Station Crew Opens Boeing Starliner Hatch, Enters Spacecraft
HOUSTON (NASA PR) — Astronauts living aboard the International Space Station opened the hatch for the first time to Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft at 12:04 p.m. EDT Saturday, May 21, on its uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2.
Watch live coverage as astronauts welcome the next-generation spacecraft to the microgravity laboratory on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website.
Starliner launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on a flight test to the International Space Station at 6:54 p.m. on Thursday, May 19, from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The uncrewed spacecraft successfully docked to the space station’s Harmony module at 8:28 p.m. EDT Friday, May 20.
For the flight test, Starliner is carrying about 500 pounds of NASA cargo and crew supplies and more than 300 pounds of Boeing cargo to the International Space Station. Following certification, NASA missions aboard Starliner will carry up to four crew members to the station, enabling the continued expansion of the crew and increasing the amount of science and research that can be performed aboard the orbiting laboratory.
The uncrewed flight test is designed to test the end-to-end capabilities of the crew-capable system as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. OFT-2 will provide valuable data toward NASA certifying Boeing’s crew transportation system for regular flights with astronauts to and from the space station.
Starliner is scheduled to depart the space station Wednesday, May 25, when it will undock and return to Earth, with a desert landing in the western U.S. The spacecraft will return with more than 600 pounds of cargo, including Nitrogen Oxygen Recharge System reusable tanks that provide breathable air to station crew members. The tanks will be refurbished on Earth and sent back to station on a future flight.
More details about the mission and NASA’s commercial crew program can be found in the press kit online and by following the commercial crew blog, @commercial_crew and commercial crew on Facebook.
Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.
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41 responses to “Station Crew Opens Boeing Starliner Hatch, Enters Spacecraft”
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The ISS days are numbered and when it goes LEO is going to be left to others. Forever.
LEO is a dead end. The Chinese may operate a platform for a few years and then splash it. There is nothing left to be learned there with humans that is worth paying billions a year for.
For humans to undertake long duration missions Beyond Earth Orbit will require massive radiation shielding on the order of 500 tons even for a small capsule that may or may not enable a couple of astronauts to go on 6 month tours. Probably not enough room. Realistically, well over a thousand tons for a small crew will be the requirement. For multi-year interplanetary missions that figure doubles. At least. With larger crews it gets bigger fast.
This “Parker Minimum” (after the 500 ton figure specified by Eugene Parker to shield space travelers from cosmic radiation) has always been the elephant in the room. Nobody, especially NASA, wants to address this issue. And the issue is quite clear; for humans to live and work in space they must be provided an environment that does not cause permanent damage. It gets worse because it is a two part problem with Dosing AND low-gravity Debilitation going hand in hand. Addressing Debilitation requires an artifiical gravity system and relatively heavy structures able to handle the rotation and loads. Dosing and Debilitation can only be addressed by providing a Near Sea Level Radiation One Gravity (NSLR1G) crew compartment with enough interior space to prevent negative psychological effects on the crew.
For a short mission of a couple weeks, perhaps on a shielded Lunar Cycler, the required interior space may be relatively small, and if the one gravity is waived the structural weight can be greatly reduced. This is probably where the Boeing and SpaceX taxis will be going if they are around long enough- intercepting Lunar Cyclers. They will likely launch and to minimize dosing intercept the Cycler at it’s closest approach within an hour or at most two. The astronauts coming from the Moon and those going to the Moon will transfer in a few minutes and those returning to Earth will be reentering within an hour or so. Those going on to the Moon may be on board for a couple weeks as Lunar Cycler trajectories are convoluted.
The other possibility is the exchanges taking place on large shielded Space Stations in GEO and others in some kind of Lunar Orbit, with some kind of cislunar nuclear electric Spaceship transporting astronauts across the cislunar sea.
no
The shock, outrage, and denial, when the truth is told has always been “the elephant in the room.”
