NASA still assessing Starliner-1 flight opportunities
A NASA official says that work with Boeing on the company's CST-100 Starliner vehicle is making "good progress" but declined to offer a date when the spacecraft could fly again.
During a July 30 briefing on upcoming spacewalks at the International Space Station, Bill Spetch, deputy manager of NASA's Commercial Low Earth Orbit Program, said NASA was working "very closely" with Boeing to address propulsion system issues with Starliner on a crewed test flight two years ago. Starliner has not flown since that mission.
Kelly Ortberg, Boeing's president and chief executive, said on a July 28 earnings call that work on Starliner was going well and suggested the main issue was scheduling the Starliner-1 mission, a cargo-only flight that will effectively serve as another test flight for the spacecraft.
"We've got to work with NASA to align on when the launches are going to be, both the crewed and uncrewed launches, going forward," he said in the call. Boeing separately stated in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company was planning Starliner-1 for no earlier than the fourth quarter of this year.
Starliner-1, though, was absent from a list of missions planned for a "busy fall and winter" for the ISS that Spetch outlined at the briefing. That includes the next crew rotation mission, SpaceX's Crew-13, scheduled for launch in mid-September, followed later in the fall by a cargo mission, SpaceX's CRS-35, and Northrop Grumman's NG-25 Cygnus cargo spacecraft near the end of the year.
"We continue to work very closely with Boeing on the Starliner upgrades," Spetch said later in the briefing when asked about Starliner. "I would say the teams are working really well together to make good progress and that we will fly it when it's ready to go and when we have a spot for it on ISS."
A successful Starliner-1 mission by the end of the year would open the door for flying the spacecraft's first long-duration crew rotation mission in the latter half of 2027. Last November, Boeing's original contract for six missions, including Starliner-1, was reduced to four. With NASA still working toward a 2030 retirement of the ISS, time is running out to fly those four missions.
The NASA comments about Starliner took place during a briefing to discuss three spacewalks planned outside the ISS in August. The first, scheduled for Aug. 6, will be conducted by NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Anil Menon. They will install equipment to prepare for the later installation of a solar array.
A second spacewalk on Aug. 13 will replace a high-gain antenna on the station. The third, planned for Aug. 25, involves work to connect power and data cables as well as replace a navigation aid used for spacecraft docking on the forward port of the Harmony module.
NASA has not announced the astronauts who will perform the second and third spacewalks, but a video shown at the briefing identified the astronauts doing the third spacewalk as Meir and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot.
Spetch said that, despite the video, NASA has not determined who will perform that spacewalk. "We like to keep an eye on what happens over the course of the EVAs, so we don't have to jostle things back and forth," he said.
Separately, NASA announced July 30 that it assigned Deniz Burnham to go to the ISS next year on the Soyuz MS-30 mission, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin and Konstantin Borisov. That mission is scheduled for launch in March and will remain there for about seven months.
This will be the first flight for Burnham, selected as part of the 2021 astronaut class. She had trained as the backup for Menon, who launched to the station earlier this month on Soyuz MS-29.
Vielen Dank, dass Sie den Artikel gelesen haben!
