WASHINGTON – Boeing said on April 17 that the next test flight of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle will not take place until August, confirming a long delay widely expected due to the schedule of other International Space Station launches and missions.
In a statement, Boeing said the company and NASA plan for the unmanned Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission to take place in August or September. That date is “supported by a space station dock and the availability of the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket and Eastern Range.”
Boeing had been working on the OFT-2 launch in late March or early April. However, in early March, NASA officials acknowledged that this was no longer likely due to delays in replacing electronic units on the spacecraft that had been 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 affected the software testing interrupted.
Neither NASA nor Boeing gave an updated launch date at the time, but noted that the mission was unlikely to launch in April or May. This was due to the Soyuz and Crew Dragon missions to the ISS scheduled for launch in April, and the launch in May of an Atlas 5 from a military spacecraft.
During an April 15 briefing on the upcoming Crew-2 Crew Dragon mission, Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s commercial crew, said another factor was the next Cargo Dragon mission to the space station, due to be launched in early June. That spacecraft, along with the Crew-2 spacecraft, will occupy the only two dock ports that Starliner can use, meaning it won’t be able to launch until after the payload Dragon takes off in mid-July.
“Right now, the windows we’re looking at are the August-September timeframe for OFT-2,” he said.
Boeing said in its statement that the Starliner flying OFT-2 will be “mission-ready” in May and that the company will “evaluate options if an earlier launch option becomes available.” For now, however, there are no plans to postpone the Charge Dragon mission in June, in part because it will carry solar panels and NASA wants to get to the station as soon as possible to begin a highly anticipated upgrade to the station’s power supply.
Stich said at the briefing that NASA and Boeing will take advantage of the delay to run additional software tests. Software glitches caused several major problems with the original OFT flight in December 2019, which caused the mission to abort and prevent the spacecraft from docking with the ISS.
“Boeing expects to complete all software testing in April and will support the agency’s post-test ratings as needed,” the company said, adding that it completes all recommendations from a year ago with an independent review, including those previously not considered mandatory. were considered. the next flight of the spacecraft.
Despite the delay in OFT-2, NASA and Boeing said they are still working on making the vehicle’s first manned flight, the Crew Flight Test, before the end of the year. Stich said during the briefing that the current target for that flight is the fourth quarter.
That would mean that the manned flight would be no more than four months after OFT-2, while previous schedules suggested a gap of about half a year. Boeing said it is working to enable “the shortest possible turnaround time between flights while maintaining the focus on crew safety,” including testing the three NASA astronauts who will fly on that mission in the flight. Starliner launched on OFT-2.