by HOUSTON – Everyone thought that the new Boeing Starliner spacecraft would already be flying astronauts earlier than now.
Starliner is set to carry two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time as soon as Monday (May 6), but it’s a long road to get there. Instead of one uncrewed test mission to the ISS, Boeing needed two to achieve its objectives. The pandemic and numerous technical issues further delayed the first astronaut launch of the capsule.
But safety must always come first, NASA and Boeing officials emphasized during a March 22 media briefing here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Three years of additional work, the teams carefully worked towards their goal of sending astronauts. And when new problems arose, they would continue to work to solve them, Boeing’s Mark Nappi told reporters.
“I don’t call it frustrating at all,” Nappi, Boeing’s commercial crew program manager, said of the longer-than-expected wait. “We want to be further along at this time. There’s no doubt about that. But we’re here, and we’re prepared, and we’re ready to fly.”
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The first Starliner mission with astronauts, called Crew Flight Test or CFT, will send two veteran NASA astronauts and former Navy test pilots to the ISS: commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams. They will be in space for just over a week after taking off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
The astronauts will use their years of space and aviation experience, thoroughly checking the spacecraft and making sure it meets all the major objectives for automatic and manual flight. If Starliner passes all of its CFT tests, the way will be clear for operational, six-month Starliner ISS missions, starting with Starliner-1 in 2025.
CFT follows two uncrewed Starliner flights. A mission in December 2019, called Orbital Flight Test (OFT), did not reach the ISS as planned. Boeing spent several years implementing multiple solutions for the spacecraft, amid the pandemic, and succeeded: the 2022 effort (OFT 2) reached the ISS and achieved all other major flight objectives.
More trouble arose in the summer of 2023, however, when crews uncovered new issues with Starliner that further delayed human spaceflight. For example: the suspension lines of the Starliner’s main parachute could not handle as much mass as the engineers thought they could, and flammable P213 tape covered much of the capsule’s wiring.
Both NASA and Boeing representatives emphasized at the March 22 briefing that the two test flights did their job: they had problems before people got on board. Steve Stich, head of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters that he was in close contact with the CFT and Starliner-1 astronauts to address all issues.
“From my point of view, until now, it seems that we have looked through everything,” said Stich. “We’ve done independent analysis, in many cases, of landing loads, prohibited performance, rendezvous and docking, all those types of things. And I would say in the time frame that we have from last summer to now, the time we spent that really testing the flight software in a very integrated way in the Boeing ASIL [Avionics and Software Integration Lab] Facility.”
“We’ve done everything we can to make sure we’re not missing things,” Stich said. “I tend to ask a lot of questions. I’m kind of more practical, I’d say, a program manager. Maybe a bit of an engineer at heart. So I try to explore areas to make sure we haven’t missed something.
“The last parachute test gave us a lot of confidence in that system,” he continued. “We had, I would say, more instrumentation on that parachute test than we’ve had in the past, looking at the dynamics of how the parachutes come out of the parachute compartment – and the edges are calculated on those parachutes and that there are a lot of them. of confidence in that system.
“What we do every day is to make sure you haven’t missed something. Space flight is so complicated. I think we’ll take it one step at a time, looking at all the details. We’ve closed all the anomalies in the flight .from OFT to our satisfaction And now we are going to go through that [CFT] flight readiness process.”
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While all Starliner systems are under scrutiny, one of particular note to CFT is the life support system that supplies the astronauts with oxygen and removes carbon dioxide, among other tasks. That system has not been tested with humans on board, but the briefing participants emphasized that robust ground testing had been done to prepare for spaceflight.
Stich said a recent integration test with the astronauts at Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility, located at KSC, allowed Williams and Wilmore to “put it [the life support system] He said the test gave us “a lot of good data, and we’re confident that the ecosystem will function as we need it to with Suni and Butch on board.”
Nappi noted icing in the thermal control system during the unmanned OFT, which “probably resulted more from not having the crew on board.” However, Boeing “made a number of changes during this final flight to ensure that does not happen again.”
Adding a crew to the vehicle will generate more heat during spaceflight than a Starliner flight without humans on board, he said. Boeing will be evaluating Starliner to see how the vehicle’s cooling system responds to that, whether humidity will remain constant, and other potential impacts.
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In 2014, Boeing and SpaceX won NASA contracts to fly astronauts to and from the ISS, filling the shoes of the agency’s space shuttle, which retired in 2011. The Boeing contract is worth $4.2 billion, while the SpaceX contract is worth $2.6 billion.
SpaceX has sent 11 operational crewed missions to the ISS with its Crew Dragon to date: eight for NASA’s commercial crew program, and three shorter missions on behalf of the Houston-based company Axiom Space.
A handful of NASA astronauts also fly aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft for technical and policy reasons, following long-established interagency practice. All NASA astronauts also flew to the ISS on Soyuz after the shuttle retired in 2011 and SpaceX’s first crewed mission, the Demo-2 test flight, in 2020.
