posted 12-23-2019 07:10 AM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by SpaceAngel:
Will there be any reconsideration of a possible re-flight of the Starliner in the near future

---

posted 12-23-2019 08:04 AM               

The patch was designed to reflect the nominal mission, which included visiting the space station. NASA did not require Boeing to dock, only show the ability to control the spacecraft during proximity maneuvers.

posted 12-23-2019 09:28 AM               

That desire to reuse the capsule drove Boeing's decision to land the spacecraft on land, at one of five selected locations in the western United States, rather than splashing down at sea. "For us, in our baseline, we need to land on land to support capsule reuse," he [John Mulholland, vice president and program manager for the commercial crew program at Boeing] said. Starliner does have the ability to splash down in an emergency, but "if we end up aborting and ditching into the ocean, then we wouldn't reuse that capsule."

posted 01-07-2020 03:09 PM               

NASA and Boeing are in the process of establishing a joint, independent investigation team to examine the primary issues associated with the company's uncrewed Orbital Flight Test. ... Once underway, the investigation is targeted to last about two months before the team delivers its final assessment.

In parallel, NASA is evaluating the data received during the mission to determine if another uncrewed demonstration is required. This decision is not expected for several weeks as teams take the necessary time for this review.

posted 01-15-2020 10:58 AM               

Take a look inside the Starliner on its Orbital Flight Test. Four interior cameras captured the mission, and this video covers nearly every dynamic event during the flight, including launch, separation events, on-orbit maneuvering, re-entry and landing.

posted 01-29-2020 07:55 AM               

Fourth-quarter operating margin decreased to 0.5 percent due to a $410 million pre-tax Commercial Crew charge primarily to provision for an additional uncrewed mission for the Commercial Crew program, performance and mix. NASA is evaluating the data received during the December 2019 mission to determine if another uncrewed mission is required.

posted 02-07-2020 06:40 PM               

John Mulholland, vice president and program manager for the Starliner program at Boeing, said the Starliner software is intended to initialize its mission elapsed timer from the Atlas 5 launch vehicle, but only in the "terminal count" phase of the countdown. The software, he said, lacked that terminal count requirement. "So, it polled an incorrect mission elapsed time from the launch vehicle, which then gave us an 11-hour mismatch," he said.

The second problem, revealed Feb. 6 at a meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), was a "valve mapping error" for the thrusters in the vehicle's service module. Those thrusters perform a "disposal burn" of the service module after separating from the crew module just before reentry.

Mulholland said the valves were configured for conditions in normal flight for that disposal burn, which, had it not been corrected, could have pushed the service module into the crew module. That could have caused the crew capsule to become unstable, requiring additional thruster firings to reorient itself, or have damaged the capsule's heat shield.

The second error was detected during the review of the spacecraft software on the ground after the timer problem took place. Mulholland said engineers found the thruster software issue late Dec. 21, with the corrected and reverified code uploaded to the spacecraft around 5 a.m. Eastern Dec. 22, or about three hours before the spacecraft landed at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

posted 02-26-2020 01:16 PM               

Critically, the panel learned early this month that Boeing did not perform a full, end-to-end integrated test of Starliner in a Systems Integration Lab with ULA's Atlas V rocket. The test typically shows how all the software systems during each component of the mission would have responded with each other through every maneuver — and it could potentially have caught the issues Boeing later experienced in the mission.

"It's pretty exhaustive. You gotta do that," said Christopher Saindon, a former member who ended his tenure on the panel in mid-February. "That was somewhat surprising to us on the panel. There were certainly gaps in the test protocol."

...Boeing said it followed all of the testing procedures NASA required of it prior to the Starliner test flight. The agency gave Boeing the green light to proceed after a flight readiness review prior to the mission.

posted 03-06-2020 11:45 AM               

Quite frankly, right now, we do not know.

The findings and corrective actions that Boeing has laid out, they have to now come back to NASA with a plan how they are going to address all of those. That plan will have a schedule, it will have all of the technical aspects to it, all of the details of when and how they are going to go ahead and address them and then NASA will evaluate that plan. We will evaluate the results of their work. We will do our own inspection of the results of their work. And then we will be in a position to decide whether or not we need another test flight or not.

So we are still a ways away from that and I can't even tell you what the schedule is for making that decision because it is very dependent on what we see in Boeing's corrective action plan and the thoroughness that we believe that corrective action plan has been implemented.