NASA, Boeing Ready for Long-Delayed, High-Stakes Starliner Test Flight
NASA, Boeing ready for long-delayed, high-stakes Starliner test flight
Running years late, Boeing's Starliner crew capsule program is poised for a crucial unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station set for launch Thursday, a do-over of an abbreviated 2019 demo mission that has cost the aerospace contractor nearly $600 million.
The Starliner crew capsule is scheduled for liftoff on the Orbital Flight Test 2, or OFT-2 mission, from Cape Canaveral at 6:54 p.m. EDT (2254 GMT) Thursday on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.
ULA, Boeing, and NASA, which oversees the Starliner commercial crew contract, gave a green light Tuesday to proceed with final launch preparations. Managers convened for a launch readiness review and gave a "go" to press on with the mission.
The review "went really well," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "It was short. It was very clean. There are really no issues that ULA, Boeing, or NASA are working for the launch coming up."
Boeing Starliner Nears Launch As ISS Astronauts Work on Space Botany and Human Research
The International Space Station (ISS) is preparing for the targeted arrival of Boeing's Starliner crew ship on the company's Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission. Meanwhile, the Expedition 67 crew is continuing its ongoing life science research while maintaining orbital lab systems.
Weather forecasters anticipate a 70% likelihood of favorable weather when Boeing's OFT-2 mission is scheduled to launch at 6:54 p.m. EDT (3:54 p.m. PDT) on Thursday. The Starliner spacecraft will lift off atop the Atlas-V rocket from United Launch Alliance at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Starliner will take a 24-hour automated trip to the station where it will dock to the Harmony module's forward port for five to 10 days of cargo and test operations.
The mission will be carrying materials for the station's botany experiments.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Thursday May 19 2022, @10:39PM
NASA YouTube [youtube.com]
NASASpaceflight [youtube.com]
No further delays, ready to launch 15 minutes from now.
https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive [nasa.gov]
9 p.m. EDT – NASA's Boeing Orbital Flight Test-2 post-launch news conference (time subject to change)
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 19 2022, @11:56PM
This is a fixed-price contract - Boeing must eat all the extra cost due to delays, design modifications, and any other failure.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @12:44AM (2 children)
But it still has to approach, dock, reenter the atmosphere and land.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 20 2022, @01:01AM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Orbital_Flight_Test [wikipedia.org]
Yes, the last one's problems started after it reached orbit. I think this time they had a callout related to the clock being correct.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @05:02PM
The last attempt never got off the ground due to corroded valves, and the previous attempt's problems started before it even left the ground when the clock was set wrong. That caused it to nearly run out of stabilization* fuel because that system didn't receive it's shutdown signal, and then miswired thrusters that might have resulted in a failed reentry if it hadn't been caught and worked around in software in time.
*Starliner has four different thruster systems, each with its own purpose and fuel supply.. wagnerrp over on Arstechnica gave a good explanation. [arstechnica.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday May 20 2022, @12:53AM (14 children)
NASA could have probably bought Space-X for half of what they paid Boeing for Starliner.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @01:07AM (7 children)
You want multiple vendors at your disposal. Remember the fed/dod forced Intel to license x86 design to AMD to ensure they do not rely on a single vendor exclusively, and that's why we still have competition in x86 market.
Besides, if NASA buys out space-x, it won't be the same space-x no more.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 20 2022, @01:36AM (6 children)
Too bad. You're getting SpaceX and a four billion dollar money sink.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @01:40AM (4 children)
"You" are we (assuming you are an mur'can.) Besides, we don't have SpaceY, so we are stuck with boeing.
That's just life.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 20 2022, @02:08AM (3 children)
My take is that a big part of the reason we don't have a SpaceX is the continued support for dead ends like Boeing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @02:46AM (2 children)
We kept supporting boeing way before spacex came into place, and spacex did come into place despite boeing being fed fat porky tax money.
I suppose you think if we cut off boeing, we will have proliferation of spacex, spacey, spacez, etc. via the libertarian capitalist magic, eh.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Friday May 20 2022, @04:38AM (1 child)
SpaceX came into being in 2002 with technology that wasn't much more advanced than the technology at the end of the Apollo program. Sure, it would have been more difficult to do vertical landing with a 1970s era rocket. But otherwise that rocket and its payloads would have very similar performance to the Falcon 9.
