NASA officials said there’s nothing wrong with the parachutes on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner awaiting its first flight ever with humans on board, but they want to make sure, so once again, the anticipated mission to the International Space Station has been delayed.
The Crew Flight Test (CFT) to bring NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the station is part of the effort to complete Boeing’s game of catchup to fellow Commercial Crew Program provider SpaceX.
CFT has been aiming for mid- to late-April, but is now pushing to no earlier than July 21.
“We take a hard look at the parachute system,” said NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich noting the need to go over more than 20 parachute tests that have been performed on the Starliner program to date including flights. “At this time, there’s really no issues or concerns with the parachute system. Those parachutes are installed in the vehicle. They’re in good shape. It’s just a matter of going through all that data and looking at the data and making sure we’re really ready to go fly safely.”
Since that review won’t be complete until May, and the ISS has a busy spate of spacecraft visits already on the books through June, NASA opted to shoot for the July launch date. It also looks to get Starliner to the station before the next SpaceX crew rotation mission planned for mid-August when Crew-7 replaces Crew-6.
Launching atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will still require NASA and Boeing to thread the needle, as even the July timeframe conflicts with a planned ULA launch of a Department of Defense mission from the same launch pad plus that same launch pad will be needed for its upcoming Vulcan Centaur flight that is seeing its own potential delays.
Despite the need to go over the the parachute data as well as perform one more parachute-related test, Stich said both the Starliner and Atlas V rocket for the mission are in good shape with most of the remaining prelaunch work set to be complete in April.
But the flight, since it’s carrying people, has to get an interim human rating from NASA.
“It is a large amount of work which has been going on for well over a year,” Stich said. “If I just step back and look at how much work goes into that, there’s 600 components that have to be qualified on the Starliner for NASA and Boeing to review jointly, over 70 hazard reports and then a total of what we call 370 verifications. Some of those are very detailed.”
Issues with the first uncrewed flight of Starliner that was not able to rendezvous with the ISS in December 2019 that NASA dubbed a “high visibility close call” forced a major overhaul of the program including hardware, software and management practices from both Boeing and NASA oversight.
The reflight of that uncrewed Starliner wasn’t completed until May 2022. Now the delay puts Boeing more than three years behind SpaceX, which has been flying astronauts on its Crew Dragon spacecraft since May 2020 and is currently in the midst of its sixth rotational flight. NASA’s plans were to have Boeing and SpaceX handle one flight each per year, but so far all the work has fallen to SpaceX.
“We we know that what we’re doing is extremely important launching humans in space and providing NASA with the second provider,” said Mark Nappi who heads up Boeing’s Starliner program. “So we’ll take our time and we’ll make sure that everybody’s confident with the work that’s been done.”
The program allowed NASA to stop its reliance on Russia for taxi service to the ISS after the end of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011. The two continue to trade seats, though, with Roscosmos cosmonauts flying on each of the last two SpaceX flights and NASA astronauts continuing to be a part of the three-person crews of the Soyuz rotation launches to the station.
The last Soyuz spacecraft to carry its trio, though, suffered a coolant leak, which forced Roscosmos to send it back home minus passengers this week, during which temperatures higher than 120 degrees Fahrenheit were reported on board.
A replacement Soyuz arrived in February, but won’t bring its crew home until at least September, meaning they will have spent more than a year on board the station. That includes NASA astronaut Frank Rubio who will have set a new American record at more than 371 days in space by the time he gets back to Earth.
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