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After years of delays and stunning setbacks during test flights, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is finally poised to make its first crewed launch.
The mission will lift off from Florida on May 6, carrying NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station, marking a historic and long-awaited victory for the beleaguered Starliner program.
“Design and development are difficult, especially when it comes to a manned spacecraft,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s vice president and Starliner program manager, said at Thursday’s press conference. “There are many surprises we have to overcome along the way. … It definitely made the team very, very strong. “I am very proud of how they overcame every problem we encountered and brought us to this point.”
Boeing and NASA officials decided Thursday to move forward with the launch attempt in less than two weeks. But Ken Bowersox, deputy administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, noted that May 6 is “not a magic date.”
“We will leave when we are ready,” he said.
If successful, Starliner will join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on routine trips to the space station, ensuring the orbiting outpost is fully staffed with astronauts from NASA and partner space agencies.
Such a scenario, in which both Crew Dragon and Starliner fly regularly, is one that the US space agency has long awaited.
“This is history in the making,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said of the upcoming Starliner mission at a March 22 press conference. “We are now in the golden age of space exploration.”
SpaceX and Boeing developed their respective vehicles under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, a partnership with private sector contractors. From the beginning, the space agency aimed for both companies to operate simultaneously. The Crew Dragon and Starliner spacecraft will each serve as a backup for the other, giving astronauts the option to continue flying even if technical problems or other glitches ground a spacecraft.
But NASA did not initially anticipate that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon would operate on its own for nearly four years before Boeing’s Starliner reached its first manned test flight.
In the early days of the program, which signed a contract with SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, NASA opted for Boeing, a close partner dating back to the mid-20th century, over SpaceX, which the federal agency saw as a relatively young and capricious startup.
The vision of Boeing, SpaceX and NASA
As recently as 2016, NASA was planning its program with the view that Starliner would surpass Crew Dragon on the launch pad.
However, the race between Boeing and SpaceX took a clear turn in 2020. Missteps roiled the Starliner test flight the year before, leaving NASA and Boeing officials scrambling to figure out what went wrong. Starliner did not dock with the space station on this mission due to software problems, including a problem with the spacecraft’s internal clock that was inaccurate by 11 hours.
Meanwhile, SpaceX made history in May 2020 with the launch of the Demo-2 test flight, carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley for a two-month mission to the International Space Station.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has been making routine trips ever since, transporting NASA astronauts and even paying customers and tourists. The spacecraft has currently flown 13 crewed missions into orbit.
But Boeing has spent several years grappling with a number of challenges, including a list of problems that emerged during the spacecraft’s second uncrewed test flight in 2022. Boeing’s commercial aircraft division has also faced a series of scandals that have damaged the company’s brand, including the 737 Max crisis and recent quality control problems that emerged when a door plug exploded during an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
NASA officials even admitted that at one point in 2020, they became more focused on SpaceX and its unorthodox methods, while problems with Boeing’s Starliner were overlooked.
“Perhaps we didn’t include as many people in this process as we should have,” Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said at a press conference in July 2020.
“When one provider (SpaceX) has a newer approach than another, it’s often natural for a person to spend more time on that new approach, and maybe we didn’t quite get the time we needed with (Boeing’s) more traditional approach. ”
Starliner’s glitches
Boeing’s space division operates separately from its commercial airline team, and NASA and officials at the US aerospace giant routinely try to make the distinction.
NASA officials also made clear that they are working more closely with Boeing than ever before, and that staff at Boeing facilities are overseeing some of the fixes the company has implemented ahead of the upcoming Starliner flight.
“This is an important capability for NASA. We signed up to do this, we will do it, and we will be successful at it,” Nappi said Thursday. “I don’t think about what’s important to Boeing as much as I think about what’s important to this program.”
Still, Boeing and NASA have a long list of problems to address.
For example, during final flight testing in 2022, engineers found that the suspension lines in the Starliner’s parachute had a lower failure threshold than initially expected.
NASA and Boeing engineers tested a solution to this problem earlier this year, but the parachutes will be kept in mind during last-minute checks before takeoff, Stich said Thursday.
Some tape, which was also used to protect wiring harnesses, turned out to be flammable, and Boeing had to remove and replace about a mile’s worth of material, Nappi said.
Boeing may even need to implement a redesign of some of the spacecraft’s valves due to corrosion issues. However, this upgrade is not expected to occur until the second crewed flight, which is planned for 2025 at the earliest.
Nappi said in March that on the first crewed flight in May, Boeing would instead use a “perfectly acceptable mitigation method” that would prevent the valves from sticking.
Starliner and security
Despite the long road to the launch pad, the two people at the center of Starliner’s first crewed mission — Williams and Wilmore, a longtime NASA astronaut — said they were as safe as ever once they arrived at the launch site.
“We want the public to think it’s easy, but it’s not, it’s very difficult,” Wilmore said Thursday after arriving at the Starliner’s launch site in Florida. “We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t ready. We are ready. The spacecraft is ready and the teams are ready.”
Wilmore stated at a press conference in March that he did not expect the Starliner spacecraft to enter any “failure mode.”
“But if something happens – because we’re all human, we can’t build everything perfectly – if something happens, we have several downgrade modes,” he said during the press conference, referring to the modes given to astronauts. The ability to have more manual control over the spacecraft if something doesn’t go as planned.
“We wouldn’t be sitting here if we didn’t have confidence in this spacecraft and our abilities to control it, and if we didn’t tell our families that,” Williams said at a news event in March.
“I’m confident not only in our own capabilities and the spacecraft’s capabilities, but also in our mission control team who are ready for this challenge,” he added at a Thursday news briefing in Florida.
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