Sunita Williams Return Delay Not Deliberate, NASA Couldn't Have Afforded Another Kalpana Chawla Incident: Ex-ISRO Scientist

Former ISRO scientist Manish Purohit has said that NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stuck at the International Space Station (ISS) for nearly 9 months, were not part of any crew but they flew to space as part of the certification flight of Boeing Starliner and supposed to be there for just 8 days.

Now the Starliner developed some issues like leakage in Helium line and thrusters failures due to which their return kept getting delayed.

Boeing Starliner performed a number of tests, thousands of simulations but cannot convince NASA that the mission to bring back the astronauts will be danger free as you cannot take chances with the human life or afford another Kalpana Chawla-like disaster.

So it was planned that a mission will fly to the International Space Station who will bring back the stranded scientists from the ISS.

As planned, crew 9 lifted off with two astronauts. Generally, a crew of 4 astronauts are part of a mission but in this case, two seats had to be kept vacant for Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore.

The Starliner, which was occupying one of the docking ports at the International Space Station, returned back safely to earth, however, without the astronauts. The space ship also had to return to empty the docking port at the space station for future missions.

ISS under human occupation for last 25 years 

International Space Station has been in occupation of the human beings continuously for the last 25 years. There are a number of jobs to be performed up there including regular research, upgradation, repair maintenance, new installations of the facilities.

But it’s kind of a rotational job as one crew goes up there, it completes its cycle and then the next crew is planned to release the responsibilities of the existing one.

Let’s look at in a way that crew 9 was there already and now crew 10 has reached, now the former one will be returning back to earth.

Usually a mission’s duration is normally between 5-6 months. When Sunita Williams flew to the space, it was a normal duration for her but then there was no another crew mission planned. The crew 9 had flown in September and now crew 10 flew in March, so probably it’s a regular rationale exercise that its taking place now and it wasn’t like there was any deliberate delay.