NASA astronauts face potential vaporisation, Warns space system expert

NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are stranded in orbit, facing a troubling situation with their faulty spacecraft, which has kept them in space for over two months. Originally, their mission was expected to last no more than eight days on the ISS. They landed on June 5 to initiate Boeing Starliner’s first pilot test flight to the International Space Station.

However, the faulty spacecraft now presents a serious issue: it contains a couple of thrusters, which are no longer functional, preventing them from returning to Earth. As tension escalates over their prolonged exposure, Rudy Ridolfi, a former U.S. military Space System Commander, has outlined three catastrophic scenarios if they attempt to re-enter space with the damaged spacecraft.

Disastrous Outcomes of Misaligned Re-entry for the Faulty Spacecraft

The U.S space agency NASA is still in a dilemma on whether to launch the Boeing star liner back to earth or to organise a rescue through Spacex. Speaking with the Daily Mail, Rudy Ridolfi also pointed out that the service module has to ensure the correct attitude of the Starliner’s capsule before the reentry. Consequently, if such alignment is missing then the outcome can be disastrous.

However, in this process, Ridolfi pointed out that if a capsule was not properly aligned during re-entry, it was disastrous. Indeed, if the Starliner is not oriented in the right fashion, it could re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up or simply be sent flying back into space. Further, if the service module tilts the capsule with a high inclination, the heat shield may fail and causes a fatal case of overheating.

The first case is that Starliner may never come back to Earth, with failed rocket protrusions and 96 hours of oxygen on board, in case an attempt at a re-entry is misaligned, causing the pill to ricochet off the atmosphere. In the second case, the spacecraft rarely is able to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere since it has been aligned wrongly and so ends up being stuck in the same manner.

Ridolfi emphasised that the hazardous position would entail the astronauts turning into liquid if the capsule enters the orbital atmosphere at the wrong inclination angle, resulting in burning from the intensity of the friction.

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