STARLINER DEBUT MISSION DERAILED
After post-launch problem, astronaut capsule won’t make it to ISS
All seemed to be going well for Boeing’s astronaut capsule, Starliner, on its debut mission to the International Space Station on Friday morning — until an unexpected issue derailed the flight and put into question the future of a program already years behind schedule.
Starliner won’t make it to the ISS after all, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a press conference following the launch.
An issue with the spacecraft’s timing system, which automates the vehicle’s maneuvers in space, was running on the wrong time, causing it to miss a major milestone about 30 minutes after launch. The maneuver, called an orbit insertion burn, would have put Starliner on course to dock with the ISS on Saturday. It didn’t happen properly.
“Clearly we missed something with this [timer]. We didn’t see it in any of our simulations,” said Steve Stich, deputy manager of flight development and operations for NASA’s astronaut capsule program, called Commercial Crew.
Teams on the ground tried to correct the issue but were not able to get through quick enough because the spacecraft was flying between two satellites that blocked the
transmission, NASA suspects.
The result: Starliner burned off too much fuel, and NASA had to scrap the plan to dock with the ISS. Teams moved the spacecraft into a safe orbit and later Friday will work to move it into an optimal position that will allow it to land back at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico as soon as Sunday morning.
No astronauts rode along on Friday’s test, which took off successfully from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s launch complex 41 at 6:36 a.m. on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. The mission was a critical test of the systems without humans on board, before NASA certifies Starliner for piloted missions.
The astronauts slated to be onboard the first mission with a crew — Mike Fincke, Nicole Mann and Chris Ferguson — were closely watching Friday’s launch. Fincke and Mann said at a post-launch press conference that they believed they could have manually taken over the spacecraft when the issue occurred, salvaging the flight to the ISS.
“I even had my flight checklist that we’ve been developing right in front of me to watch what was going on,” Fincke said. “… We’d like to think that … had we been on board, we could have given the flight control team more options on what to do in the situation.”
The failure is a potential setback for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which for the better part of a decade has been working to return American astronauts to space on U.S. rockets.
Since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011, NASA has been sending Americans to space on Russian Soyuz rockets.
Friday’s launch was supposed to show how Starliner’s autonomous systems could perform the mission, something SpaceX, the other Commercial Crew contractor, did successfully in March without any issues.
Officials said they have not yet determined whether Starliner would need to perform another test flight without crew before moving on to piloted missions. The docking component was not a requirement of the flight and NASA has flown humans to space before without putting a vehicle through a full dress rehearsal to the ISS first.
“Remember, when we had space shuttles, every single one of those missions was crewed,” Bridenstine said. “From day one, the very first time we launched the space shuttle, it had people on board and the first time that it rendezvoused with an object in space, it had people on board.”
Still, SpaceX and Boeing were on track to launch with humans in 2020 — Friday’s issue puts that timeline into question.
Commercial Crew is already behind schedule. NASA originally planned to start ferrying astronauts to the space station in 2017, but challenges in the program have delayed it at least two years. Technical issues, problems with parachute development and two major missteps during testing have already set both contractors back. In April, SpaceX’s test capsule exploded during a test of its abort engines. And in June 2018, Starliner experienced a fire during a test of its abort engines too.
Boeing was paid $4.2 billion for its contract, while SpaceX got $2.6 billion.
A recent audit by a NASA watchdog found that the space agency gave Boeing an additional $287.2 million in 2016 to keep it on track as a second provider in the program.
Bridenstine defended the decision earlier this week saying that the requirements for Boeing and SpaceX were different: SpaceX already had a crew version of its craft that it’s been sending on resupply missions to the ISS, while Boeing had to start from scratch.
“The real question is, ‘Would you prefer to spend the money with a company in the United States of America? Or would you prefer to spend the money in Russia?’” Bridenstine said. “I’d prefer to spend in the United States of America.”
Mann, the astronaut, said that the issue with Starliner is the reason the agency goes through testing.
“This vehicle is a new level of automation that we’ve never seen before. And so what we’re really doing is we’re testing that automation and that’s why you have test pilots on board, especially for these early missions,” Mann said. “That’s our job. That’s what we’re trained to do. We are looking forward to flying on Starliner. We don’t have any safety concerns.”