Boeing is standing down for the first-ever crewed launch of its Starliner astronaut capsule for NASA, possibly indefinitely, on account of questions of safety with the spacecraft’s parachutes and wiring discovered last week.
The Starliner astronaut launch, already years behind schedule, was most recently targeted to launch two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on July 21. Now, it likely won’t launch in any respect this summer, and should not get off the bottom this yr.
“It’s feasible, but I actually would not need to commit to any dates or timeframes,” Mark Nappi, Boeing Starliner program manager and vice chairman, told reporters in a press conference Thursday (June 1). “We want to spend the subsequent several days understanding what we want to go do to unravel these problems.”
Two major questions of safety are driving the most recent delay, each of them discovered last week during in-depth reviews of Starliner to certify the spacecraft for crewed flight, Nappi said.
First, Boeing engineers discovered that the “soft links” on used on the suspension lines of Starliner’s three primary parachutes have a failure load limit that is definitely lower than previously thought. It turned out that those links, which secure the parachute lines with their anchor tethers on the capsule, cannot handle the load of Starliner if one chute fails. With the ability to land safely with two of three chutes is a security requirement for NASA, Nappi said.
The second safety issue Boeing found pertains to the protective tape covering the wiring harnesses throughout the Starliner capsule. That tape, Nappi said, is flammable and there are “a whole bunch” of feet of it inside Starliner.
“It’s highly unlikely that we might go in and cut this tape off,” Nappi said, adding that it might likely cause more potential damage. “So we’re solutions that will provide for essentially one other style of wrapping over the present tape in essentially the most vulnerable areas that reduces the danger of fireside hazard.”
Related: Starliner: Boeing’s next-generation spaceship for astronauts
Boeing’s latest Starliner delay follows a string of setbacks for the spacecraft. In December 2019, Boeing’s first uncrewed test flight of Starliner failed to succeed in its proper orbit and couldn’t rendezvous with the International Space Station. It ultimately needed to land sooner than planned.
A follow-up NASA investigation ultimately tasked Boeing to make 80 different corrective actions to deal with safety and other issues with the Starliner spacecraft. The corporate also needed to launch a repeat uncrewed test flight, which successfully reached the space station in May 2022 after its own series of delays over valve issues. The flammable tape issue and the parachute soft links issue were each present on that flight, however the mission was a hit, NASA officials said.
Meanwhile, two NASA astronauts — Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore — have been waiting and training to fly Starliner’s first crewed flight, called Crew Flight Test. At first of the yr, that test flight was targeted for February and has steadily slipped later and later within the months since. In 2021, two other NASA astronauts originally assigned to fly on Starliner, the agency’s Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, were reassigned to fly on SpaceX’s Dragon so that they could complete their missions. Each have since done so.
In a recent meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, experts raised concerns over Starliner’s readiness, particularly its parachute certification because the system flown on the uncrewed test flight was not certified for crewed flight, in accordance with a SpaceNews report.
Steve Stitch, NASA’s Business Crew Program manager, said the whole team feels the pain of yet one more delay.
“I’d say everybody is a bit upset,” Stitch told reporters Thursday, adding that Boeing and NASA engineers discussed the delay together in a gathering this week. “But you could possibly see people able to go roll up their sleeves and go see what the subsequent steps are.”
Boeing is considered one of two business corporations picked by NASA to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station through multibillion-dollar fixed-cost contracts with agency’s Business Crew Program. Resulting from those fixed-cost agreements, Boeing likely is accountable for any additional costs on account of the delays.
NASA’s second pick for business crew flights is SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, which has been launching astronauts to the station on its Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules since 2020. To this point, SpaceX has launched seven crewed flights for NASA and three private flights for purchasers, most recently the Ax-2 business flight to the station for Axiom Space that landed on Tuesday (May 30).
The traffic to and from the International Space Station is tightly packed over the subsequent few months, Stitch said, with crew arrivals, departures and cargo missions to the orbiting lab. If Boeing is in a position to solve its parachute and wiring issues in the subsequent few months, the subsequent window to fly the Starliner crewed flight can be in the autumn, he added.
Boeing is on the hook for not less than seven crewed flights for NASA, including the Crew Flight Test and 6 operational astronaut missions, as a part of its NASA contract. Despite the repeated delays, Nappi said Boeing stays committed to its Starliner spacecraft and fulfilling its NASA obligations.
“We have been talking concerning the way forward for Starliner and the way we’ll move forward,” Nappi said. “We all know that there is growing pains in developing vehicles and flying vehicles … That is just a part of the business to have the sorts of issues.”
NASA desires to have two different spacecraft available for astronaut flights so it isn’t depending on a single company to fly astronauts in space, Stitch added.
“NASA desperately needs a second provider for transportation,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is to have one SpaceX and one Boeing flight per yr rotate as much as the station.”
