Boeing Starliner Orbital Demonstration Mission

[Yazata]

Coming up this Friday, December 20. Scheduled for 6:36 AM EST (an ungodly 3:36 AM PST, but very comfortable 11:36 UTC in Greenwich, just in time for Bojo's lunch break). They have precise launch windows so that the Starliner can catch up with the Space Station which is zipping by overhead at 18,000 mph. The booster, an ULA Atlas, is expendable and won't be recovered.

The launch will be streamed on NASA Live, and several other websites besides. There will be a number of other events associated with this on NASA Live, including a pre-launch press-conference for today (Tuesday Dec 17) at 2:00 PM EST (11:00 AM PST, 19:00 UTC) These press conferences are often educational, since at least some of the reporters are from the aerospace press, have some engineering and industry experience, and know what questions to ask. (Others are just the typical journalistic idiots.)

https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

[Yazata]

ULA Starliner blog with lots of information.

https://www.ulalaunch.com/missions/atlas-v-oft

ULA is the manufacturer of the Starliner's booster. It's a joint-venture of both Boeing and Lockheed's rocket manufacturing arms.

They say that this will be the 81st launch of an Atlas V and the 136th ULA launch all-together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance

Even though ULA is kind of portrayed as the evil empire, compared to Elon Musk's rebel jedi knights, I like ULA's CEO, Tory Bruno. He's a good space guy.

https://www.airspacemag.com/space/tory-b...180968983/

[C C]

ULA Starliner blog with lots of information.

https://www.ulalaunch.com/missions/atlas-v-oft

ULA is the manufacturer of the Starliner's booster. It's a joint-venture of both Boeing and Lockheed's rocket manufacturing arms.

They say that this will be the 81st launch of an Atlas V and the 136th ULA launch all-together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance

Even though ULA is kind of portrayed as the evil empire, compared to Elon Musk's rebel jedi knights, I like ULA's CEO, Tory Bruno. He's a good space guy.

https://www.airspacemag.com/space/tory-b...180968983/

I've been sub-verbally wondering at times why Lockheed seemed to be silent or sitting passively in the bleachers while these other rich kids were playing Outer Space Company in a more independent way. Going back to 2002 and maybe earlier, I guess they aren't.

[Yazata]

Starliner unmanned orbital test flight took off flawlessly Friday morning. (I actually set my alarm and got up to watch about 3:30 AM PST.)

But... the final orbital insertion burn where the Starliner fires its own on-board maneuvering engines to match orbits with the Space Station didn't take place as planned. Apparently there is a problem with the Starliner's attitude control, getting it pointed precisely the right way when its engines fire.

Starliner is in a stable orbit and they have deployed its solar arrays, to keep it its batteries charged while the Boeing engineers work through the problem trying to figure out what, if anything, they can do.

Live broadcast has now signed off with no resolution. Just from tone of voice and body language, I get the impression that the problem might be worse than they are letting on.

The Kennedy Space Center press room has been alerted that a press briefing is coming in about 75 minutes.

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/statu...1701962752

Tim Dodd notes that when the booster shut down, there was enthusiastic cheering by the ULA booster team, suggesting that they saw nothing wrong with the booster's performance. But Boeing's Starliner team was quiet and appeared a little grim. Other observers note that telemetry that was expected to be publicly displayed wasn't. So there's speculation that some problem with Starliner was detected by its controllers early in flight.

Jim Bridenstine just announced that there will be a NASA press conference at 9:00 AM EST (6:00 AM PST) that will be streamed live on NASA TV.

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/statu...5483260933

People are noting that if they have successfully oriented Starliner's solar arrays to point at the Sun, then the attitude control system must still be working. So there's speculation that the problem might be with the orbital maneuvering (OMAC) engines. But those bigger engines would have had to successfully fire to achieve a stable orbit, which they claim to be in. So (speculation) did a maneuvering engine fail at the end of its earlier orbital insertion burn? (Nobody knows, hopefully things are clarified at 9AM.)

[Yazata]

Press conference pushed back to 9:30 AM Friday.

Jim Bridenstine is writing that it sounds like a software problem.

"Because Starliner believed it was in an orbital insertion burn (or that the burn was complete), the dead bands were reduced and the spacecraft burned more fuel than anticipated to maintain precise control. This precluded Space Station rendezvous."

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/statu...3388633090

More from Bridenstine: Now it sounds like it may have been something as simple as a bad clock:

"Update: #Starliner had a Mission Elapsed Time (MET) anomaly causing the spacecraft to believe that it was in an orbital insertion burn, when it was not."

There are hints that there's more to it than that. Something about the OMAC orbital insertion burn may (or may not) have been seriously off-nominal. If so, then the computer may have been technically correct in 'believing' that the burn was completed. (Even if another burn was needed to make the orbit right.) It should have conserved maneuvering and attitude control fuel in that case, which it apparently didn't do. (Boeing may have to rewrite its software to take the possibility of off-nominal insertions into account.)

So bottom line: the Space Station docking is off and attention has swung to trying to save and recover the vehicle. (Which would be necessary if astronauts were aboard.)

All of this seems to mean that there will have to be another unmanned Starliner demo flight and that the first crewed mission will be pushed back months.

[Yazata]

Briefing is on...