No bucks, no buck rogers. There is no cheap. There is a narrow path to expanding humankind off-world and the profit motive has kept our species dancing around it for over half a century. Our time is running out.
this was well done. ISS will fly for another 10 years easy
And 40 billion dollars that could have went to the Moon instead of around in circles a couple hundred miles up. I doubt they will find 40 billion tourist dollars. The rich like their vacations subsidized.
The plan is to transition to commercial stations in 2030 to 2031. The Axiom station (funded) begins construction at ISS in 2024, the first two modules being built right now at Thales. There’s also a competition for a second station.
yes thank you. I am hopeful that actually happens but…lets just say I am interested in how the financial and other environments evolve. ISS is more then a space station it is an agreement among various governments including Ivan to have a joint human spaceflight project in large measure because any other goal is to expensive. it has failed in every way to develop an economic reason for human spaceflight…so we are left with this “together in space” goal that satisfies a pretty wide variety of roles including keeping the Space industrial complex of all these countries busy
Unless that goal can transfer to both a private station AND maybe the gateway. ISS will continue to support that goal.
Now its possible that this goal might transfer to a new station; but I am skeptical. I am also skeptical that a new station can find enough paying customers to keep itself afloat or even get built outside of government funding
Axiom will be an initial test of this.
if someone discovers something that is done in space and needs humans in some fashion well that will change everything but as long as it is all about singing songs and accomplishing nothing that makes money it wont
Well said,
it has failed in every way to develop an economic reason for human spaceflight…so we are left with this “together in space” goal
something that is done in space and needs humans in some fashion well that will change everything but as long as it is all about singing songs and accomplishing nothing that makes money it wont
The Cold War sent us to the Moon, and the big threat now is Climate Change. As foreseen by the true prophet of space colonization, Gerard K. O’Neill, Space Solar Power by way of lunar resources is the enabler of space colonization.
A false prophet has led us astray with rural video gaming and offers to buy us horses.
“…failed in every way to develop an economic reason for human spaceflight”
My colleagues and I just don’t see it that way. ISS is a national laboratory, a lab operating in a unique environment, an environment (0g) that hasn’t existed for the billions of years it took for life to evolve on this planet.
I live near some well $ funded national labs, labs where basic research goes on day after day, with little hope of that a-hah -Tang!! moment the public will understand. Once in a while there’s a party, with cake, like when some of the guys at NIST bagged a Nobel prize in physics for their “Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms”. Woop-dee-doo, the $ millions spent on that nonsense may never pay off; a bunch of nerds playing with lasers and vacuum chambers. All this basic research, from UCAR to Sandia to ISS costs $ billions, all for egg heads to play in their sandbox. It must be stopped.
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I DONT disagree that it has done a lot of what you say. but it was not promised as that. Reagan and NASA promised it as a manufacturing center blah blah with massive new products…and that it has not done
Yes, how foolish he was to think that would interest NASA. Instead NASA simply evolved it into a geopolitical tool with a little science on the side to sell it and make it look less like its basic mission is geopolitical. Of course Congress is only interested in seeing the pork flows from it.
that was in fact the only way it would survive. As the project ground on, the notion of “it must fly on the shuttle” drove cost continually upward…it only survived by 1 vote. without it we would have really no human space program
So therefore what.
How can we take lessons learned, and apply them to future LEO facilities.
Use the lessons learned in COTS and CCP. Just announce a fix priced for so many cubic meters of habitat in a specific orbit with a set number astronauts per mission and see what private firms build.
Really, the ISS is to space stations what the SLS/Orion is to Dragon/Starliner.
“…fix priced for so many cubic meters of habitat…astronauts”
Gotta have standard rack power, data and (hardest of all) heat rejection.
“ISS is to space stations what the SLS/Orion is to Dragon/Starliner”
err…wa waaat?
So just put that in the specs, just as NASA crew had its specs on docking hatches, etc.
