HOUSTON - Everyone thought Boeing's new Starliner spacecraft would have flown astronauts before now.
Starliner is ready to take two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) no earlier than Monday (May 6), but it's been a long road to get here. Instead of one unmanned test mission to the ISS, Boeing needed two to achieve its goals. The pandemic and numerous technical problems further delayed the launch of the capsule's first astronaut.
But safety must always come first, NASA and Boeing officials emphasized during a media briefing March 22 here at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Through years of extra work, the teams worked carefully toward their goal: launching astronauts. And if new problems arose, they would continue working to resolve them, Boeing's Mark Nappi told reporters.
"I wouldn't call it frustrating at all," Nappi, program manager of Boeing's commercial crew program, said of the longer-than-expected wait. "We would have liked to be further along at this point. There's no doubt about that. But we are here, and we are prepared, and we are ready to fly."
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The first Starliner mission with astronauts, called Crew Flight Test or CFT, will send two experienced NASA astronauts and former Navy test pilots to the ISS: Commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams. They will be in space for just over a week after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, near NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
The astronauts will leverage their decades of space and aviation experience, thoroughly checking the spacecraft and ensuring it meets all key objectives for automatic and manual flight. If Starliner passes all CFT tests, the way will be cleared for operational, six-month Starliner ISS missions, starting with Starliner-1 in 2025.
CFT follows two unmanned Starliner flights. A December 2019 mission called Orbital Flight Test (OFT) did not reach the ISS as planned. Boeing spent several years during the pandemic implementing dozens of spacecraft repairs, and it succeeded: a 2022 attempt (OFT 2) reached the ISS and met all other major flight objectives.
However, more problems arose in the summer of 2023, when teams discovered new problems with Starliner that further delayed human spaceflights. For example, the suspension lines of Starliner's main parachutes could not handle as much mass as engineers thought they could, and flammable P213 tape covered much of the capsule's wiring.
Both NASA and Boeing representatives emphasized at the March 22 briefing that the two test flights did their job: They discovered problems before people boarded. Steve Stich, head of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, told reporters that he had closely involved the CFT and Starliner-1 astronauts to address any issues.
"From my perspective, so far it seems like we've looked at everything," Stich said. "We've done independent analysis in many cases... of landing loads, performance aborts, rendezvous and docking, all that kind of stuff. And I would say in the time frame that we've had from last summer to now, we have that time really spent testing the flight software in a very integrated way in the Boeing ASIL [Avionics and Software Integration Lab] Facility."
(Image credit: Boeing/Steven Siceloff)
"We've done everything we can to make sure we don'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 bit of an engineer at heart. So I try to explore areas to make sure we haven't missed anything.
"The last parachute test gave us a lot of confidence in that system," he continued. "We had, I would say, more instrumentation on that parachute test than we have had in the past, looking at the dynamics of how the parachutes actually come out of the parachute compartment - and calculating the margins on those parachutes and putting a lot of confidence in that system.
"What we do every day is make sure you haven't missed anything. Space travel is so complicated. I think we take it step by step, looking at all the data. We've ruled out all the anomalies during the flight." from OFT to our satisfaction. And now we're going to go through that [CFT] flight readiness process."
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(Image credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz)
Although all Starliner systems are scrutinized, CFT focuses primarily on the life support system that supplies the astronauts with oxygen and removes carbon dioxide, among other things. That system has not been tested with humans on board, but briefing participants emphasized that robust ground testing has been conducted to prepare for spaceflight.
Stich said a recent integrated test with the astronauts at Boeing's Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility, located at KSC, allowed Williams and Wilmore to "tell it [the life support system] He said the test "gave us a lot of good data and confidence that the ecosystem will perform as needed with Suni and Butch on board."
Nappi pointed to icing in the thermal control system during the unmanned OFT, which "probably resulted more from the fact that there was no crew on board." However, Boeing has "made some changes during this latest flow to ensure this doesn't happen again."
Adding crew to the vehicle will generate more heat during spaceflight than flying Starliner without people on board, he said. Boeing will evaluate Starliner to see how the vehicle's cooling system responds, whether humidity remains constant and other possible consequences.
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In 2014, both Boeing and SpaceX won NASA contracts to fly astronauts to and from the ISS, filling the shoes of the agency's space shuttle, which was retired in 2011. Boeing's contract is valued at $4.2 billion, while SpaceX's is worth $2.6 billion.
SpaceX has so far sent 11 operational crewed missions to the ISS with its Crew Dragon: eight for NASA's commercial crew program and three shorter-term missions on behalf of Houston-based company Axiom Space.
A handful of NASA astronauts also fly aboard Russia's Soyuz spacecraft for technical and policy reasons, following long-standing interagency practice. All NASA astronauts also flew to the ISS on Soyuz after the shuttle's retirement in 2011 and SpaceX's first crewed mission, the Demo-2 test flight, in 2020.
