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Museum Pieces: Boeing Starliner, Kennedy Space Center [1]
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Date: 2023-06-27
The ill-starred Boeing Starliner spaceship was part of an effort by NASA to encourage and support private-industry space programs.
"Museum Pieces" is a diary series that explores the history behind some of the most interesting museum exhibits and historical places.
Boeing Starliner on exhibit at NASA Kennedy Space Center
By the first years of the 21st century, the United States' NASA Space Shuttle program was already on the way out. Despite some notable successes, it was still flying with 1970s technology and had never lived up to its advertising in either cost or performance. Even when construction was begun on the International Space Station in 1998, it was the Russian Soyuz family of spacecraft that were the real workhorses. The last Space Shuttle mission, flown by Atlantis, was in July 2011.
The decision to end the Shuttle program, however, left the USA with no viable manned spacecraft, and NASA was now totally dependent upon paying Russia to carry astronauts to the ISS on its Soyuz craft. It was a situation that the US Government and NASA found intolerable. And so, in an effort to find alternative methods of space travel that would end its dependence upon the Russians, NASA announced a program called the “Commercial Crew Program”, in which NASA would help fund efforts by private aerospace companies to produce manned space vehicles, which the space agency would then pay to carry its astronauts to the ISS and other space destinations.
Five companies submitted proposals, and in 2014 NASA selected two of these for further development. The SpaceX company called their design the Dragon, and Boeing designated its entry the CST-100 Starliner.
The spaceship is based, if only loosely, upon the old Apollo design that took Americans to the Moon, but with sophisticated electronics and other updates. Its early research was funded both by NASA and by Boeing itself, though the company’s Commercial Crew Program contract with NASA was “fixed fee”, meaning that any extra costs came out of Boeing’s pocket.
The Starliner measures about 15 feet wide, a bit bigger than the old Apollo command module, and was designed to carry a manned crew of up to seven into low earth orbit. The spaceship is “partially reusable”: the service module containing the maneuvering engines, solar panels, and consumables is jettisoned for each mission, but the occupied command module can be reused for up to ten missions. Unlike the Apollo moonship, the Starliner was designed with retro-rockets and airbags for a soft landing on the ground, similar to the system used by the Russian Soyuz.
Starliner is compatible with a number of different booster rockets, including NASA’s Delta IV, the Atlas V, and even its competitor SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Upon launch, the craft is boosted into a suborbital trajectory reaching a height of 112 miles. The Starliner’s service module engines are then fired to push the spaceship into orbit.
Most space experts assumed that Boeing, with its long years of experience with NASA space programs, would immediately dominate the commercial field, and the start-up SpaceX would struggle to keep up. Instead, it was Boeing who fell behind.
In its first orbital test flight, originally scheduled for early 2017, the mission called for the unmanned spaceship to dock with the International Space Station. However, this was delayed by technical issues until 2019, and during this launch a flaw in the software, coupled with a radio communications issue, prevented the Starliner from reaching the ISS. NASA allowed Boeing a “do-over”, but this was delayed several times by further technical issues and wasn’t launched until 2022, when the unmanned spaceship successfully docked with the ISS.
That advanced the program towards a manned test flight, which had originally been scheduled for late 2017, but the delays during the unmanned test flights had already pushed this back to late 2022. But once again, technical issues (including problems with the thrusters) delayed the mission several times, and by the summer of 2023 there had yet to be a successful manned launch, and the latest launch attempt planned for July was indefinitely postponed just a few weeks before the scheduled mission after new issues were found, including possible dangers with the parachutes and with a potential fire hazard posed by the cloth tape used to wrap all of the spaceship’s electrical harnesses. By this time, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft had already passed all of its test launches and was regularly making two manned operational flights to the International Space Station each year.
Originally, it was intended that both SpaceX and Boeing would do six manned missions each to the ISS as part of their contract with NASA. In the wake of Boeing's consistent issues and delays, however, SpaceX’s share has been boosted to 14 missions, enough to maintain the ISS until 2030, and some of the NASA astronauts assigned to the Starliner have been transferred to the Dragon program instead. Many, inside NASA and out, have raised doubts that Boeing’s spaceship, now years behind schedule and almost $1 billion over budget, will ever actually be capable of reliably performing successful missions, and there have been several calls to cancel the entire project.
So far, however, NASA maintains that it is confident that the Starliner will overcome all of its many issues and take its place alongside SpaceX, and officials have stressed that they want to maintain two independent private launch options for sending astronauts into space. It is hoped that having two commercial contractors would help spur competition and technical innovation, and also keep costs down.
Today, an engineering mockup of the Boeing Starliner command module is on display at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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