow like it was."

While this provides the agency with more certainty, it doesn't confirm that the anomalies that it and Boeing have replicated on the ground are the same as those that the thrusters are experiencing in space. As a result, teams are now trying to understand "the conditions that caused the thruster fail offs" since "it's not always at the same temperature, it's not always at the same number of pulses," according to Stich.

As part of the investigation, NASA is "doing modeling on the ground to try to understand how this Teflon could extrude, what the forces are on the Teflon, and then trying to understand how it could contract, in, uh, how it could contract over time," explained Stich. The key to understanding this is to understand the physics of Teflon's behavior, including the reasons behind its heating and contraction. This understanding will be used to model the Starliner's return profile (its downhill phase) to help NASA make the final decision on how to bring the crew back home.

While it works to understand the reasons behind Starliner's thruster anomalies, NASA has shifted the launch of SpaceX's Crew-9 to late September. To introduce "flexibility" into its return options for Wilmore and Williams, the agency has worked with SpaceX to fly two passengers in September and return with four in February. It has identified the suits for the Boeing crew, set up the seats with the right foam inserts, and identified other supplies that will be sent on Crew 9 in case Starliner returns uncrewed.

However, Stich cautioned that NASA hasn't officially approved this mission profile and a decision will probably be made in the middle of August since Starliner has to leave ISS before Crew 9 can dock with it. In case of an uncrewed Starliner undock Boeing has to update the ship's software parameters and train ground teams for this particular mission profile, both of which add time before a return attempt.

Crucially, he outlined later during the call that the "right course of action would be to return Butch and Suni in Starliner should there be an emergency at ISS where it's an uninhabitable environment or they need to get off station, Starliner would be their best option."

Bowersox added that "it may be confusing" that while NASA is willing to fly Wilmore and Williams in Starliner in case of emergency and simultaneously choosing to evaluate other options for their normal return, the discrepancy in the thought process is due to "how we make decisions about risk in contingency situations. It's pretty unlikely to get into one of those contingency situations, number one, and then number two, because of the criticality of those situations, we typically would be willing to accept a little more risk."

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