Starliner Work in Vertical Integration Facility to Continue Through Weekend
CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION, Fla. (Boeing PR) — This weekend, Boeing engineers will continue testing and evaluating the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft inside the Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) at Space Launch Complex-41.
Yesterday, teams powered up the spacecraft to receive data and send commands to the propulsion system valves that unexpectedly indicated “closed” positions early in the launch countdown on Tuesday. The transmitted commands successfully opened some of the valves, giving the team new data to assess while also beginning physical inspections.
“Cautiously optimistic is a good way to describe how the team is feeling,” said John Vollmer, Starliner vice president and program manager. “They’re coming forward with innovative ideas and prioritizing the safety of the spacecraft and their teammates.”
Boeing aims to perform all activities at the VIF before returning to the launch pad for flight. If necessary, the spacecraft could return to the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center for further troubleshooting and inspections and possibly return to the pad for launch this month.
Boeing is assessing multiple launch opportunities for Starliner in August and will work with NASA and United Launch Alliance to confirm those dates when the team is ready to proceed with the Orbital Flight Test-2 mission.
Updates will be provided by NASA and Boeing as information is available.
Please follow @NASA, @Commercial_Crew and @BoeingSpace on Twitter, or visit www.nasa.gov or www.StarlinerUpdates.com, for more information.
39 responses to “Starliner Work in Vertical Integration Facility to Continue Through Weekend”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
ok then
I want this to work. Boeing employs a lot of folks who will suffer, unlike their platinum parachute bosses. They are the ones to be mad at. Don’t hate the jobbers. They are trying to rebuild tribal knowledge lost when the old hands through their hands up and walked out due to management. They don’t need new space libertarians piling on.
agreed well said I am ex Boeing
to amplify it is ESSENTIAL for both the company and NASA that this work
I don’t think that is true for either proposition. It would certainly be better for both Boeing and NASA if Starliner can somehow be made to work. But I don’t think failure to do so would constitute a fatal injury to either the company or the agency. The company would be hurt more, but not fatally. NASA can get by with just F9 and the Crew and Cargo Dragon 2s for as long as ISS is still in commission.
they need a second one…if not boeing SNC ISS is going to be around a long long time
There are two components to your comment.
First, it is very important that Starliner become operational. NASA and Boeing need this to happen for somewhat different reasons. NASA for dissimilar back up and stable mate for Dragon. Boeing to fulfil their contract and protect the company going forward. The nation as counter to the “All Elon, All the Time” meme that has a little too much traction. A Starliner failure damages multiple parties if allowed to happen.
Second is your thought on protecting jobs. This is almost never a good reason to continue a program. If whatever program is not going to produce useful results, then the time and talents of the people involved are wasted along with the money. Functionally all those people would be better .employed working on anything else that might have actual use. Or early full retirement, or full ride education with normal paycheck, or paid vacation in Tahiti with the naked servers bringing the beer. In short, anything else that improves their lives and the company because useless activity is useless.
Here is the thing though…having a lot of people employed means you have a constituency…a pro-space voting block to support national space efforts. Imagine if all things NASA were put in Florida, then space just gets seen as that one state’s “pork” a term I really hate since JPL could be called Pasadena’s pork.
Now from a purists standpoint an all Florida NASA would seem like a wise cost-cutting measure…in truth it might spell the end of NASA. So you do want the jobs spread around. Shelby types would then be more open to Space Solar Power as opposed to voting against coal, which he is really beholden to. He’s the whipping boy on this site…but like many, he really doesn’t have a passion like Nelson does.
As Hillhouse said at Americaspace….Old Space and New Space need to praise the hell out of each other.
Or you could be like the Comsat Industry and not worry about what NASA is going to spend on space. That is the promise of Starship, to bring the cost of space access down so folks start making real money in space, and the center of funding shifts from Washington to Wall Street. Then instead of a constituency you have markets that votes with their spending.
But comsats have been around awhile and all some in the space industry did was serve that only…looking at Musk’s interests as fan-boy foolishness. Jim at NSF for example.
Had PUBLIC Old Space been hurt with MSFC being killed, Jim would have cackled with glee and his kind of deadwood would still be blocking the spillway.
And here comes Musk as a bundle of dynamite, and Jim dropped off the NSF board awhile.
Musk just had the money Marshall never had.
MSFC gets a lot more money than Musk is spending at Starbase every year. MSFC just doesn’t do anything useful with it. Handing ever more money to entitled wastrels tends not to end well.
The Venture Star SLI days were when I was disappointed with them. The Bimese concept would have made SLS look like pocket change…for only EELV payloads. I think a lot of Les Johnson up there. I was hoping for SLS SuperHeavy or something to put a sun diver past Jupiter to unfurl at a kilometer across or so. MSFC is spread thin.
You seem stuck on the idea that the U.S. government will continue to be the main determinant of what the U.S. does in space and of the funds available to do it. That isn’t true now and it will be even less so in future. Political coalitions of the uselessly employed are one of the nation’s key problems, not a solution to anything.
