I'm John John Bachelor with David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show.

This is Hotel Mars episode and we're very pleased to have Eric Berger of Arse Technica here to help us understand a story that as of yet is not finished.

Boeing is a private contractor with the opportunity to build a spacecraft not unlike Dragon that

SpaceX already uses to and from ISS. Boeing tested Starliner twice without people on board and then two astronauts took off on Starliner on top of a ULA booster and docked with the ISS.

It remains docked at ISS.

Questions raised about something called a leak and then something called its nozzles.

It's nozzles for maneuvering are not all functioning correctly.

That's as much as I know, Eric.

Do we know more than that?

The engineers want time to study this.

Yeah, so as it was flying up to International Space Station, Starliner encountered a couple of significant problems. First of all, it had one helium leak in its propulsion system prior to launch.

NASA and Boeing decided that was manageable.

This healing which is used to pressurize in the service modules propulsion system

basically, you know, helping to get the propellant and oxidizer where it needs to go and at the right

pressures.

This, they sprung four more leaks.

They had five different helium leaks.

So NASA was concerned about that.

And then also five of the spacecraft's 28 RCS thrusters.

These are smaller thrusters used for maneuvering attitude correction, not the bigger engines, but five of the 28 did not operate as intended.

Boeing and NASA were able to recover four of those five before they got to the space station.

But it was really a nip and tuck thing getting docked to the ISS.

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