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After years of delays and a dizzying series of setbacks during test flights, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is finally ready for its first crewed launch.
The mission is on track to depart from Florida on May 6 and carry NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station, which could be a historic and long-awaited victory for the beleaguered Starliner program.
“Design and development are difficult – especially on a human spacecraft,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and Starliner program manager at Boeing, during a news briefing on Thursday. “There are some things that were surprises along the way that we had to overcome. … It certainly made the team very, very strong. I am very proud of the way they overcame every problem we faced and got us to this point.”
Boeing and NASA officials decided Thursday to move forward with the launch attempt within two weeks. However, Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, noted that May 6 is “not a magic date.”
“We will launch when we are ready,” he said.
If successful, the Starliner will join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft in making routine trips to the space station, keeping the orbiting outpost fully staffed with astronauts from NASA and its partner space agencies.
Such a scenario – with both Crew Dragon and Starliner flying regularly – is one that the US space agency has long anticipated.
“This is history in the making,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a March 22 press conference about the upcoming Starliner mission. “We are now in the golden age of space exploration.”
SpaceX and Boeing developed their respective vehicles under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, a partnership with private sector contractors. From the beginning, the space agency aimed to have both companies operate simultaneously. The Crew Dragon and Starliner spacecraft would each serve as a backup for the other, giving astronauts the ability to keep flying even if technical problems or other setbacks ground one spacecraft.
However, NASA did not initially anticipate that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon would operate under its own power for nearly four years before Boeing’s Starliner achieved its first crewed test flight.
In the early days of the program, which awarded SpaceX and Boeing contracts in 2014, NASA had favored Boeing — a close partner dating back to the mid-20th century — over SpaceX, which viewed the federal agency as a relatively young and capricious upstart.
The vision of Boeing, SpaceX and NASA
As recently as 2016, NASA planned its schedule with the Starliner aiming to defeat the Crew Dragon on the launch pad.
But the race between Boeing and SpaceX took a clear turn in 2020. A Starliner test flight last year was riddled with missteps, leaving NASA and Boeing officials scrambling to figure out what went wrong. The Starliner did not dock with the space station during that mission due to software problems, including a problem with the spacecraft’s internal clock, which was off by 11 hours.
Meanwhile, SpaceX made history in May 2020 with the launch of its Demo-2 test flight, carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on a two-month mission to the International Space Station.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has been performing routine flights ever since, carrying NASA astronauts and even paying customers and tourists. The spacecraft has now flown 13 crewed missions to orbit.
However, Boeing has been grappling with a series of challenges for several years, including a list of issues that emerged in 2022 during the spacecraft’s second unmanned test flight. Boeing’s commercial aircraft division has also suffered a series of scandals – including the 737 Max crisis and the recent quality control issues revealed after a door plug blew off on an Alaska Airlines flight in January – that have damaged the brand of the company.
NASA officials even admitted at one point in 2020 that they had been paying more attention to SpaceX and its unorthodox ways, while problems with Boeing’s Starliner were slipping through the cracks.
“Maybe we didn’t have as many people involved in that process as we should have,” Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said at a press conference in July 2020.
“If one provider (SpaceX) has a newer approach than another, it’s often normal for a human to spend more time on that newer approach, and maybe we haven’t quite taken the time we needed with (Boeing’s) more traditional approach. ”
Starliner’s misadventures
Boeing’s space division operates separately from its commercial airline team, and officials from NASA and the U.S. aerospace giant have routinely tried to make that distinction.
NASA officials have also made it clear that they are working closer with Boeing than ever, with staff on the ground at Boeing facilities overseeing some of the repairs the company has made ahead of the upcoming Starliner flight.
“This is an important opportunity for NASA. We signed up to do this, and we’re going to do it and be successful with it,” Nappi said Thursday. “I don’t think of it so much in terms of what’s important to Boeing, but I think about it in terms of what’s important for this program.”
Still, Boeing and NASA have a long list of issues that need to be addressed.
For example, during the final flight test in 2022, engineers discovered that the suspension lines on the Starliner’s parachute had a lower failure threshold than initially expected.
Engineers from NASA and Boeing tested a solution to that problem earlier this year, but parachutes will remain a priority while they face last-minute payments before takeoff, Stich said Thursday.
Some tape also used to protect wiring harnesses was found to be flammable and Boeing had to remove and replace about a mile of material, according to Nappi.
Boeing may even have to redesign some of the spacecraft’s valves due to corrosion problems. However, this upgrade is not expected to take place until the second crewed flight, scheduled for 2025, at the earliest.
On May’s inaugural crewed flight, Boeing will instead use a “perfectly acceptable constraint” that should prevent the valves from sticking, Nappi said in March.
Starliner and safety
Despite the long road to the launch pad, the two people at the center of the Starliner’s first crewed mission — Williams and Wilmore, two longtime NASA astronauts — said when they arrived at the launch site they were as confident as ever.
“We want the general public to think it’s easy, but it’s not — it’s very difficult,” Wilmore said Thursday after arriving at the Starliner launch site in Florida. “We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t ready. We are done. The spacecraft is ready and the teams are ready.”
Wilmore said at a press conference in March that he does not expect the Starliner spacecraft to enter a “failure mode.”
“But if something were to happen – because we’re all human, we can’t build things perfectly – if something were to happen, we have different downgrade modes,” he said at the press conference, referring to modes that give the astronauts the ability to take more manual control of the spacecraft if something doesn’t go according to plan.
Williams said at a news event in March, “We wouldn’t be sitting here if we didn’t have confidence in this spacecraft and our ability to fly it, and we tell our families that.”
She added at Thursday’s news briefing in Florida: “I am confident in not only our capabilities and the capabilities of the spacecraft, but also in our mission control team, which is ready for the challenge.”
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