Just before dawn on Friday, Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft launched from Florida on top of an Atlas rocket. The launch was beautiful, with the rocket soaring up out of darkness to catch the rising sun, and both the Atlas first stage and Centaur second stage appear to have functioned flawlessly. Unfortunately, once the craft reached space, and Starliner separated from the upper stage, it failed to fire its engines on schedule. Engineers were able to instruct the craft to enter a stable orbit, and it is expected to be able to return to Earth safely in the next two days, but it was unable to make its scheduled docking with the International Space Station.
Starliner is Boeing’s entry in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program that will begin taking astronauts to the ISS from Cape Canaveral in 2020. In March, SpaceX launched its Crew Dragon capsule in a similar test flight that did achieve a scheduled docking with ISS. Both capsules can carry up to seven crew members and would replace the U.S.’ current dependence on Russia’s Soyuz capsules to get astronauts to the station. NASA has not launched astronauts from U.S. soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program more than eight years ago.
The problem on Starliner appears not to have been in hardware, either of the boosters, or the Starliner craft. The diagnosis shortly after the flight seems to indicate a purely software issue having to do with the improper setting of a timer. That timer should have been set half an hour into the flight when the systems on the booster handed over control to the automation on the spacecraft. But, for reasons still not understood, that clock did not get set correctly, and the engines on the Starliner failed to fire and place the spacecraft in the proper orbit to intersect with ISS.
NASA and Boeing are emphasizing that, had there been astronauts on board, they would have been safe at every stage of the mission and would have simply stayed with the spacecraft until its return. In fact, astronauts scheduled to fly on Starliner noted that, had they been on board, they could very well have noted the issue with automation and used the manual systems to successfully complete the mission.
It’s unclear at this point whether the issue will mean that Boeing will conduct another unmanned test before moving forward with an already scheduled manned launch.
Boeing engineers are indicating that Starliner could be brought home sooner, but they’re planning 48 hours in orbit to collect more data on how the craft behaves in orbit. They’re expecting to land on solid ground near the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
SpaceX is currently scheduled to conduct a crewed flight of the Crew Dragon system no sooner than February, assuming completion of additional tests of their system in January. The SpaceX system was set back earlier after a Crew Dragon craft was destroyed in a ground test of an emergency escape system.
At this point, Boeing has not yet determined the cause of the incorrect clock setting. It appears that the problem with the timer was detected quickly enough to save the mission, but it just happened at the moment the problem occurred that no satellite was close enough to pass along the command to execute the orbit burn. When a satellite was available just a few minutes later, it was too late to achieve a proper rendezvous.
Friday, Dec 20, 2019 · 3:17:56 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
The one thing that seems to surprise a lot of those asking questions is the idea that the spacecraft was not in “constant comms”—that there were gaps in satellite communications with the spacecraft. From the answers provided, it seems that this may be more of a theory. All that’s really known is that the craft did not initiate a burn, even though a signal was sent.