For the third time in a month, two NASA astronauts have taken their seats for an attempt to launch the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket is due to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 10:52 a.m. ET (7:52 a.m. PT) today, sending Starliner and its crew — NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams — on a shakedown cruise to the International Space Station and back.
NASA is streaming live coverage of the countdown.
Boeing’s effort to get Starliner ready to carry astronauts has suffered through years of delays and roughly $1.5 billion in cost overruns. But the two earlier attempts to launch this Crew Flight Test, or CFT, were due to problems with the Atlas V launch system rather than with Starliner.
The first attempt was called off on May 6, two hours before liftoff, due to concerns about a valve on the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage. The second try was scrubbed on June 1, with less than four minutes left in the countdown, when an alarm was triggered due to a faulty power supply in one of the launch control computers.
United Launch Alliance’s team replaced the hardware and verified that the system was “good to go,” in the words of the company’s CEO, Tory Bruno. ULA, Boeing and NASA then gave the go-ahead for today’s countdown.
“As you might imagine, there’s lots of pressure to just go,” Bruno said in a posting to the X social-media platform. “But that’s not what we’re here for.”
The gumdrop-shaped Starliner spacecraft has been through two uncrewed flight tests — an initial test that fell short of full success in 2019, and a do-over that reached the space station and met its objectives in 2022. This will be the first time Starliner has carried actual astronauts rather than test dummies.
CFT’s main objective is to have the crew verify that all of Starliner’s systems work as expected. They’ll run through tests during the daylong cruise to the International Space Station, and during what’s envisioned as an eight-day stay aboard the station. Wilmore and Williams will deliver about 800 pounds of mementos, supplies and equipment, including a replacement pump for the station’s urine-recycling system.
At the end of their orbital stay, Wilmore and Williams will climb back into their reusable Starliner capsule — which has been christened Calypso, in honor of the ship used by the late ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Then they’ll descend to a parachute-aided, airbag-cushioned touchdown in the western U.S., with the precise landing site to be determined by the timing of their departure.
When CFT is finished, NASA and its partners will evaluate Starliner’s performance and make adjustments in the design or procedures as necessary. In the months ahead, NASA is aiming to have Starliner certified so that it can take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon as a commercial “space taxi” for ferrying astronauts and supplies to and from orbit on a regular basis.
Mark Nappi, Boeing’s vice president and program manager for commercial crew, said 80% of the work for certification is already in progress — with the remaining 20% depending on CFT’s outcome. “There are likely going to be some kinds of flight anomalies or data that we need to collect from the CFT flight,” Nappi said. “We have to download that data and analyze it and understand it. And that’s going to be part of what we bring to the certification review.”
https://ift.tt/k4idE1m June 05, 2024 at 01:08PM GeekWire
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