WASHINGTON – Boeing said on April 17 that the next test flight of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle will only take place at least in August, confirming a long delay that is generally expected due to the schedule of other launches and missions of the International Space Station.
In a statement, Boeing said the company and NASA are planning the unmanned Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission, which will take place in August or September. The date is “supported by an opportunity to connect the space station and the availability of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V Rocket and Eastern Series.”
Boeing worked on the launch of OFT-2 in late March or early April. In early March, however, NASA officials acknowledged that this was no longer likely due to delays due to the replacement of aircraft units on the spacecraft damaged by a power surge during ground tests, as well as power outages in the Houston area due to a winter storm in February that interrupted software testing.
Neither NASA nor Boeing provided an updated launch date at the time, but noted that the mission was unlikely to begin in April or May. This was due to Soyuz and Crew Dragon missions to the ISS that would be launched in April and the launch of an Atlas 5 in May with a military spacecraft.
At an information session on April 15 on the upcoming Crew-2 Crew Dragon mission, Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program Manager, said another factor is the next Cargo Dragon mission to the space station, which will begin in early June. would be launched. The spacecraft, along with the Crew-2 spacecraft, will occupy the only two ports that Starliner can use, meaning it can only start after the cargo Dragon leaves in mid-July.
“Right now, the windows we are looking at are the time frame for OFT-2 in August-September,” he said.
Boeing said in a statement that the Starliner fly OFT-2 would be “mission ready” in May and that the company would “evaluate options if an earlier launch opportunity is available.” For now, however, there are no plans to postpone the cargo-dragon mission in June, in part because it carries solar panels, which NASA wants to reach at the station as soon as possible to get a long-awaited upgrade of the station’s power station. start.
Stich said during the briefing that NASA and Boeing would take advantage of the delay to test additional software. Software issues were at the root of several major problems with the original OFT flight in December 2019, which cut short the mission and prevented the spacecraft from arriving at the ISS.
“Boeing expects all software testing to be completed in April and will support the agency’s post-testing assessment if necessary,” the company said, adding that it had completed all the recommendations made a year ago by a independent investigation, including those not previously considered mandatory. the spacecraft’s next flight.
Despite the delay in OFT-2, NASA and Boeing said they were still working on the vehicle’s first crew flight, the Crew Flight Test, before the end of the year. Stich said at the briefing that the current target for the flight is the fourth quarter.
This would mean that the crew flight would not take more than four months after OFT-2, while previous schedules suggested a gap of about half a year between them. Boeing said it was working to “allow the shortest time between flights while maintaining the focus on crew safety”, including having the three NASA astronauts who will fly the mission perform tests in the Starliner that run on OFT-2 launched.