Now that’s where we disagree. What if…heaven forbid…someone kills Elon? Bezos is Mishin to his Korolev. There is a part of me that wonders just what other reasons Elon has for moving so fast. In his elevated position, he may see pitfalls coming to this country the rest of us are blind to. He himself may not be in physical danger…in the recent 3 part interview? He’d wear a sniper out.
The bosses aren’t going anywhere absent either a shareholder revolt or a hostile takeover. The former would seem to be likelier than the latter. One or the other of these things is the typical end-stage reaction to a corporation with management that is executing a controlled flight into terrain.
Can’t wait for the earth-shattering KABOOM.
So they didn’t have this issue during extensive testing but now they have. Umm! Wonder what else is waiting for them?
Cheers
Neil
what else? Gloom dispair agony and misery (with apologies to the US series from long ago HeeHaw
“Deep, dark, depression, excessive misery.
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”
Seems to be Boeing’s new theme song at it seems as they aren’t able to do anything right nowadays.
yes but with all due respect to the folks there as the good Barron would say or Uncle Carl (Von Clauswitz) to paraphrase “you make your own luck” (or random chance)
its hard for me to see how this thing got on the rocket without some indication of the testing issues that are here now…or sustained in some fashion a major failure after it got on the rocket that caused this
as the Chinese would say “the period of despair”
cue Misty Roe 🙂
I’d bet lunch they did not test. I’m wondering if the team is even full time and not a composite of many other related teams working on other projects. I’ll bet internally Boeing is acting on a money emergency and anything else is job 3 or greater. Jobs 1 and 2 are to save money for the blowback from all the bad engineering they’ve done.
Hello Andrew. at this point sadly little would surprise me here. I guess right now I am a little surprised that NASA is as silent as NASA is…but I think that they are worried about bleed over to the SLS and Boeings work there…
its starting to strike me that at somepoint someone is going to figure out that thad they somehow got off the pad, they might have lost the vehicle…and well I dont think that anyone is going to like the next three or so weeks
Along your second paragraph. Flight 1 had a lot of problems, but non functional thrusters was not one of them. Or did I miss something? This seems to be a new problem. I think Boeing needs to be split up, and maybe McDonnell Douglas and others spun off.
they have had thruster problems in the past…both on the jig ie the test rig and in the desert after a test…this have been a continual issue with them
Spinning off wouldn’t help. Boeing has long since shuttered most of the facilities it acquired along with the companies that used to own them. The old McD-D complex in Long Beach, for instance, is now occupied by, among others, a trio of NewSpace launch vehicle companies – Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and Relativity Space. Simply put, there’s nothing left to spin off. Boeing’s problem isn’t that it’s too big or too diversified but that it’s too dumb. Divvying up the dumb isn’t going to help make it go away.
Heh
Then break it up and set the bits and pieces against each other in competition. That will go a long way toward getting the deadwood out of the way.
What is really needed anent all the legacy primes is some real competition from entirely outside the dinosaur corral. That, in turn, will require genuine reforms to the military procurement bureaucracies and regulations of the DoD and the various armed services. JSOC is already a serviceable model of such. It’ll deal with anyone who has something good. Space Force will, I hope, prove to be another nexus of such nimbleness. Slicing and splicing three old glue-factory-bound draft horses into a bunch of equally aged and infirm – just smaller – ponies isn’t going to produce any Derby prospects.
Why would they test? Their computer simulations said it will work…
Jim Collins (Great by Choice) has a great term – Return on Luck (ROL), which is about how a firm responds to chance events. The best firms take advantage of the them to become better while the poor ones allow them to be dragged under.
Boeing’s Model 299 (B-17), Dash-8 (B707), B737 and B747 are examples of when Boeing had a very good ROL.
in commercial air they have only really run into problems with this “international” thing…I see commercial air getting back on track pretty quickly
Maybe. I hope so.
Those examples were also from a time when engineers could stand up and say NO, because they would be welcomed at the competition across town. One of the many problems of being the only provider of certain products is that key employees may not have elsewhere to go. As a result, “yes boss” replaces “are you nuts” in too many cases. It was also a time when good engineers came from other companies bringing experience and varying insight. Boeing won, especially in the large aircraft category Problem is that there is a price to be paid as last man standing. Mainly being that the last man has limited feedback AKA no/limited bench.
At the current rate of innovation, the US would have fought WW2 with the P-26.
And that is why the American economy is so powerful. As old firms cease to be competitive new ones take their place. We already know who is replacing Boeing in space. Airliners are next on the list for disruption, replacing the old with cleaner, more flexible and economical option.
“Endless misery.”
Some of the valves opened? And the rest?
How very encouraging ?
encouraging LOL yes my thoughts exactly
or depressing
It is a good thing that OFT-2 is unmanned. Boeing might have to consider that they might need another flightworthy Starliner. Since getting this one back more or less intact from orbit is not a certainty.
I wonder if there could be a lubricant issue.
Clearly there’s a testing issue (when looking at this current matter in combination with the issues that arose during the first test flight).
They had a loong time to get ready for this, but they put it on the pad without having checked if the valves worked? That’s what makes me wonder if a lubricant or some other substance degraded — maybe they checked multiple times in the past but so much time has passed that things have changed in the plumbing or in actuator motor housings.
Continuing software woes could be another possibility