Bridenstine says that the problem was a software problem with the Mission Elapsed Timer. The flight control computer believed that it was at a different point in the mission than it really was, where the OMAC orbital insertion had already happened. So those engines didn't start their burn necessary to put Starliner into a more circular stable orbit. Without it, perigee of the orbit was so low that the Starliner would have reentered and burned up after a few orbits. The orbital insertion was manually commanded from the ground and the vehicle has since raised the perigee of its orbit to an altitude that's safe.

They have verified that conditions inside the Starliner are fine and astronauts wouldn't be in any danger. But the Starliner hasn't achieved a suitable orbit for catching the Space Station with the fuel reserves it has on hand. So they are configuring the Starliner to return to White Sands where it was originally scheduled to land. Since a big part of the mission objectives for this flight was seeing how the vehicle behaves in orbit in terms of temperature regulation, electrical and so on, as well as orbital reentry and landing, most mission objectives can still be salvaged, even if it doesn't dock with the Station.

The astronauts slated to fly the first crewed Starliner mission were at the briefing and say that had they been aboard, they could have manually taken over from the computer and commanded the insertion burn. That's one of the contingencies they remember practicing from the simulators. So had astronauts been aboard, they would have been safe and the Starliner would probably have been docking with the Space Station tomorrow. The astronauts pointed out that this is why these are considered test flights and why they are flown by test pilots.

Bridenstine says that it's too early to say whether another uncrewed demo mission will be necessary. They are still assessing. They want to know how the mission timer problem originally arose. Was it set wrong from the beginning or did something throw it off. If so, what? They want to know if this is evidence of a more systemic software problem.

They say that they don't see any impact on the Crew Dragon manned flight. But if they see any vulnerabilities in their analysis of the Starliner flight that might also crop up with Crew Dragon, they will apply the new information across the board, just like they did with the parachutes.

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/statu...9009538055

https://twitter.com/Commercial_Crew/stat...6659221510

https://starlinerupdates.com/boeing-upda...ight-test/

https://twitter.com/Space_Station

https://twitter.com/Astro_Ferg/status/12...1083235328

[Yazata]

The Starliner successfully returned to White Sands NM this morning. I didn't watch live, but here's the video of the landing from NASA TV

https://youtu.be/lPzNHeX7OYM

Had there been astronauts in it, they would have gotten back fine, even if they didn't make it to the Space Station.

Post landing press conference video is here

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1208766257870319617

Something that jumped out at me was the answer to the last question:

How far off was the Mission Elapsed Timer from the actual mission elapsed time?

Answer: 11 hours!

Starliner thought that it was 11 hours into its mission when it was just minutes in. So it didn't autonomously do its insertion burn (since that would have already happened at 11 hours). Ground control had to manually command it, and it happened 8 minutes later than it should have happened. That put Starliner in an orbit too far from the Space Station to reach with the fuel available to the orbital maneuvering thrusters. Launching precisely on time for orbital rendezvous is vital when the target is zipping by overhead at 18,000 MPH and circling the globe every 80 minutes or so. Since Earth has about a 25,000 mile circumference, an 8 minute delay would have put the Starliner off about 2,500 miles.

[Yazata]

There's a press briefing underway on the Boeing Starliner. After the Mission Elapsed Timer choked on their unmanned Demo mission, several more problems later emerged and NASA ordered a thorough review of the whole thing. Today they are announcing their findings. NSF's Chris Gebhardt is there.

His quick summary, posted on twitter...

61 action items
49 software test gaps
NO decision on Orbital Flight Test reflight
Starliner not flying for months

https://twitter.com/ChrisG_NSF/status/12...5034564608

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm starting to feel sorry for Boeing... They are a good company, all in all, but with the 737Max and now this, they are messing up bigtime.

gGBb

[Yazata]

NASA just announced today that they are going to re-fly the Boeing Starliner uncrewed OFT (orbital flight test) mission to the Space Station. Date not decided yet, but sometime this fall.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/20...-for-nasa/

[Yazata]

Starliner just passed its final flight readiness review for a re-do of its Orbital Flight Test. The first one was flown way back in December 2019 and while it launched and landed successfully and had good life support throughout, it was unable to match orbits with the Space Station due to badly botched software. A review found many other software faults that might have proved disastrous, so it was decided to completely rewrite the software, test it extensively, then refly the unmanned demo mission.

The second try at the Orbital Flight Test (dubbed OFT-2) is now set for Friday July 30, 2021 at 2:53 PM EDT (11:53 AM PDT, 18:53 UTC)

https://twitter.com/BoeingSpace/status/1...4109020161

Poor Boeing. This happened to them while they were reeling from the 737 Max debacle. Then on top of that, covid hit, airlines around the world cut back and nobody was buying new planes.

Boeing got a larger contract than SpaceX got for Crew Dragon (they were Boeing for heaven's sake, the safe choice!) and in the year and a half Starliner has been delayed, SpaceX has flown Bob and Doug, got approved for operational flights and flown Crew 1 and Crew 2. And Starliner still has to successfully complete its unmanned demo flight let alone fly actual people.

It's easy to feel Schadenfreude, which I admit I do feel a little bit (it's Boeing for heaven's sake!) but I really do want Starliner to succeed. Dissimilar redundancy is important. (What happens if Crew Dragon is all we have and it's suddenly grounded?) And there are lots of good engineers at Boeing that have poured their hearts and years of their lives into Starliner. I want it to succeed for them.