A Boeing official said Monday that the company has delayed a crewed flight test of its Starliner spacecraft until at least March 2024.<\/p>\n
The manager for the company\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, Mark Nappi, said the spacecraft should be ready for flight by early March, or seven months from now. However, Nappi said that date is conditional on availability of an Atlas V rocket, provided by United Launch Alliance, and an opening in NASA\u2019s visiting vehicles schedule.<\/p>\n
According to NASA\u2019s internal schedule, there is a docking port available from early April to late June 2024 on the International Space Station. So barring a schedule change to delay a cargo mission, the likely no-earlier-than launch date for Starliner\u2019s crewed test flight is April 2024.<\/p>\n
Boeing has reported $1.1 billion in losses for its Starliner program, which is one of two vehicles that NASA helped support development of to fly astronauts to the space station. The other vehicle, SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft, flew its crew test flight in May 2020. Dragon\u2019s seventh operational mission, Crew-7, is due to launch in about two weeks.<\/p>\n
Starliner has faced a more difficult development path. The vehicle\u2019s first uncrewed test flight narrowly averted disaster in December 2019, and due to software issues, Boeing agreed to fly a second test flight without astronauts on board. That mission took place in May 2022, and Starliner successfully docked with the space station.<\/p>\n
That set the stage for a crewed test flight this summer, with Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore on board. However, in late May, just weeks before this mission was due to launch, Boeing and NASA discovered two serious problems\u2014with the vehicle\u2019s parachutes and flammable tape inside the spacecraft.<\/p>\n
On June 1, Boeing announced that it was \u201cstanding down\u201d to investigate these issues. NASA also said it would require some independent investigations.<\/p>\n
In the two months since then, Boeing and NASA have been busy. During a teleconference with reporters on Monday, Nappi and the leader of the Commercial Crew Program for NASA, Steve Stich, provided updates on what has transpired since the eye-raising announcement on June 1 of two major problems identified so close to launch.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Nappi said workers have started removing the flammable tape from inside the spacecraft. This glass cloth tape was wrapped around wiring inside the spacecraft to protect it from chafing and rubbing in flight. Several pounds of tape have been removed from Starliner so far.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the more significant issue, from a schedule standpoint, are changes to Starliner\u2019s parachutes. At issue were \u201csoft link\u201d joints in the canopy of the parachutes that were found to not have a high enough safety factor. Nappi said the parachute\u2019s manufacturer, Airborne, is fabricating a new version of the parachute joints using a stronger Kevlar material. Boeing plans to conduct a drop test of this new parachute in mid- to late-November, which would leave time for analysis ahead of a launch next spring.<\/p>\n
Nappi said he is confident in the timeline left to complete these tasks, saying the work is fairly \u201cstraightforward.\u201d<\/p>\n
When SpaceX decided to change to a more rigorous parachute design for its Crew Dragon vehicle in 2019, going from the \u201cMark 2\u201d to \u201cMark 3\u201d parachute, it had to repeat its entire test series. This process, consisting of about two dozen drop tests from various altitudes, took the better part of a year.<\/p>\n
Stich, the NASA official, said the space agency was only requiring Boeing to complete a single additional test to verify the performance of its upgraded parachute. SpaceX\u2019s modifications of its parachutes were \u201csignificant,\u201d he said. Boeing\u2019s modifications by contrast are fairly simple, Stich said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe felt like we only needed one test\u2026 given how close both the soft-link redesign and the joint redesign were to what we have already tested in all the previous parachute drop tests.\u201d he said. \u201cThe design changes were, I would say, minimal as opposed to what we had for Dragon, which was a, really, a wholesale change in the canopy.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to the hardware work, Boeing must also comply with three separate investigations. According to Stich, there is an \u201cindependent team\u201d at Boeing reviewing the company\u2019s actions. In addition, NASA\u2019s chief engineer, Joseph Pellicciotti, has interviewed every one of Starliner\u2019s subsystem managers to ensure there are no other potential surprises looming. Finally, Pellicciotti, his deputy, and the NASA Engineering & Safety Center have been conducting their own independent review of Starliner\u2019s soundness.<\/p>\n
All of these assessments must be completed before NASA convenes a flight-readiness review and determines that Starliner is finally ready to take flight with astronauts on board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Boeing official said Monday that the company has delayed a crewed flight test of its Starliner spacecraft until at least March 2024. The manager for the company\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, Mark Nappi, said the spacecraft should be ready for flight by early March, or seven months from now. However, Nappi said that date is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46008"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46008\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}