Starliner Reaches Orbit, Can’t Dock with Station
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft suffered an anomaly after reaching space during its maiden flight test on Friday morning, resulting in the abandonment of plans for a rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station (ISS).
Boeing and NASA officials said the spacecraft is in a good orbit and performing well. They are planning an abbreviated two-day flight test before bringing the spacecraft down for a landing on Sunday morning at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said a mission elapsed timing error caused the uncrewed Starliner to believe it was performing an orbital insertion burn when it was not. As a result, the spacecraft burned up a lot of fuel as its reaction control system began firing.
Bridenstine said controllers on the ground were not able to immediately override the automatic controls and command Starliner to perform the burn because the spacecraft was out of contract with the ground as it flew between two TDRS communications satellites.
Controllers were able to get the Starliner to perform the insertion burn late to reach a stable orbit, which was subsequently raised. Because it was not clear whether a full burn would enable Starliner to reach the space station, controllers decided to put it into an orbit that would allow for a safe landing at White Sands.
Astronaut Nicole Mann, who is part of the first three-person crew that will fly on Starliner, said if they had been aboard they could have overridden the automatic controls and commanded the orbital insertion burn.
Officials stressed that if astronauts had been aboard, they would not have been in any danger.
The orbital insertion burn was necessary because the Atlas V booster delivered Starliner into a suborbital trajectory. This was planned, not an anomaly.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) CEO Tory Bruno said the Atlas V booster performed perfectly.. He said an on board camera showed that Starliner cleanly separated from the Centaur upper stage.
The rocket used a Centaur upper stage with two RL-10 engines instead of the one that is used for satellite launches.
The launch was the first of two planned flight tests for Starliner, which Boeing is developing to carry crews to and from the space station. If the flight had gone as planned, a three-member crew would have flown a second mission sometime in the first half of 2020.
Bridenstine was non-committal on whether NASA would require Boeing to conduct another uncrewed flight test before putting astronauts aboard the spacecraft. The answer would depend upon the results of the anomaly investigation.
SpaceX is building its Crew Dragon spacecraft under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The company flew an uncrewed flight to ISS earlier this year.
SpaceX is planning an in-flight abort test of Crew Dragon using a modified Falcon 9 booster no earlier than Jan. 11. That flight will be followed by a crewed mission to the space station.
Due to delays in both Starliner and Crew Dragon, NASA is in the process of acquiring additional seats on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to maintain an American presence on ISS.
27 responses to “Starliner Reaches Orbit, Can’t Dock with Station”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
As Roberto says proudly, “Boeing isn’t a software company” and it shows…again. Lots of similarities to 737MAX as it’s easy to cross-reference MET with other propulsion indications (Sensors) to know if the burn happened as expected. If not s/w should cancel the narrow dead-band mode to conserve fuel. Again Boeing shows it is woefully incapable of 21st century software automation. And tax payers pay extra for that lack of competency.
Yet Boeing is already spinning this as a success since docking with the ISS on the DM-1 was not a contract requirement, just something it would have been “nice” to do…
Of course they still have to safely recover the capsule at WSMR, which may be more difficult if it has a problem doing precision burns with its thrusters.
Added to the parachute “anomaly” it looks like Boeing has QC problem with flying the Starliner.
Just like when the parachute isn’t connected to the abort test it’s still 100% successful. Yea..
Just read that it may have been what sounds like a misentry in the mission sequencer. Which is unforgivable on a program like Starliner. That should have been the subject of ongoing meetings of constant nit-picking, and the subject of a human review culminating with a binary check of the final sequence before it was uploaded into the flight system. If they’re skimping on all that, Space X skimps better.
It’s on NASA too, I’m thinking. NASA loves this approach of component level testing but certify the overall system through simulation and paperwork, test fly once just to do one final real-life verification, and then you’re good to go.
In real life, funny things happen that can’t be simulated. To me, this clock start error and the earlier unattached parachute show that Boeing simply has to fly more and get their operations practiced in the real world, and NASA has to embrace that approach too
There is a balance to be had with a heavy weighting to flying more. Flying unmanned is a real option these days and should be exercised more. My take at the end of the first day is SpaceX skimps on the details better than Boeing does. Having flown more they probably have a better set of insights on what you can skimp on and what you can’t.
