Boeing Starliner’s crewed mission to the ISS planned for 21 July, 2023 has been postponed.
The mission was to take NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore to the orbital station.
The parachute for landing the capsule on its return was found to be faulty. Also, the insulating tape covering the wiring was discovered to be flammable.
The mission is therefore, placed on hold until the issues are resolved.
Boeing Starlinee has had two test flights to the ISS before: One was successful while the other was a partial success.
Orbital Flight Test-2, OFT-2, to the ISS landed with parachutes at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico by 23:49 WAT on 25 May, 2022 returning with it, about 600 pounds of scientific materials. It took 800 pounds of science experiments to the ISS.
At 23:54 WAT, 19 May, 2022 a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket launched it to the ISS.
The launch of this second Crew Space Transportation (CST) –100 Starliner spacecraft, as an uncrewed test mission, like the first one, was in Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
It docked autonomously with the ISS by 01:28 WAT on 21 May, 2022.
About 30 minutes after lift-off, the Starliner reached its intended preliminary orbit, the orbit at which point during its 2019 test flight that a software glitch ruined the mission.
Then, two of its 12 onboard thrusters failed 45 seconds into the flight but that did not stop it from reaching the ISS and returning to Earth safely.
The first attempt on 20 December, 2019 failed to arrive and dock at the ISS because of the software glitch which made the onboard computers 11 hours off schedule.
Then a fuel valve problem was also discovered in the system afterwards and Boeing, the manufacturers, worked to correct it.
NASA wants the Starliner as a complement to the Crew Dragon by SpaceX, to take astronauts to the ISS and back.
The only alternative now is to join a Soyuz capsule from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan.
In 2014, NASA awarded Boeing $4.2 billion and, SpaceX $2.6 billion, for the programme.
SpaceX successfully tested its Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2019 and flew two astronauts to the space station in 2020.
Since then, SpaceX has had six fully operational flights to the ISS.
Boeing Starliner and NASA will fix another date for the crewed mission to the space station after resolving this latest problem.
photo credit: nasa
Good piece. I was stunned to read about Russia’s accusations but I doubt they would randomly pull that outta the sky. Serves no purpose. I hope FG looks into it despite the fact that it is an election year.