He means that ISS, like SLS-Orion, is a government project for which economic rationality was never a design constraint.
Nope, no President or any Congress would end human spaceflight, it wouldn’t look good either politically or from a geopolitical perspective.
So the Shuttle and Spacelab would have continued to fly. And after Columbia we would have just scrapped the Shuttle earlier and returned to capsules and a smaller MOL style station…
maybe maybe not. The shuttle was fundamentally unsafe. but its like the Vikings finding America. I am sure in some alternate history timeline this is possible not in ours so its not worth debating 🙂 but what is real is that the promises Reagan made were not met
Nor were the promises of President Clinton (RLV replacing Shuttle), President Bush (Project Constellation), President Obama (ARM), while President Trump’s Project Artemis is fading and will be killed off by the inflation based economic issues emerging. Really, you want to go to the Moon when there isn’t even enough infant formula available to feed babies?
The NASA bureaucracy, Congress and the legacy space industry has just been doing what they want since the Nixon Administration set the post Apollo course of space exploration and basically ignores whoever is in the White House other than nodding their heads when they do their Kennedy impression.
Which is why the only hope for human space exploration is the crazy billionaires you hate.
LOL I was not saying and did not say that Reagan’s failure was unique. What I am saying is that the failures will continue until there is a reason for a space based economy that involves humans. And until that comes, the billionares will fail as well. actually I will be surprised if they even try as their wealth starts to “reenter” as the bubble either burst or soft envelopes as the period of irrational exuberance fades.
It cost to much to do these things because all these things are technology based…require massive amounts of technology for survival and that technology is expensive because it is sole sourced.
and no one has that much money…or is willing to simply start spending it
Do you r eally believe Musk when he says “starlinks profits are going to Mars?” do you really?
if so then with his hundreds of billions why isnt Musk spending “some of it” to actually send things to Mars to do some preliminary work? Why has he not sent aa plant to mars to try and work the CO2? If there are profits from starlink they are all going to 1) repaying all the money put into it, including probably Starship development, paying off all the money invested in it…and himself as he goes twittering off into other things
he recognizes he cannot afford it. until there is some self sustaining reason for people to go to space, its not happening
There will, of course, be plenty of reasons for people to go to space and many more will be found once there. But just the space tourism business would be enough to make human spaceflight a pretty big deal compared to now. After all, there are a huge number of tourist destinations right here on Earth where almost no one who visits them would seriously contemplate staying for the rest of their lives. And, yet, there are “lifers” in all of those places except perhaps Antarctica.
see if you are correct…but I dont think that 1) tourism has enough business to support anything that is not heavily subsidized by the government, 2) the Moon is even more expensive, and 3) there is nothing else pushing it
the Axiom thing will be a big test for this. But really I just dont see the private market as either that big or that lucrative
And IBM didn’t see the copier market as being big enough to waste time on it. The old establishment rarely are able to see the possibilities when private entrepreneurs start exploring markets which is why so few predicted the killer apps of the Internet.
the comparisons are not even close. the “copier” was an application a product, something that had new capabilities. what you are talking about is creating an entire infrastructure to serve a travel destination that is going to be one of the highest priced in history
Been listening to a good book on the history of the mail service. The Congress didn’t see any economic case for airmail at the start since bad weather and bad planes made the airmail travel slower than express trains between major cities. Also trains had the ability to sort the mail and drop off and pick up the mail at small communities along the tracks. They believed airmail was just anstunt at the start and kept trying to cut funding for it, typical of old establishments that rarely see the new economic models until they emerge by trail and error.
The airmail is a good example of why spaceflight with humans is stuck.
There was a pretty solid airline service pre the airmail. but the purpose of the airmail was three things 1) give the airlines a steady source of federal revenue, 2) force them into larger planes and 3) provide a service for American business which made them more competitive.
this was in addition to people who flew, not for the joy of flying (it was actually quite a rigorous thing) but because they got a competitive edge or used their time more valuable by being able to fly.