The reason it took so long for a SpaceX to come along was the massive funding thrown at the Space Shuttle and later an oligopoly of launch vehicles (which included Boeing's Atlas series). The conditions for SpaceX really came about in the 1990s when the US Air Force started encouraging competition between launch providers.
Indeed, because we eliminate a big obstacle to that proliferation. The problem with your narrative is that Boeing (and various other old space launch providers like United Launch Alliance, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman) don't compete with SpaceX. But they have a great deal of control over the funding and regulatory apparatus that keeps out new business. Few economic sectors, for example, allow a competitor to just bring up a concern about your business and stop everything. These aerospace firms do it all the time. To give a specific example, SpaceX when it was developing the Falcon 1 temporarily abandoned Vandenberg Air Force Base as a launch location because its launches were getting obstructed by competitors that had priority on launch facilities. These businesses did it to each other too - I've heard of an Atlas III launch that allegedly was delayed by concerns raised by a third party that had no real knowledge of the launch vehicle, but the launch managers on the US government side didn't know that. And for a number of years, a non profit in Sacramento, CA that I used to work for, had delays with their high altitude balloon launches due to established aerospace firms consistently protesting the FAA launch licenses. The founder soon got to the point where he'd factor those delays into his schedule for obtaining regulatory approval. I gather this stopped around 2005 when licensing became a lot easier to do.
Point is that these businesses have created a number of barriers to entry. SpaceX bulldozed through those rather quickly. They were very flexible, with such things as changing launch sites in a few months (moving from Vandenberg AFB to the Kwajalein Atoll site).
Eliminating the dinosaurs would allow new fauna an opportunity to thrive. It's certainly worth the price of eliminating fake competitors to SpaceX who are just in it for the easy funding.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @04:58AM
Given khallow's practices in the backhoe rental market, not a reliable source on things like this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @05:08PM
Dreamliner, who really should have been one of the awardees for the first cargo contract in 2008, will be flying cargo soon, and the crew variant should be up and running about when Boeing's Starliner contract runs out.
What I'd like to see is Dreamliner flying on Neutron.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 20 2022, @01:20AM (3 children)
About $4 billion for Starliner ($4.2 billion + $287.2 million - $595 million) vs. $100-125 billion for SpaceX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner [wikipedia.org]
https://fortune.com/2022/05/17/spacex-employees-selling-shares-125-billion-valuation-elon-musk/ [fortune.com]
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @01:34AM
Million, billion, what's the difference, eh?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday May 20 2022, @08:05PM (1 child)
Now I see why kids came up with emojis. You can't recognize a joke when you see it?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 20 2022, @08:32PM
I can't help but 💩 on everyting.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Frosty Piss on Friday May 20 2022, @03:49AM (1 child)
This is a fixed-price contract - Boeing must eat all the extra cost due to delays, design modifications, and any other failure.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday May 20 2022, @08:08PM
I guess NASA learned their lesson with Apollo and Shuttles.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 4, Touché) by Fnord666 on Friday May 20 2022, @12:25PM (5 children)
Starliner had a thruster glitch during the Orbital Insertion maneuver that caused the system to not only fail over to a secondary thruster but from there to a tertiary one when the secondary thruster failed as well.
NASA, Boeing hail Starliner space capsule launch success despite thruster glitch [space.com]
Hopefully the tertiary thruster holds out for the rest of the mission.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday May 20 2022, @02:03PM (2 children)
Shit. Boeing better get their act together soon if they want to continue being a significant player in the space industry. Lobbying can only do so much, and at this rate their partners on various projects are going to start wondering if they're a liability rather than an asset.
Then again maybe they don't actually care - I mean, what's the point without cost-plus contracts?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 20 2022, @05:11PM (1 child)
Boeing has been a liability partner for years. Even Lockheed Martin is grumbling about them screwing with their ULA partnership.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday May 20 2022, @08:35PM
Yeah, seems like their merger with McDonnell Douglas managed to turn two well-respected engineering companies into one shit-show of an example of why you shouldn't let accountants and MBAs run a company that actually builds things.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday May 20 2022, @11:00PM (1 child)
Would a failure of this system have caused loss of life or mission if the tertiary redundant system had failed?
Failures in the primary and backup on a refly after the first mission's failure is pretty damming. It wasn't long ago they were arguing they didn't need a second test flight. I'm glad that got walked back.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Sunday May 22 2022, @08:38PM
I don't know. All of the thrusters in question were a part of the same cluster, so I suspect that if they lost the whole cluster, maneuverability would be severely impaired. That would probably prevent a proper re-entry.