NASA astronaut Bob Hines received a special mission shortly after taking the first Boeing Starliner to a spaceport.
Hines was one of the astronauts working aboard the International Space Station for the historic first docking of an uncrewed Boeing Starliner spacecraft on May 22, 2022. Flying with SpaceX Crew-4, Hines returned to Earth in October after six months in space. , to learn that NASA wants him to help see the Starliner on its first crewed mission.
It took extra time after new technical issues arose, but Starliner finally lifted off on its first astronaut mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station yesterday (May 21) aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Hines, a former U.S. Navy test pilot, shares this military legacy with two members of Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT): NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.
A big advantage of that military background is that everyone is familiar with the “test fundamentals” they learned at the prestigious Naval Test Pilot School, he told Space.com at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in early May. “It’s about teamwork and building and leading teams to do the hard work,” Hines said of the experience. “It’s a fundamental thing for him.”
Relating to: Astronaut says Boeing’s Starliner is ‘a big part of America’s overall strategy for access to low Earth orbit’
Hines is a member of the joint test team, a team that manages the testing and verification of commercial crew vehicles under the commercial crew program. In addition, he explained that he was the assistant to NASA’s chief astronaut on the commercial crew side, which was a sort of technical advisory role to advise the chief on moving forward.
Starliner, one of NASA’s two commercial crew vehicles, flew its first crewed mission in 2020, four years after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. While SpaceX had the advantage of borrowing design and experience from its eight-year-old cargo Dragon missions, Starliner was a new spacecraft.
Starliner therefore ran into obstacles: Its first uncrewed mission in 2019 failed to reach the ISS as planned after software errors put the spacecraft in the wrong orbit. While Hines is eyeing the safe docking of a second Starliner in 2022, crewed missions were delayed again last year due to parachutes and cabling issues. (As officials have repeatedly emphasized in recent months, all issues were addressed well before the CFT, to the satisfaction of NASA and Boeing.)
Read more: After ‘an emotional rollercoaster’, NASA astronauts ready to fly Boeing Starliner
Hines explained that design decisions are always difficult because aerospace technicians must consider “trade-offs”: emphasizing one aspect of a spacecraft (like more mass) means something has to be given away elsewhere (for example, available rocket fuel to carry other things). ). ). Hines was part of the team that tried to make smart trades as Starliner met its final design challenges.
“Sometimes it might be about figuring it out procedurally rather than technically and bringing the teams together and creating that kind of alignment so you can have those conversations and make those trade-offs,” he explained. “Everything is a compromise. So it’s really about bringing these different perspectives together, putting them all on the table, and then figuring out what the best path forward is.”
RELATED STORIES:
— Boeing Starliner astronauts conduct a dress rehearsal ahead of launch on May 6 (photos, video)
— Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft won’t fly special missions yet, officials say
— ‘I’m sure we’ll learn something’: NASA astronauts fly to launch site for the first crewed Boeing Starliner mission to the ISS on May 6 (photos)
This design process will continue even after the Starliner returns and future missions come into play. Starliner-1, the first operational crewed mission involving astronauts, has most of its hardware ready for launch before early 2025. Assuming all goes as planned at CFT, this spacecraft will mostly fly as is, and future missions will include deeper design “lessons learned” from the pioneering astronaut mission.
“We will look at this data [from CFT] And is this what we expect? If not why? I’m trying to figure this stuff out,” Hines explained. “This is a test flight. Therefore, we expect some unexpected things to occur during this test flight. “That’s where I come in with the other team (members of the Joint testing team) to analyze and really examine this data.”
Hines plans to record the crew’s experiences even during the flight; this will include space-to-ground interviews with Wilmore and Williams, where he talks about the topics while they’re still fresh in their minds. “We’ll have a series of questions. We’ll de-interpret them. Then we’ll match them with the data we see.”
“It’s really important,” he added of the process. “Those of us who grew up in flight testing get into the habit of talking into tapes, we say this. We make comments in real time, and they may be short and abbreviated, but [it is a] memory jogger so we can remember what that detail was when we come back.”