South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Review finds 80 Starliner issues
NASA wants Boeing back on track after problematic test flight
Parrot Analytics has come up with a metric that can measure what a show means to a streamer.
NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is enjoying the success of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon flight to the International Space Station but wants to get its other commercial partner Boeing back on track after the problematic uncrewed test flight of its Starliner capsule in late 2019.
NASA designated that December mission a “high visibility close call” because even though Boeing managed to launch its CST-100 Starliner atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, several issues including a trajectory error put the capsule in an orbit that wouldn’t allow it to dock with the ISS. The company was able to return it safely back to Earth.
The first round of an independent review of what went wrong released in March turned up 61 issues, and the now-complete final review has beefed that list up to 80 things that both NASA and Boeing need to work on to get the Starliner on track.
The problems address needs for more hardware and software integration testing, peer review, updating software code and fixing Earth-to-vehicle communication. NASA specifically will be playing
more of a Big Brother mode with software testing than it did initially with Boeing.
“We’ve added team members on the commercial crew side to be more embedded with that Boeing team and to sort of walk with them,” said NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich.
Stich said because Boeing has been working with NASA for years, and their approach to software development for programs like the space shuttle and ISS have been successful in the past, that NASA might not have paid as much attention as it should have in the Starliner’s development.
The joint NASA-Boeing Independent Review team came up with recommendations that include making sure a contractor’s management approach has specific requirements when it comes to systems engineering and ensuring NASA reviews hazard verification test plans before
Boeing’s first Starliner spacecraft on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Staton in Cape Canaveral in December.
being performed. NASA should also ensure independent validation and verification teams work with their contractor counterparts, the review team concluded.
Kathy Lueders, associate administrator of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate said the anomalies that led to Starliner’s incomplete uncrewed
test flight led to an across-the-board look at NASA’s other in-development programs, to make sure similar fates didn’t befall them.
“We really wanted to make sure that we looked deep into ourselves and with our Boeing teammates and make sure if there were any lessons out there that would help us and our other programs,”
Lueders said. The process and possible improvements have been shared with NASA programs like the Space Launch System and with other commercial aerospace partners like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp.
“This is a community we’re dependent on,” Lueders said. “We need it to be as safe and robust an industry as possible.”
Both Lueders and Stich said that progress has already been made on the 80 issues across the board in efforts to move forward to the next flight.
Boeing has already said it would do the uncrewed flight again at no cost to NASA, dubbed Orbital Flight Test-2, which is on track for late 2020, but only if it they can work through and sign off on the issues. No launch date has been set.
Boeing is also working on refurbishing the capsule that returned from the December flight to prepare it for the first crewed flight as early as next spring. Both capsules are at Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center.
“There are two spacecraft getting ready in Florida right now,” Lueders said. “There’s a launch vehicle there ready to fly. This is about tweaking the system, right? This is about tweaking the spacecraft and tweaking the software to make sure that these particular errors that were found are fixed.”