After years of delay, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft finally blasted into orbit from Florida on Wednesday, sending two veteran NASA astronauts on a long-delayed cruise to the International Space Station.
The Starliner capsule lifted off at 10:52 a.m. EDT (14:52 UTC) aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Fifteen minutes later, after ejecting two belt-driven boosters and a base stage powered by a Russian RD- 180, Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage launched the Starliner right on target to begin a nearly 26-hour pursuit of the space station. Docking at the space station is scheduled for 12:15 p.m. EDT (4:15 p.m. UTC) Thursday, where NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will spend at least a week before returning to Earth.
In comments shortly after Wednesday’s launch, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Wilmore and Williams, both former U.S. Navy pilots, will “test this thing from the bottom to the bottom” to make sure Boeing’s Starliner is ready for six-month operational crew rotation missions to the ISS.
It’s been a long time coming
This is a big moment for NASA and Boeing. The launch of the Starliner test flight brings NASA closer to having access to two independent commercial spacecraft carrying astronauts into low Earth orbit, the cornerstone of an initiative the agency began working toward a decade and a half ago. For Boeing, the first launch of astronauts aboard the Starliner comes as the once popular aerospace contractor wrestles with safety concerns about its 737 jetliner.
NASA awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft in 2014, with the goal of flying astronauts in the capsule beginning in 2017. The company first announced the spacecraft that became Starliner, then known only as CST-100, at the 2010 Farnborough International Air Show.
In the 2010 announcement, Boeing officials said they hoped to declare the CST-100 spacecraft operational in 2015, but Congress initially did not appropriate the funding that NASA said was needed to support the development of new commercial crew vehicles after the retirement of the spaceship. . Boeing then faced numerous technical problems, resulting in a major fuel leak during ground testing, an aborted unmanned test flight to the space station in 2019, and further delays caused by valve corrosion. Another test flight in 2022 achieved all of Boeing’s key objectives, setting the stage for the crewed test flight.
But last year, officials discovered that Boeing had mistakenly used flammable tape around bundles of wires inside the Starliner spacecraft, leading to another scheduling error. Engineers also found they needed to redesign a component of the capsule’s parachute system, putting the crew’s test flight back to 2024. These delays cost Boeing nearly $1.5 billion of its coffers. US taxpayers were unhappy about the cost overrun because NASA’s contract with Boeing is fixed-price.
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which NASA co-supported with Boeing in the commercial crew program, began flying astronauts in 2020. It has now launched 13 crewed missions for NASA and private customers.
Two previous attempts to launch the Starliner crew test flight on May 6 and June 1 were interrupted by a faulty valve in the Atlas V rocket and a failed power supply to a ground computer on the launch pad. In the time between these two launch attempts, engineers discovered a small but persistent leak of helium from the Starliner’s service module. Helium, which the spacecraft uses to propel propellants from internal tanks to the maneuvering thrusters, is an inert, non-toxic gas, and managers ultimately determined that the leak was sustainable and did not add any unacceptable risk to the mission.
That led to approvals to proceed with the launch attempt on June 1, then another countdown on Wednesday that was capped by the successful launch of the Starliner. Milestones achieved early in the flight indicated that the spacecraft was performing well.
“We’re off and running on the mission,” Wilmore radioed mission control in Houston Wednesday afternoon. “And I can tell you, I wish we could have taken you all on that climb. It was pretty exciting.”
“It was a bit of a shock that we actually got going,” Williams said. It was the third time the two astronauts had boarded the Starliner capsule in hopes of launching into space, after two aborted launch attempts in the past month.
“It was pretty cool to jump off the planet and then feel the Atlas V doing its thing,” Williams said. “There were a few bumps here and there, a couple of G’s.”
It was also the first time a crew launched on ULA’s Atlas V rocket, which flew on Wednesday on its 100th mission. It is also the first time astronauts have launched on a member of the popular Atlas rocket family since the last flight of NASA’s Mercury program in 1963.
Hours after liftoff, Wilmore and Williams each returned to the controls of the Starliner for a series of demonstrations to show that crew members could manually steer and fly the Starliner if its automation failed. All these crates seemed to go well.
“Sunny and I have done some manual maneuvers, and it’s accurate, more so than the simulator,” Wilmore said. “I mean, stopping exactly at a number where you want to stop. The accuracy is pretty amazing.”
One leak becomes three
When he spoke to ground controllers Wednesday afternoon, Wilmore said that so far, the Starliner test flight “has just gone swimmingly.” But as the crew prepared for an overnight sleep shift before Thursday’s docking at the space station, two new helium leaks appeared in the Boeing capsule.
The spacecraft’s service module houses most of the Starliner’s propulsion system, including 20 larger orbital maneuvering motors and 28 less powerful feedback control system thrusters for fine-tuning and smaller adjustments. The Starliner has four doghouse-shaped thrusters around the perimeter of the service module, with lines for hydrazine fuel, nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer, and helium pressurization located in each thruster pack.
Two helium tubes feed each dog house. The leak discovered prior to Starliner’s launch was traced to a flange in a port manifold, or the left side doghouse wing. Late Wednesday, engineers discovered two more helium leaks — one with the other manifold in the port doghouse and another in the doghouse on the top side of the service module.
Brandon Burroughs, a Boeing engineer, described the two new helium leaks as “minor” in a discussion broadcast on NASA TV’s live coverage of the Starliner test flight. These leaks did not appear when troubleshooting known ground leaks.
With the finding, three of Starliner’s eight helium manifolds now show signs of leaking, and mission controllers told the crew they will have an update on the situation after they wake up at 4:30 a.m. EDT (08:30 UTC) Thursday. . It was not immediately clear how significant the leaks might be, or any immediate implications for the shuttle’s planned arrival at the space station.
“It looks like we detected some more helium leaks,” said Neal Negata, an engineer who serves as the spacecraft’s communicator, or CAPCOM, in mission control. “We’re about to copy to find out exactly what you mean by getting another helium. leak, so give it to us,” Wilmore radioed to the ground moments later.
Negata told Wilmore that they will isolate the manifolds newly discovered to be leaking helium, while the manifold known to leak before launch will remain open. “This will give the teams the ability to manage the spacecraft,” Burroughs said.
Before they were comfortable launching with the known helium leak, engineers determined that the Starliner spacecraft could handle up to four more helium leaks, even if the existing leak worsened, according to Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. -s.
“It’s a tough system,” Stich told reporters last month. “This is a high-pressure system, and helium is a very small, tiny molecule, and it tends to leak.”
In its current configuration with two sealed helium collectors, six of the 28 thrusters of the spacecraft’s feedback control system will be disabled. The capsule has the ability to operate on a subset of its thrusters, and Burroughs said Boeing engineers believe “the helium system remains safe for flight.”
“This was not unexpected and we plan for such cases,” he said. “The team will work to make sure we are in a good configuration to complete our mission, which is to dock and rendezvous with the ISS.”