After years of delays and a dizzying series of setbacks during test flights, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is finally ready to make its inaugural crewed launch.
The mission is scheduled to take off from Florida on May 6, taking NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station (ISS), marking what could be a historic victory and there is highly anticipated for the Starliner program.
Design and development is difficult, especially with a human roversaid Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of the Starliner program at Boeing, during a press conference on Thursday (25). There were a number of surprises along the way that we had to overcome. It certainly made the team very, very strong. I’m so proud of how they overcame every problem we encountered and got us to this point.
Boeing and NASA officials made the decision Thursday to move forward with the launch attempt in less than two weeks. However, Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, noted that May 6 is “not a magic date.”
We will launch when we are readyhe said.
If successful, Starliner will join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft to make routine trips to the space station, keeping the orbiting outpost fully staffed with astronauts from NASA and its partner space agencies.
Such a scenario — with Crew Dragon and Starliner flying regularly — is something the United States space agency has long hoped for.
“This is history in the making,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said of the upcoming Starliner mission during a March 22 press conference. “We are now in the golden age of space exploration.”
SpaceX and Boeing developed their respective vehicles under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, a partnership with private industry contractors. From the beginning, the space agency intended to have both companies operating at the same time. The Crew Dragon and Starliner spacecraft would serve as each other’s backup, giving astronauts the option to continue flying even if technical problems or other setbacks grounded one spacecraft.
However, NASA did not initially anticipate SpaceX’s Crew Dragon operating alone for nearly four years before Boeing’s Starliner achieved its first crewed test flight.
In the early days of the program, which awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, NASA favored Boeing — a close partner since the mid-20th century — over SpaceX, which the federal agency viewed as a relatively young and capricious startup.
The vision of Boeing, SpaceX and NASA
In 2016, NASA planned its schedule hoping that Starliner would arrive at the launch pad before Crew Dragon.
But the race between Boeing and SpaceX changed course in 2020. Errors marred the Starliner test flight the previous year, leaving NASA and Boeing scrambling to figure out what went wrong. Starliner did not connect to the space station on that mission due to software problems, including a glitch in the spacecraft’s internal clock, which was 11 hours ahead.
Meanwhile, SpaceX made history in May 2020 with the launch of the Demo-2 test flight, carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on a two-month mission to the International Space Station.
Since then, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has been carrying out routine flights, transporting NASA astronauts and even paying passengers and tourists. The spacecraft has already carried out 13 manned missions to orbit.
Boeing, however, has spent several years facing a series of challenges, including a list of problems discovered in 2022 during the spacecraft’s second uncrewed test flight. Boeing’s commercial plane division has also faced a series of scandals — including the 737 Max crisis and recent quality control problems highlighted after a door exploded during an Alaska Airlines flight in January — that have damaged the company’s image.
In 2020, NASA officials admitted that, at a certain point, they began to focus more on SpaceX and its unorthodox methods, while problems with Boeing’s Starliner went unnoticed.
“Maybe we didn’t have as many people involved in this process as we should have,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, at a July 2020 press conference.
When one vendor (SpaceX) has a newer approach than another, it’s natural for a human to spend more time on that newer approach, and we may not have spent enough time on the more traditional (Boeing) approach.
Starliner setbacks
Boeing’s space division operates separately from its commercial plane team, and officials at NASA and the U.S. aerospace giant routinely seek to make that distinction.
NASA officials have also made clear that they are working more closely with Boeing than ever before, with personnel on the ground at Boeing facilities overseeing some of the fixes implemented by the company ahead of the next Starliner flight.
This is an important capability for NASA. We signed up to do this, and we are going to do this and be successfulNappi said on Thursday. I don’t think about it in terms of what’s important to Boeing, but rather what’s important to this program.
Still, Boeing and NASA had a long list of problems to resolve.
During the last test flight in 2022, for example, engineers discovered that the Starliner’s parachute suspension lines had a lower failure threshold than initially expected.
NASA and Boeing engineers tested a fix for that problem earlier this year, but the parachutes will remain a top priority while they work on some last-minute checks before liftoff, Stich said Thursday.
It was also discovered that some tape used to protect wiring harnesses was flammable, and Boeing had to remove and replace about a mile of that material, according to Nappi.
Boeing may even need to implement a redesign of some of the spacecraft’s valves due to corrosion issues. This update, however, is not expected to be in effect until the second manned flight, scheduled for 2025 at the earliest.
On May’s inaugural crewed flight, Boeing will use a “perfectly acceptable mitigation” that should prevent valves from sticking, Nappi said in March.
Starliner and security
Despite the long road to the launch pad, the two people at the center of Starliner’s first manned mission — Williams and Wilmore, two veteran NASA astronauts — said upon arriving at the launch site that they are more confident than ever.
“We want the general public to think it’s easy, but it’s not — it’s very difficult,” Wilmore said after arriving at the Starliner launch site in Florida on Thursday. “We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t ready.
During a press conference in March, Wilmore mentioned that he does not expect the Starliner spacecraft to enter any “failure mode.”
“But if something happens — because we’re all human, we can’t build things perfectly — if something happens, we have multiple modes of reduction,” he said during the press conference, referring to modes that give astronauts the ability to take over the manual control of the spacecraft in case something doesn’t go as planned.
Williams said during an event in March: We wouldn’t be sitting here if we didn’t feel — and tell our families that we felt — confident in this spacecraft and our abilities to control it.
She added during Thursday’s press conference in Florida: I have every confidence not only in our capabilities and the capabilities of the spacecraft, but also in our mission control team, who are up for the challenge.
Source: CNN
