Software flaws nearly doomed Boeing capsule

An uncrewed test flight of a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts may have narrowly avoided catastrophic failure in December. A software error that could have resulted in loss of the spacecraft was discovered and fixed while the capsule, known as Starliner, was in orbit, and not long before it returned to Earth.

Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said the mission “had a lot of anomalies” but that it was important that the agency continue to work with Boeing to fix them.

The agency is conducting an ongoing review with the company to assess what went wrong. But Douglas Loverro, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said the review had already found multiple failures in Boeing’s processes that should have caught the mistakes on the ground.

“It told us that we have a more fundamental problem,” he said, not just the flaws that were identified last week.

Boeing will now review 1 million lines of Starliner software code. Officials from the company declined to speculate how long that might take. Neither the agency nor the company would set a schedule for when the Starliner capsule would be ready to carry astronauts to space.

But Bridenstine said NASA needs more than one way for getting astronauts to the International Space Station. The agency has also hired SpaceX, which has developed a different spacecraft, Crew Dragon, to transport astronauts.

The additional software problem, first reported Thursday during a meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, is the second major flaw known to have marred Starliner’s trip in December, the first orbital flight of the spacecraft. During its trip to orbit, the spacecraft set its clock to the wrong time, causing it to deplete its propellant. A planned docking at the space station was called off, and the mission was cut short, to two days instead of eight.

Because of the clock problem, Boeing engineers started searching to see if there were other flaws in the software. On the evening before landing, they found one. “It is our belief we wouldn’t have found it if we hadn’t gone looking,” said Jim Chilton, senior vice president of the space and launch division at Boeing.

The newly disclosed flaw would have compromised Starliner’s preparations for reentry. Engineers on Earth were able to fix the software problem within a few hours of finding it.

Kenneth Chang is a New York Times writer.

Bill Ingalls / NASA 2019 Workers inspect Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft after it landed Dec. 22 in White Sands, N.M. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the mission, which was cut short, “had a lot of anomalies.”