00:00How do you define Butch and Sonny's status on the International Space Station?
00:05Yeah, it's interesting. We get a lot of terminology.
00:09I mean, in my view, they were never really stuck or stranded.
00:14They always had a way to depart the space station.
00:18And to me, when somebody is stranded, there's a location where they cannot leave.
00:22And so they had Starliner as the vehicle that they could depart from for a period of time.
00:27Now, Crew 8 is their emergency return vehicle.
00:30And when Crew 9 gets there, that will be their vehicle.
00:33That will be their return vehicle for a nominal and any emergency.
00:36So they're really a part of the expedition.
00:39They've transitioned from their role as Starliner test pilots,
00:42and now they're part of the expedition working day in and day out with Dana and her team.
00:48With intention, we put them through long-duration space station training a few years ago.
00:53And so they finished all the same training that a normal expedition crew would do,
00:58fully qualified in all of the complex areas, spacewalks, robotics, et cetera.
01:04Butch and Sonny have also both done expeditions on board stations,
01:07so they're very familiar with what that looks like.
01:11So we had them well prepared to move into this role.
01:15Really what we need to do now, we have been entirely focused this summer
01:20on understanding what is happening on orbit, trying to decide can we bring the crew back or not.
01:27Once we decided uncrewed, now how do we safely get the vehicle undocked
01:32and landed at White Sands Space Harbor?
01:34I think what we need to do now is really lay out the overall plan, which we have not had time to do.
01:39We haven't because the teams have been so focused on this flight,
01:43laying out that overall search strategy, the overall amount of work we've got to go do.
01:47And then when we do that, we'll have a better understanding of when can we certify the vehicle
01:50and when can we resume flights.
01:53Let's see, since Butch and Sonny have been on board and they were extended,
01:56they already started participating and really helping us out on board station.
02:01They've done over 42 experiments, may actually be more than that by now.
02:05That was when I checked last week.
02:07They had over 100 hours between the two of them helping us on board with science and research.
02:14And so I would say that the change between their short duration mission and an expedition
02:19has been a lot more gradual than you might imagine just because they've been chipping in
02:23and helping along the way.
02:26They are doing the normal exercise regiments that have a high degree of both cardiovascular work
02:36as well as resistance training.
02:40So they're doing the standard amount that we have all crew members do at this point.
02:45Many parts of the flight went extremely well, and Starliner is a great spacecraft.
02:51We know that it performs well.
02:53The life support system is performing very well.
02:55In fact, we have extra oxygen we're going to transfer over the next 24 hours or so,
03:00about 20 pounds of oxygen to the International Space Station to use that oxygen.
03:04So many things on the vehicle are working really well.
03:07What we really need to go do is look at the things that didn't perform the way we expected,
03:12like I talked about the helium leaks.
03:14Can we go fix those leaks, test those on the ground, and have confidence to move forward and fly again?
03:19And the same thing with the thrusters.
03:21We know the thrusters are working well when we don't command them in a manner that overheats them
03:26and gets the poppet to swell on the oxide.
03:29Many of the thrusters, we never saw any degradation at all,
03:32so we know that the thruster is a viable thruster.
03:34It's a good component.
03:36We then not overheat it.
04:06NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
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