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After years of delays and an array of difficulties during test flights, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is finally ready to make its inaugural crewed launch.
The mission is on track to take off from Florida as soon as May 6, carrying NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station in what could be a historic and long-awaited victory for the beleaguered Starliner program.
“Design and development is difficult — especially with a human space vehicle,” Mark Nappi, vice president and Starliner program manager at Boeing, said during a briefing Thursday. “There are some things that were surprising in the way we had to overcome. … it definitely made the team very strong. I’m very proud of how they’ve overcome every issue we’ve encountered and gotten us to this point.”
Boeing and NASA officials made the decision Thursday to move forward with the launch effort 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 send when we are ready,” he said.
If successful, the Starliner will join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft in making regular trips to the space station, keeping the entire team of astronauts from NASA and its partner space agencies in the orbiting center.
Such a scenario – with both Crew Dragon and Starliner flying regularly – is one the US space agency has been waiting for for a long time.
“This is history in the making,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said of the upcoming Starliner mission during a March 22 news 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 aimed to have both companies operating at the same time. The other spacecraft would be backed up by the Crew Dragon and Starliner spacecraft, giving astronauts the option to continue flying, even if one spacecraft was grounded by technical issues or other difficulties.
However, NASA did not initially imagine that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon would operate on its own for nearly four years before Boeing’s Starliner reached 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 dating back to the mid-20th century – over SpaceX, which the federal agency saw as a relatively young and capricious startup. .
the vision of Boeing, SpaceX and NASA
As recently as 2016, NASA was planning its schedule with the assumption that the Starliner would beat the Crew Dragon to the launch pad.
But the race between Boeing and SpaceX changed dramatically by 2020. The previous year’s Starliner test flight was marred by missteps, leaving NASA and Boeing officials scrambling to figure out what happened. The Starliner did not join the space station on that mission due to software problems, including an issue with the spacecraft’s internal clock, which was off by 11 hours.
Meanwhile, SpaceX made history in May 2020 with the launch of its Demo-2 test flight, carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on a two-month mission to the International Space Station.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has been flying regular trips ever since, carrying NASA astronauts and even paying customers and tourists. The spacecraft has now flown 13 crewed missions into orbit.
However, Boeing has spent several years dealing with a series of challenges, including a list of issues revealed in 2022 during the spacecraft’s second unmanned test flight. Boeing’s commercial plane division has also faced a series of scandals – including the 737 Max crisis and the quality control issues most recently highlighted when a door plug blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight in January – that have damaged the brand company.
NASA officials at one point in 2020 even admitted that they had turned more scrutiny toward SpaceX and its unorthodox ways, and problems with Boeing’s Starliner fell through the cracks.
“Maybe we didn’t have as many people embedded in that process as we should have,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said at a news conference in July 2020.
“When one provider (SpaceX) has a newer approach than another, it’s often natural for people to spend more time on that newer approach, and maybe we didn’t take the time which we needed with a more traditional approach (Boeing). “
Disadvantages of Starliner
Boeing’s space division operates separately from its commercial airline team, and officials at NASA and the US aerospace giant have regularly sought to make that distinction.
NASA officials also made it clear that they are working more closely with Boeing than ever, with personnel on the ground at Boeing facilities overseeing some of the solutions the company has implemented ahead of the upcoming Starliner flight.
“This is an important resource for NASA. We signed up to do this, and we’re going to do it and be successful at it,” Nappi said Thursday. “I don’t think about it in terms of what’s important to Boeing as much as I think about what’s important to this program.”
However, Boeing and NASA had a long list of issues to contend with.
During the final flight test in 2022, for example, engineers discovered that the suspension lines on the Starliner parachute had a lower threshold for failure than originally expected.
NASA and Boeing engineers tested a solution to that issue earlier this year, but parachutes will remain alert as they work through some last-minute checks before liftoff, Stich said Thursday.
Some tape also used to protect wiring harnesses was found to be flammable, and Boeing had to remove and replace about a thousandths worth of the material, according to Nappi.
Boeing may even have to redesign some of the spacecraft’s valves due to corrosion issues. That upgrade is not expected to be in place, however, until the second crewed flight, slated for 2025, at the earliest.
On the first crewed flight in May, Boeing will use a “perfectly acceptable mitigation” that would prevent the valves from sticking, Nappi said in March.
Starliner and safety
Despite the long path to the launch pad, the two men at the center of Starliner’s first manned mission – Williams and Wilmore, two longtime NASA astronauts – said as they arrived at the launch site they were as confident as their ever was.
“We want the general public to think it’s easy, but it’s not — it’s pretty hard,” Wilmore said after arriving at the Starliner launch site in Florida on Thursday. “We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t ready. We are ready. The spacecraft is ready, and the crews are ready.”
Wilmore stated at a news conference in March that he does not expect the Starliner spacecraft to enter any “failure modes.”
“But if something were to happen – because we’re all human, we can’t build things perfectly – if something were to happen, we have downgraded some methods,” he said during the news conference, referring to methods that astronauts. the ability to take more manual control of the spacecraft if something doesn’t go according to plan.
Williams said during a news event in March, “We wouldn’t be sitting here if we didn’t feel — and tell our families that we do — confident in this spacecraft and our ability to control it.”
She said during Thursday’s briefing in Florida, “I have confidence not only in our capabilities and the capabilities of the spacecraft, but also in our mission control team, which is ready for the challenge.”
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