Boeing and NASA teams are participating in a dress rehearsal for the Boeing CST-100 Starliner landing mission in White Sands, New Mexico.
Boeing’s Starliner capsule is set to return to Earth on Wednesday in the final step of a key test flight to prove it is worthy of providing NASA astronauts with travel to the International Space Station.
It is planned that the spacecraft will disconnect autonomously at 2:36 p.m. Eastern Time (1836 GMT) and landed in New Mexico just over four hours later, at 22:49 GMT, completing a six-day mission that was crucial to restoring Boeing’s reputation after past failures.
The Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) is the last hurdle Starliner must overcome before transporting people on another test flight, which may take place later this year.
Starliner met with the ISS on Friday, the day after the explosion from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Over the weekend, astronauts aboard the research platform opened the hatch and “greeted” the only passenger on the capsule: Rosie the Rocketman, a mannequin equipped with sensors to find out what the human crew would experience during the voyage.
The mission did not pass without hiccups. These include propulsion problems at the start of Starliner’s trip, which saw that two thrusters responsible for placing it in a stable orbit failed, although officials insisted the system had many reserves built into the system.
On the day of the docking, the ship missed the scheduled contact time by more than an hour after the ring responsible for fastening to the station failed to deploy properly. The engineers had to put the ring away and then take it out again before it worked a second time.
However, the problems are few compared to the problems Starliner saw during its first test run in 2019, when one software bug caused it to burn too much fuel to reach its destination, and another almost meant that the vehicle the tool was destroyed during re-entry.
The second mistake was caught in time to board the patch, and the ship managed to make a gentle landing, delayed by its huge parachutes, in the White Sands spaceport – the same spaceport where space shuttles once launched and where Starliner is again expected to touchdown.
Boeing and NASA also tried to launch the Starliner in August 2021, but the capsule was returned from the launch pad to deal with sticky valves that did not open properly, and the ship was eventually sent back to the factory for amendments.
NASA is seeking to certify Starliner as the second “taxi” service for its astronauts to the space station – a role that Elon Musk’s SpaceX gave after succeeding in a test mission for its Dragon capsule in 2020.
Boeing’s Starliner approaches the ISS in a high-stakes test mission
© 2022 AFP
Citation: Boeing’s Starliner faces another challenge as it returns to Earth (2022, May 25), retrieved on May 25, 2022 from
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