WASHINGTON — NASA and Boeing will further delay the primary crewed launch of the corporate’s CST-100 Starliner, which had been scheduled for July, to handle two newly discovered issues with the spacecraft.
At a briefing June 1 announced on little greater than an hour’s notice, officials said they were standing down from preparations for the Crew Flight Test (CFT) of the spacecraft, with two NASA astronauts on board, which had been scheduled for as soon as July 21. They set no latest date for the test flight to the International Space Station.
One issue is with components within the parachutes called soft links. Those components had a lower load limit than previously expected, decreasing the general factor of safety within the parachute system “pretty significantly,” said Mark Nappi, vice chairman and program manager for CST-100 Starliner at Boeing.
The second issue is with tape used to wrap wire harnesses within the spacecraft that tests have shown is flammable. That tape, he said, is used “quite extensively” on Starliner.
Each concerns were highlighted as “emerging issues” in a May 26 NASA statement that was otherwise positive in regards to the prospects for a July launch of the CFT mission. Nappi said subsequent studies of each the parachutes and the wiring issues, which had been found only recently during final certification work, led Boeing to conclude they need to halt preparations for the launch.
That call, he said, went to Boeing leadership all of the approach to Chief Executive Dave Calhoun. “Boeing unanimously decided that that is something that we would have liked to correct,” Nappi said. “We decided to face down the preparations for the CFT mission to be able to correct the issues.” That call, and the notification of NASA, took place earlier within the day.
Nappi declined to say how long these issues will delay the mission. He said the corporate needed five to seven days to review what must be done and schedules for completing that work. Asked later in the decision if a launch of CFT later this yr was feasible, he said it was but that it was premature to contemplate any latest launch dates for it. “I definitely don’t need to commit to any dates or timeframes until we spend the subsequent several days understanding what we’d like to go do.”
Each the parachute soft links and wiring tape were used on the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 uncrewed test flight in May 2022 without incident. The soft link issue, officials said, would only be a priority if one among the three principal parachutes failed, putting additional loads on the opposite two, while the flammable tape would have required what Nappi called “multiple failures” elsewhere within the spacecraft.
NASA backed Boeing’s decision to delay CFT. “We applaud Mark for deciding to face down and we support that call 100%,” said Steve Stich, NASA industrial crew program manager. He added that agency leadership, as much as Administrator Bill Nelson, supported the choice.
The delay is the newest in a series of setbacks for Starliner that include a flawed initial OFT test flight in December 2019 and stuck valves that delayed the OFT-2 reflight by nearly 10 months. In March, NASA and Boeing said they were delaying the CFT mission from April to July to present teams more time to finish certification work.
NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), at a public meeting May 25, expressed skepticism that the agency and Boeing could complete the certification work in time for a July launch. It called on the agency to usher in an independent panel, perhaps from the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC), to perform what Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel, called a “deep look” on the remaining work.
Stich said that the agency is accepting that advice through having NESC engineers embedded in teams throughout the Starliner program. Those engineers will transient a panel organized by NASA’s Office of the Chief Engineer. An identical process, he said, is used on other programs. “That’s what we plan to make use of to meet what the ASAP is requesting, which I feel is a wonderful request,” he said.
This latest delay comes two days after the third anniversary of the launch SpaceX’s similar to CFT, the Demo-2 mission of its Crew Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX has now launched 10 crewed missions for NASA and personal customers, most recently the Ax-2 private astronaut mission in May.
Stich emphasized that NASA continues to be expecting Boeing to bring Starliner into service. “NASA desperately needs a second provider,” he said, providing redundancy. “We support Boeing and we’re doing the whole lot we will in the course of the investigation of every of those issues, and check out to get to flight as soon as we will, when it’s secure to accomplish that.”
Nappi, when asked if Boeing had considered abandoning Starliner, initially offered an ambiguous response. “We’ve been talking in regards to the way forward for Starliner and the way we’re going to maneuver forward,” he said. He later clarified that was referring to long-term decisions about whether to construct one other Starliner vehicle to support higher flight rates and when to transition from the Atlas 5 launch vehicle that will probably be used for initial Starliner missions.
Asked later if there had been any discussions inside the company about dropping Starliner, he said there had been “not serious discussions.”
Stich said that he had seen progress at Boeing for the reason that earlier problems with Starliner. “I actually have seen an incredible change within the Boeing culture for the reason that first Orbital Flight Test,” he said. He said the work resulting in CFT had been “very thorough and comprehensive” and that it was uncovering design issues made years ago.
“My view is that the security culture has all the time been strong,” said Nappi moments later, explaining that the explanation issues were just now being found was “a certain sense of optimism” in earlier phases of spacecraft design. “The method is catching these items, and we’ll proceed to do these thorough reviews, catch things, speak about them and fix them.”
