NASA and Boeing have delayed the initial launch of the company’s CST-100 Starliner crewed spacecraft with astronauts until at least the end of July, due to longer-than-expected certification paperwork. Speaking to reporters on March 29, officials said they postponed the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission to July 21 at the earliest. The announcement comes six days after NASA said CFT won’t take place until the end of April, as it had before. was planned, but few details were given as to why.
Most of the work needed to prepare the CFT mission to launch to the International Space Station will be completed by April, said Steve Stich, head of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The exception, according to him, is work on the certification of capsule parachutes. “There are no problems or problems with the parachute system,” he said. “It’s just a matter of going over all that data, reviewing it, and making sure we’re ready to fly safely.”
The parachutes were deployed on the spacecraft, but Stitch said another ground test of the parachute system element was planned, with the parachute lifting the hatch above the spacecraft to reveal the rest of the parachute deployment system. This test is designed to verify that it can operate as planned during an outage, as it says “highest possible mode”.
Mark Nappi, vice president and director of the Starliner program at Boeing, said the delay in getting the parachutes approved was the fault of both the company and NASA. “It took longer for us to get the product to NASA and a little longer for NASA to test it with us,” he said.
During a briefing on February 17, officials expressed confidence in the launch of CFT by the end of April, but did not discuss any potential problems with certificate paperwork. At the time, Stitch said his mission preparations were 80% complete, and neither he nor Nappi raised issues such as certification work in a way that would challenge this program.
“We may have been a little optimistic about these reviews on these products when setting the April deadline,” Stich said. “We knew April was a good time to fly,” given the schedule of other crew and cargo missions to the station.
When it became clear they wouldn’t be ready to launch in April, NASA and Boeing considered the May launch option, but concluded that it didn’t work. A SpaceX Dragon cargo mission is scheduled to arrive at the station in June and take over the docking port to be used by Starliner. “We concluded that the July window would be best,” he said.
This revised program will give engineers more time to test the vehicle’s avionics after discovering a logic flaw in a black box unit called the integrated drivetrain controller. “We want to make sure this is not the case anywhere else,” Nappi said. Said.
Stich said additional testing will make sure we “really push the system for crewed flight.” “We want to look at the whole system to make sure we’re ready to fly.”
A July 21 date has yet to be set and will depend on the resolution of a range dispute with the US Space Forces mission, which is scheduled to launch with another Atlas 5 around the same time. Stich asked the ULA to see if our vehicle is ready and if its vehicles are ready and if we get that slot,” Stich said. He did not name the combat mission, but according to current statements, a secret mission called USSF-51 is scheduled to begin in early June.
Source: Port Altele
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