by Shortly after bringing the first Boeing Starliner to a spaceport, NASA astronaut Bob Hines received a special assignment.
Hines was one of the astronauts working in the International Space Station for the historic first flight of an unmanned Boeing Starliner spacecraft on May 22, 2022. Hines, who flew on SpaceX Crew-4, returned to Earth after half a year in space until October. , to find out that NASA wanted him to help see Starliner through its first crewed mission.
It took extra time after new technical issues emerged, but Starliner finally took off yesterday (May 21) aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on its first astronaut mission. Hines, a former US Navy test pilot, shares that military heritage with the two members of the Starliner Flight Test (CFT) Crew: NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.
A big advantage of that military background, he told Space.com at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in early May, is that everyone has a hand in the “fundamentals of testing” they learned in Pilot School. Notorious Naval Test. “It’s about teamwork, and building and leading teams to take on hard things,” Hines said of the experience. “That’s basic to him.”
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Hines is a member of the joint test team, a team within the commercial crew program that manages the testing and verification of commercial crew vehicles. In addition, he is the assistant to NASA’s chief astronaut on the commercial side – a sort of technical advisory role to advise the chief executive on progress, he explained.
Starliner, one of NASA’s two commercial crew vehicles, flew its first crewed mission four years after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in 2020. SpaceX had the advantage of borrowing design and experience from eight years of Dragon cargo missions, and was Starliner is a new spaceship.
So Starliner hit snags: its first uncrewed mission in 2019 failed to reach the ISS as planned after software glitches stuck the spacecraft in the wrong orbit. While Hines envisioned a second Starliner landing safely in 2022, crewed missions were delayed again last year due to issues with the parachutes and wiring. (All issues were dealt with to the satisfaction of NASA and Boeing well ahead of CFT, officials have emphasized repeatedly in recent months.)
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Design decisions, Hines explained, are always difficult because aerospace technicians must consider “trade-offs”: an emphasis on one aspect of a spacecraft (such as greater mass) means that something must go somewhere else (rocket fuel that available to carry other things, for example ). Hines was part of the team working to make smart trades as Starliner met its ultimate design challenges.
“Sometimes it might not be a technical solution, but a procedural one, and getting the teams together and building that kind of cohesion so we can have those conversations and make those trades,” a he explained. “Everything is a compromise. So it’s really about getting those different opinions together, laying them all out on the table, and then figuring out what’s the best way forward.”
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That design process continues even after Starliner returns, as future missions are set up. Most of its hardware is ready for launch by Starliner-1, the first operational crewed mission with astronauts, no sooner than early 2025. Assuming all goes to plan on CFT, the that spacecraft is flying mostly as is, with future missions progressing. Deeper design “lessons” from a pioneering astronaut mission.
“We are going to look at this data [from CFT] and see if we expect it? If not, why? Trying to figure those kinds of things out,” Hines explained. “It’s a test flight. So we fully expect some unexpected things to come up during this test flight. And so that’s kind of where I’ll be coming in with the other team — members of the Joint Test Team — to analyze that data and really look at it.”
Hines plans to capture the team’s experience even during the flight, which will include space-to-ground interviews where he will talk to Wilmore and Williams about what’s on their mind. “We’re going to have a series of questions. We’re going to take their comments down. And then we’re going to pair all of that with the data that we’ve seen.”
“It is very important,” he said of the process. “Those of us who grow up in flight tests tend to talk on the tapes, we say it. We’re making real-time observations, and they might be short and abbreviated, but [it is a] memory jogger so that we can recall, when we go back, what was in data.”