I would not say that SX has flown more than Boeing. I would say that SX has flown a lot more, in RECENT TIME.
It really is about the ppl that you have, not the company. And SX is loaded with top ppl.
Boeing continues to lay-off, fire, sell-off great ppl and then hire ppl from outside of the industry whose ‘experienced’ ppl is still less than the newbie that they could have hired in America.
INSANE.
The real problem is, that the clock start error SHOULD have been picked up by QA.
I am just dumbfounded that Boeing is making this many mistakes.
Sadly, Boeing is being ran by the MBAs from McD who ran that company into the ground.
Yeah, they’re going to have to up their game, that’s for certain.
I’d be really interested to see who was doing the avionics.
Not good Boeing. The stuff I’m picking up seems to indicate a lack of cross checking local clocks, lack of skew detection or clock upset within the system, lack of using external sources such as GPS, or telemetry stream. …. Come on guys #include<time.h> …. It’s all in there, use it! Wow just wow.
And …. what’s with this having to use Starliner’s OMS to finish the burn to a stable orbit? Come on, just use one or two more SRB’s or …. gasp … fly on a friggin’ Falcon 9. Cutting it that close is a needless risk that we see the consequence of playing out today.
Having a very expensive for the performance launch vehicle makes you do pretty weird trades apparently.
The Shuttle used to fly a similar ascent profile so that the ET would re-enter while a short OMS burn put the orbiter in actual orbit. I don’t know what the justification is for Starliner doing this. I hope the answer doesn’t turn out to be that Boeing is reusing Shuttle source code on Starliner as well as actual OMS engines but I can’t say I’d be exactly shocked to find out this was true. In any case, I’m not aware that any of the other freight or crew vehicles that visit the ISS do this sort of climb-dip-climb ascent profile either.
Where is Task Force RGO? The world wonders.
From what I’ve read, using on board for the last bit was a way of using up the unused LAS propellant. Just this morning I was thinking that they has found a decent use for that mass. I was wrong.
Right good point. I had not considered that.
Actually, I think that it is a great use of the OMS. If not used for LAS or landing, then might as well use it for moving around in orbit as well as perhaps pushing the ISS.
The issue here was not the use of OMS, but the burn time, which, like the parachute earlier, was screwed up by ppl.
I was wondering if it was G limitation? Boy if they are using STS code on Starliner ….. So many things failed for this to have happened. Or were never there.
I know at some point Orion was going to use the space rated Pentium as the main CPU. F00F bug? 🙂 I doubt it. This is either a gross clock problem or the flight sequence was off. Lot’s to see on landing. If they hit White Sands, they understand the problem and have a fix in. Otherwise they’ll have to dump it in an ocean. I need to find out what the public policy is going to be on landing as it’s only a few hours drive away for me.
If they are smart they will close the range as well as Highway US 70 for safety reasons. Who knows how accurate it’s landing will be, best to minimize risk. But if you are interested there is a rest area just pass Organ Pass on US 70 before the road blocks that has a good view of the range. Its where I watched the first FAA licensed commercial rocket launch decades ago.
Need the janitor to mop of the mess.
G loads on Crew.
I don’t know much about orbital mechanics but this was a really weird Atlas. It has SRBs, but it holds onto them for 48 seconds after burnout. It has a dual engine Centaur, but still doesn’t put Starliner into orbit? I dunno, I need to go figure this odd bird out.
On the plus side, trampolines don’t require atomic clocks to work
NASA are saying they don’t need to redo it. It was their idea to do the test flight. So I guess NASA says it is OK to do a Crew flight and if anything goes wrong we use SOP. Well that may make the Pence prediction of flight before Spring come true. SpaceX can do the same thing. Whatever the Boss says.
I’m unhappy about this failure (and what I perceive as preferred treatment for Boeing in general), but I think the next flight should be crewed as nothing in this flight presented as a loss of crew emergency. I’m not super happy that they didn’t demo prox ops near the ISS. Remember that Progress that went haywire near the ISS?
I guess I don’t know enough about TDRS as I thought I did. Are there many TDRS dead zones?
Actually it appears that the problem was that the Starliner didn’t know which TDRS to point at because of the clock being wrong.
Ah, interesting. Thanks, Prof. Matula.