Starliner Second Chance
High stakes launch for Boeing – Image at stake
The Boeing brand has been battered and the company is desperate for a win. A chance comes later this week on a launchpad at Cape Canaveral. A Boeing Starliner capsule is expected to launch into orbit for a second test mission. Boeing hopes this time the software works and Starliner gets to and docks with the International Space Station. A lot will be riding on what is called Orbital Test Flight-2.
It was in late 2019, a very bad year for Boeing, that the Starliner lifted off in the darkness before sunrise. It was a beautiful launch that looked picture perfect. In fact, I reported on Good Morning America shortly after the launch all looked normal.
(ABC News Good Morning America December 20, 2019)
"OFF NOMINAL"
The flight was anything but “nominal.” Timing is everything for these missions. But the software’s watch was off, way off. The clock signals the software to tell the rocket what to do and when to do it.
Photo Credit: Boeing
The timing was so off that the computer thought the vehicle was someplace else and started firing off thrusters, burning fuel. By the time the Boeing folks got it figured out and fixed, there was a worry there wasn’t enough fuel left to reach to ISS, dock, and complete the mission. The Boeing team, defeated by the software mistake, brought the capsule came home. Boeing had lost an important milestone that would prove costly for the company in dollars and reputation.
Photo Credit: NASA-Bill Ingalls
CAPTURE THE FLAG
Boeing, which helped land man on the moon, was hoping to be the first to fly astronauts from the U.S. to the space station in nearly a decade. Since the retirement of the space shuttle, NASA had relied on Russian Soyuz flights to get to the station. The last shuttle crew left a small U.S. flag on the station to be returned to Earth by the next flight from American soil.
Photo Credit: NASA
This was no ordinary flag. It had flown on the first shuttle mission and returned on that last mission. It was a “capture the flag” competition between SpaceX and Boeing. With its test failure, the Boeing team was forced to watch as the flag was captured and taken to SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters.
Photo Credit: NASA
SpaceX and its leader Elon Musk basked in the glow of delivering astronauts to the station. “I hate that the other guy gets talked about more than we do,” Boeing CEO David Calhoun said in June. “We have a good business there. It’s rock solid, [though] everyone likes the new players,” he told the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference.
Photo Credit: Boeing
A YEAR TO FORGET
Could it have gotten worse for Boeing? This all came in a year in which a second Boeing 737-MAX jetliner crashed. The entire fleet of the new variant was grounded around the world. Production of the most popular jetliner in the world slowed and then stopped.
Both the Starliner and the 737-MAX suffered from software issues. Boeing fixed the MAX and was able to re-certify the aircraft and recently won some big orders for the jetliner. The company also hired a new Vice President of software engineering. The same engineer who helped develop SpaceX’s Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon capsule.
Photo Credit: Boeing
"RING THIS VEHICLE OUT"
The company says the software for the Starliner has also been fixed. “I think one the biggest areas we focused on is the hardware-software integration,” says John Vollmer who heads Boeing’s Commercial Crew program. He told reporters that it’s all been tested with the Atlas V rocket that will propel the Starliner into orbit. The timing miscommunication happened between the rocket and the capsule on the first test flight. Boeing is paying the bill for this Orbital Test Flight-2- more than $400 million.
“I am confident in our vehicle,” Vollmer said after a Launch Readiness Review with Nasa. “We have spent 18 months really trying to ring this vehicle out,” he added.
Visiting Boeing at KSC where the Starliner is built.
The Starliner is built in Boeing’s building at the Kennedy Space Station, harkening back to the company’s glory days in space. It is the building where the company would refurbish space shuttles after they returned from space. I was in that building in 1988 watching repairs on a shuttle and visited again three decades later to see the Starliner under construction.
Photo Credit: Boeing artist rendering
Now, both the team in that building, and across the country, will be watching the launch hoping OFT-2 is a success and the “artist rendering” of the Starliner docking is replaced by an actual picture. It is a needed picture of success.
(Video credit: ULA mission profile of OFT-2)