Starliner Crew Flight Test Slips Again, Now July at the Earliest

Starliner Crew Flight Test Slips Again, Now July at the Earliest

The Crew Flight Test of Boeing’s commercial crew spacecraft, CST-100 Starliner, has slipped again by several months. NASA and Boeing said today the test flight carrying two NASA astronauts will take place no earlier than July 21 and even that date is contingent on deconflicting with a U.S. Space Force launch about the same time.

Boeing and SpaceX won contracts from NASA in 2014 to develop crew transportation systems to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station through Public-Private Partnerships. NASA wanted two contractors to provide redundancy and competition.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon was certified as meeting NASA’s requirements in 2020 and is now operational. Boeing suffered a series of setbacks starting in December 2019 when the first uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT) experienced significant anomalies. The decision was made to redo the test. Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) ran into its own problems and did not successfully launch until May 2022.

Boeing Starliner OFT-2 landing at White Sands Space Harbor, NM, May 25, 2022. Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

In November, NASA said the CFT launch would take place in April 2023, a two month slip from its previous estimate of February. Now it’s another three-month delay, making it 14 months between OFT-2 and the Crew Flight Test (CFT). Though it seems like a long interval, it’s about the same as between SpaceX’s uncrewed Demo-1 flight test in March 2019 and the Demo-2 crewed flight test in May 2020.

Nonetheless, today’s announcement of a July launch date — and a tentative one at that — came as a surprise.

Steve Stich, the head of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, and Mark Nappi, Boeing Vice President and Program Manager for Starliner, attributed the delay to a combination of final preparations taking longer than expected and finding a time to fit it into the busy schedule on the ISS and at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS).

Still on the to-do list is a further ground test of Starliner’s parachute system that will take place in May. Stich said they need to ensure that a forward heat shield will deploy properly to expose the drogue and main parachutes. They don’t expect any issues, but the test is required to meet NASA’s certification requirements.

“We want to do one more ground test of that deployment system just to make sure that the highest possible flight regime airspeed that it could be deployed at, that it will work properly,” Stich told reporters today.

Nappi also referred to a “recent discovery” of a logic error in an Integrated Propulsion Controller that was “pretty simple” to fix, but “we want to make sure that that same condition doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

Stich and Nappi painted the remaining work mostly as a matter of completing “paperwork” that is taking longer than they anticipated when they thought the launch would be in April.

Fitting into the busy schedule on the ISS is another factor. Three spacewalks by Russian cosmonauts and one by U.S. astronauts are coming up in April and May and the next private astronaut mission to ISS, Axiom-2, is in May.

Then there’s the schedule at CCSFS. Starliner will launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex-41.  The U.S. Space Force also has an Atlas V launch coming up and only one can be on the launch pad at a time. Stich said NASA and the Space Force will work together to decide which gets the July slot.

ULA’s Gary Wentz, Vice President of Government and Commercial Programs, told SpacePolicyOnline.com that they need to know by mid-May which mission will take the July timeframe.

 

This article has been updated.

User Comments



SpacePolicyOnline.com has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate.  We do not post comments that include links to other websites since we have no control over that content nor can we verify the security of such links.