NASA Is Trying To Decide The Future of Starliner

It’s now been over a month since the Starliner spacecraft returned from the ISS without any crew aboard. Since then, SpaceX’s Crew 9 Dragon has docked to the station and now Butch and Suni have a ride home, set to occur early next year.

All that being said, while all of those events have been going on, NASA has been trying to determine the future of the spacecraft. Considering its history and the most recent failure, the program is not in the best position.

Starliner’s Future

Last week, NASA released a new statement related to the agency’s 2025 commercial crew plan. As far as what this means, in an initial quote, they say, “NASA and its industry partners Boeing and SpaceX continue planning next year’s missions to the International Space Station for the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. While significant work remains to prepare for these flights, the agency expects a busy year of in-orbit activities and is planning windows of opportunity for mission teams to target, pending operational readiness and station traffic” they said.

From here, they go on to highlight planned SpaceX crew launches including Crew 9, Crew 10, and even Crew 11. However, when mentioning Starliner, the agency uses much more broad terms to describe the spacecraft’s future.

Specifically, the agency is quoted as saying, “The timing and configuration of Starliner’s next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing’s path to system certification is established. This determination will include considerations for incorporating Crew Flight Test lessons learned, approvals of final certification products, and operational readiness.”

They finish by saying, “Meanwhile, NASA is keeping options on the table for how best to achieve system certification, including windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025.”

Based on these quotes, it seems that NASA still isn’t quite sure of the best path for the spacecraft. When they talk about the next flight and determining its configuration, this sounds like deciding if it should be crewed or uncrewed. It’s very possible based on the recent crew flight test results that the agency will require Boeing to complete a successful uncrewed mission again.

In other words, they would want the company to prove that any issues related mainly to the thrusters have been fixed to the point where there is practically no chance of another event like the CFT-1. This could be a cargo mission where Starliner brings supplies to the ISS.

What is very clear from these statements is that NASA has not certified the vehicle for crew launches which was the main purpose of the crewed flight test. This is a big deal because Starliner is not going to be completing any official crew rotations (which come with a big price tag) until they are certified. This puts even more stress on a program that has already had quite a rocky history.

To put it in perspective, originally, Boeing and SpaceX were both tasked by NASA in 2014 to create new commercial crew vehicles, with billions of dollars of funding. Boeing managed to receive $4.2 billion while SpaceX received $2.6 billion in those deals. SpaceX Crew Dragon’s first astronaut flight flew in 2020. In the four years since, the company has sent over 10 missions to ISS. This has racked up a significant amount of money for the company in terms of large crew contracts. On the other hand, Boeing’s delays have forced the company to miss out on different opportunities and even lose around $1.6 billion thanks to different charges.

It’s also important to point out that immediately after the launch, some officials believed that following a few fixes, they would certify the vehicle and it would move on to Starliner-1. It seems in the time since then, the agency has continued to shift toward a more hesitant approach and with it, likely a lot more work for Boeing.

Lots of Issues

Right after Starliner landed, the commercial crew program manager Steve Stich explained that three different Boeing teams are working on different parts of the spacecraft. Specifically, he said “It’s really great to get the spacecraft back and then we’ll start the next steps. We’ve been talking to the Boeing team already about the next steps. We want to get into the spacecraft and start working on the helium system. We know we have a seal that we’ve got to go replace on the flanges on the RCS thrusters. We need to upgrade that material to make it hyperbolic compatible, and maybe a little bigger size will do that.”

He then said, “Boeings already formed teams to look at the changes that need to be made for Starliner-1. In terms of the thermal environment, can we do something different to make the doghouse less thermally severe for the OMAC burns and the thrusters. A second team is looking at the hot fire of the thrusters thats needed on the service module to complete the qualification and make sure we understand which pulses cause the Teflon seal on the oxide to swell. And then thirdly there’s a GNC team already formed to look and figure out how we go fly the vehicle differently. Can we change the dead bands, can we change the way it flies to not stress the thrusters. And so that work has already started and that’s really the path to Starliner-1” he said.

This highlights some of the optimistic goals officials had related to the next Starliner flight. That crewed mission following certification was originally scheduled for February 2025 but was delayed to August 2025. At this point, it seems up in the air entirely.

Looking back at the flight test, Starliner launched on June 5th and there were a number of issues that arose, including multiple thruster failures that delayed the initial docking. They went on to perform in-space tests along with ground testing to try and replicate what was going on. After lots of testing and looking at various data, the agency decided the safest option was to return the capsule without the crew.

While it did manage to return successfully, even this process wasn’t without issues. At the time Steve Stich said, “During entry, the vehicle performed great. The one thing we will have to go look at after the flight is when we hot-fired before we had the entry, on the crew module there are 12 thrusters, and one of the up-firing thrusters did not perform at all. We hot-fired it twice and we used two different methods to talk to it, two different parts of the avionics system, and we never saw any chamber pressure or any pulses there” he said.

Even much earlier in Starliner’s life, the spacecraft ran into different issues. The first crewed Starliner mission was supposed to happen in 2017. That helps highlight the amount of problems that have come up in this vehicle’s history.

For context, the first uncrewed orbital flight test launched on December 20, 2019, but after deployment, an 11-hour offset in the mission clock of Starliner caused the spacecraft to compute that “it was in an orbital insertion burn”, when it was not. This caused the attitude control thrusters to consume more fuel than planned, precluding a docking with the International Space Station.

To make matters worse, after the mission NASA stated that two software errors detected during the test, one of which prevented a planned docking with the International Space Station, could each have led to the destruction of the spacecraft, had they not been caught and corrected in time. Before re-entry, engineers discovered the second critical software error that affected the thruster firings needed to safely jettison the Starliner’s service module. The service module software error “incorrectly translated” the jettison thruster firing sequence.

Soon after the mission was complete, NASA and Boeing began a significant investigation to figure out exactly what went wrong and ensure it never happened again. By December 2019, they had completed this review. The review team identified 80 recommendations, including 21 suggesting the need for greater hardware and software integration testing; performance of an end-to-end “run for record” test prior to each flight using the maximum amount of flight hardware available; reviewing subsystem behaviors and limitations; and addressing any identified simulation or emulation gaps.

After this initial test flight and review process, a few years went by as Starliner prepared for its second uncrewed test flight. Despite all of the recommendations and the thorough review, the next launch attempt would still feature quite a few problems. During the August 2021 launch window, some issues were detected with 13 propulsion-system valves in the spacecraft prior to launch. The spacecraft had already been mated to its launch rocket, United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Atlas V, and taken to the launchpad.

Attempts to fix the problem while on the launchpad failed, and the rocket was returned to the ULA’s VIF (Vertical Integration Facility). Attempts to fix the problem at the VIF also failed, and Boeing decided to return the spacecraft to the factory, thus canceling the launch at that launch window. OFT-2 would eventually launch but not after some substantial delays.

On that flight, two Orbital Maneuvering and Attitude Control System (OMACS) thrusters failed during the orbital insertion burn, but the spacecraft was able to compensate using the remaining OMACS thrusters with the addition of the Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters. A lot of these initial delays and issues are what increased the charges from NASA to what it is now at around $1.6 billion.

Conclusion

Right now NASA is trying to decide exactly what the future of Starliner looks like. By now it’s clear they are not comfortable with certifying the vehicle just yet and might end up requiring another uncrewed flight. All of which puts even more stress on the program.