HOUSTON — Everyone thought Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft would get astronauts flying sooner by now.
Starliner is ready to carry two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time as soon as Monday, May 6, but it’s been a long road to get here. To achieve its goals, Boeing needed two test missions to the ISS rather than a single uncrewed test mission. The pandemic and numerous technical problems further delayed the capsule’s first astronaut launch.
But NASA and Boeing officials emphasized that safety should always come first during a media briefing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on March 22. Through years of extra work, teams carefully worked toward their goal of launching the astronauts. Boeing’s Mark Nappi told reporters that they will continue to work to solve new problems as they arise.
“I wouldn’t describe it as frustrating at all,” Nappi, program manager for Boeing’s commercial crew program, said of the longer-than-expected wait time. “We wish we were further ahead right now. There’s no doubt about that. But we’re here, we’re prepared and we’re ready to fly.”
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The first Starliner mission with astronauts, called Crew Flight Test, or CFT, will send two veteran NASA astronauts and former Navy test pilots to the ISS: commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams. They will spend a little more than a week in space after lifting off aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from NASA’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station near Florida’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC).
Astronauts will draw on their decades of space and aviation experience by performing comprehensive checks of the spacecraft and ensuring it meets all key objectives for automatic and manual flight. If Starliner passes all CFT tests, it will pave the way for six-month operational Starliner ISS missions, starting with Starliner-1 in 2025.
CFT follows two uncrewed flights of the Starliner. The December 2019 mission, called Orbital Flight Test (OFT), did not reach the ISS as planned. Boeing spent several years applying dozens of fixes to the spacecraft amid the pandemic, and it was successful: a 2022 attempt (OFT 2) reached the ISS and met all other major flight goals.
But more problems arose in the summer of 2023 when teams uncovered new problems with the Starliner that further delayed human spaceflight. For example: the suspension lines of the Starliner’s main parachutes couldn’t handle as much mass as engineers thought, and flammable P213 tape covered most of the capsule’s cables.
At the March 22 briefing, representatives from both NASA and Boeing emphasized that the two test flights did their job: They caught problems before people got on the plane. Steve Stich, head of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters that the CFT and Starliner-1 astronauts are closely involved in resolving all the issues.
“From my perspective, it looks like we’ve reviewed everything so far,” Stich said. “In many cases, we’ve done independent analysis on things like landing loads, abort performance, rendezvous and docking. And I would say that in the time frame that we’ve had since last summer, we’ve spent that time at Boeing ASIL testing the flight software in a very integrated way.” [Avionics and Software Integration Lab] Facility.”
“We did everything we could to make sure we didn’t miss anything,” Stich added. “I tend to ask a lot of questions. I’m more of a hands-on program manager, I would say. Maybe a little bit of an engineer at heart, too. So I try to research areas to make sure we’re not missing anything.”
“The last parachute test gave us great confidence in this system,” he continued. “I would say we have more instrumentation in this parachute test than we have in the past; we studied the dynamics of how the parachutes actually exit the parachute bay and calculated the margins of those parachutes, and we got a lot out of it.” My trust in this system.
“What we do every day is make sure you don’t miss anything. Spaceflight is very complex. I think we’re taking it one step at a time, looking at all the data. We’ve turned off all the anomalies during the flight to our satisfaction with the OFT. We’ll go over that now.” [CFT] “Flight preparation process.”
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While all Starliner systems are examined, one that particularly stands out for the CFT is the life support system, which provides oxygen to astronauts and eliminates carbon dioxide, among other tasks. This system has not been tested with people on board, but briefing participants emphasized that robust ground tests have been conducted to prepare for spaceflight.
A recent integrated test with astronauts at Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at KSC allowed Williams and Wilmore to “demonstrate this,” Stich said. [the life support system] He said the testing “gave us a lot of good data, and with Suni and Butch’s involvement, it gave us confidence that the ecosystem would perform the way we needed it to.”
Nappi noted icing in the thermal control system during uncrewed OFT; this was “probably due to the lack of crew on board.” However, Boeing “made some changes during this latest influx to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
He said adding crew to the vehicle would generate more heat during spaceflight than flying the Starliner without humans on board. Boeing will evaluate the Starliner to see how the vehicle’s cooling system responds, whether humidity will remain constant, and other possible effects.
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In 2014, both Boeing and SpaceX won NASA contracts to fly astronauts to and from the ISS to replace the agency’s retired space shuttle in 2011. Boeing’s contract is worth $4.2 billion, while SpaceX’s is worth $2.6 billion.
So far, SpaceX has sent 11 operational crewed missions to the ISS with Crew Dragon: eight for NASA’s commercial crew program and three short-term missions on behalf of Houston-based company Axiom Space.
A handful of NASA astronauts also fly on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft for technical and political reasons, in keeping with long-standing interagency practices. Additionally, all NASA astronauts flew to the ISS on Soyuz following the shuttle’s retirement in 2011 and the Demo-2 test flight, SpaceX’s first manned mission in 2020.