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After years of delays and dizzying setbacks during test flights, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is finally set for its first crewed launch.
The mission, scheduled to depart from Florida as early as May 6, will carry NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station in a historic and long-awaited move for the beleaguered Starliner program. could be a victory.
“Design and development is difficult, especially for a manned spacecraft,” Mark Nappi, Boeing vice president and Starliner program manager, said at a press conference Thursday. “There were a lot of surprises that we had to overcome along the way. … It certainly made the team very, very strong. How they overcame every problem we encountered and got us this far. I’m very proud of that.”
Boeing and NASA officials made the decision Thursday to move forward with launch plans within two weeks. But May 6 is “not a magical day,” said Ken Bowersox, deputy administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate.
“We’ll leave when you’re ready,” he said.
If successful, Starliner would join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft in making regular trips to the space station and permanently stationing astronauts from NASA and its partner space agencies at the orbiting outpost. Become.
Such a scenario, in which both Crew Dragon and Starliner fly regularly, is something the U.S. space agency has long anticipated.
“This is history in the making,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a March 22 press conference about the upcoming Starliner mission. “We are now in a golden age of space exploration.”
SpaceX and Boeing developed their respective vehicles under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, a partnership with private industrial contractors. From the beginning, the space agency aimed to operate both companies simultaneously. The Crew Dragon and Starliner spacecraft each act as a backup for the other, so if one spacecraft is grounded due to technical problems or other failures, astronauts can will be given the option to continue flying.
But NASA didn’t originally envision SpaceX’s Crew Dragon operating alone for nearly four years before Boeing’s Starliner reached its first manned test flight.
In the early days of the program, which signed contracts with SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, NASA was a close partner dating back to the mid-20th century, rather than SpaceX, which the federal agency viewed as a relatively young and volatile upstart. He supported Boeing.
Vision of Boeing, SpaceX and NASA
As of 2016, NASA was planning its schedule with a view to Starliner beating Crew Dragon to reach the launch pad.
However, the competition between Boeing and SpaceX took a clear turn by 2020. A mistake made during a Starliner test flight last year left NASA and Boeing officials scrambling to figure out what went wrong. Starliner did not dock with the space station on that mission due to software problems, including a problem with the spacecraft’s internal clock that was off by 11 hours.
Meanwhile, SpaceX made history in May 2020 by launching a Demo 2 test flight carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on a two-month mission to the International Space Station. Ta.
Since then, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has continued to fly regularly, carrying NASA astronauts and even paying customers and tourists. The spacecraft has currently flown 13 crewed missions into orbit.
But Boeing has spent years grappling with a series of challenges, including a list of problems revealed during the spacecraft’s second uncrewed test flight in 2022. Boeing’s commercial aircraft division has also faced a series of scandals that have tarnished its brand, including the 737 Max crisis and recent quality control issues highlighted by a door plug flying off during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. ing.
NASA officials even acknowledged at one point in 2020 that they were drawing closer scrutiny of SpaceX and its unconventional practices while letting problems with Boeing’s Starliner slip through the cracks.
“We probably didn’t have enough people to be part of that process,” Steve Stitch, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said at a press conference in July 2020.
“If one provider (SpaceX) has a new approach than another, it’s natural for us as humans to spend more time on that new approach. Perhaps (Boeing’s) more traditional Maybe the approach didn’t give us enough time.”
Boeing’s space division operates separately from its commercial aviation team, and NASA and officials at the U.S. aerospace giant have routinely sought to draw that distinction.
NASA officials have also said they are working more closely with Boeing than ever before, with ground crews at Boeing facilities reviewing some of the modifications the company has implemented ahead of Starliner’s upcoming flight. is supervised.
“This is an important capability for NASA. We signed up to do this, and we’re going to do it and be successful,” Nappi said Thursday. “I don’t think in terms of what’s important to Boeing, I’m thinking in terms of what’s important to this program.”
Still, Boeing and NASA have a long list of issues to address.
For example, during the last flight test in 2022, engineers found that Starliner’s parachute suspension lines had a lower failure threshold than originally expected.
NASA and Boeing engineers tested a fix for the problem earlier this year, but parachutes will remain a top priority as they work through final pre-launch checkouts, Stich said Thursday.
Some of the tape, which was also used to protect the wiring harness, was found to be flammable, and Boeing had to remove and replace about a mile of tape, Nappi said.
Boeing may have to redesign some of the spacecraft’s valves because of corrosion problems. However, this upgrade is not expected to take place until the second crewed flight, scheduled for 2025 at the earliest.
Nappi announced in March that for the first crewed flight in May, Boeing would instead use “fully acceptable mitigations” to prevent the valves from sticking.
Starliner and safety
Despite the long journey to the launch pad, Williams and Willmore, two longtime NASA astronauts who were central to Starliner’s first manned mission, said they had never been before when they arrived at the launch site. He said he is equally confident.
“We want the 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. We’re ready. The spacecraft is ready and the team is ready.”
Wilmore said at a press conference in March that he did not expect the Starliner spacecraft to go into “failure mode.”
“But we can’t build things perfectly because we’re all human. If something happens, we have some downgrade modes,” he said. spoke at a press conference about the mode it will give astronauts. The ability to have more manual control over the spacecraft if something doesn’t go as planned.
“If we didn’t have confidence in this spacecraft and our ability to control it, and if we hadn’t told our families that we felt that way, we wouldn’t be here,” Williams said at a news event in March. I wouldn’t be sitting there.”
“I have full confidence not only in our capabilities and the capabilities of the spacecraft, but also in our mission control team who are ready for this challenge,” she said at a Thursday news conference in Florida. added.