The problem is that human space flight really is simply a transportation node, that cannot even come close to being self sustaining. because on the end of it; there is no productivity marker. ie there is nothing done in space which justifies the cost of either the transportation or the maintenance of people on orbit.
with all these dragon flights by JI there is nothing any of his crews will do that will come close to the economics of paying for the flight…there is nothing. its just money that vanishes into being distributed
Most people in the 30’s flew because it made them better at whatever they did. the scene in the movie The Untouchables where they fly out. that made what they went out to do possible because of the speed.
there is no economic model even in play here
That’s a good point Bob, but the promises depended on the target cohort. What can I say, the Agency and the TV sci shows do their best to jazz things up, but the truth is, science and research is mostly tedious and boring.
What every man wants to hear on a beautiful Saturday morning, “honey, you wanna run to the lab with me and run some gels?”
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NASA is already an anchor customer, putting up front money into its construction and hosting one Crew Dragon preparatory mission with three more on the books. The linked PDF shows the approximate schedule and a render
https://welanded.s3.amazona…
I hope this works, but what I suspect that this really is, is a module expansion for ISS. its going to take a lot of anchoring cash. I will be curious to see what the bottom line dollar wise is for the first module and the launch
Well, for at least eight years anyway. There may be some moderate difficulties if the Russians pull out before decommissioning – which I regard as quite likely – but nothing that NASA can’t handle.
ISS will probably be flying when I depart this earth in my 90’s. thats at least 35 years away 🙂
A defining aspect of your personality seems to be the firm conviction that whatever is going on now will last forever while anything new will crash and burn – except for your unaccountable notion that Virgin Galactic was going to be The Next Big Thing.
It is good that you plan to live for a long time. I hope to as well, but it will take more and more mirth to do that, I suspect. As long as you’re around, though, I’m assured of all I’ll need.
I wonder if the thruster issues will necessitate a redesign? Hope not. Otherwise, excellent so far.
if it does it wont be a big deal
The thruster valve issues on the pad may be resolved with a redesign, but that is not likely to prevent moving forward to the CFT mission next.
After SpaceX’s uncrewed Dragon 2 demo, a catastrophic (could have been deadly if people were on board) failure of the thruster system on a test stand resulted in a redesign of the valving system that went into effect on the crewed demo flight.
One step closer to getting this done.
Looking forward to a succeful rest of the flight
Yes. Let’s hope OFT-2 can at least match OFT-1 in terms of a nominal re-entry and landing.
SIS: Sphere-Inside-Sphere.
The key to expanding humankind off-world is NOT a cheap rocket. The key is a construct that will allow humans to live and work in space without the permanent damage caused by Dosing and Debilitation. This construct, minus radiation shielding, was proposed at the beginning of the space age as the “wet workshop.” That is, an upper stage that after expending its propellants is converted into a crew compartment. Incorporating a shield would make this a “Fat Workshop.”
The baseline, the “Parker Minimum”, is the 16 feet of water required to stop cosmic radiation and this space between the inner and outer sphere to contain the shielding is the main feature. Such a stage would of course be very large. Water to fill the shield can be brought up from the Moon with 20 to 23 times less energy than from Earth. An electromagnetic rail gun, to send water slugs into space from the Moon, may be an “order of magnitude” more efficient.
By attaching two S-I-S workshops together with a several thousand foot tether system, this “bola” can be spun to provide artificial gravity. The large water shield would be used in a closed loop life support system to provide air and food and solar panels attached to the tether system would provide electricity. This construct would provide a near Earth environment, independent of outside support, for several years. A true Space Station. By docking a nuclear propulsion system it would be the first true Spaceship.
The concept is a spherical Super Heavy Lift Vehicle with two “doughnuts” of engines and a central Earth departure engine. The larger doughnut would mount the first stage engines and the smaller inner doughnut the second stage engines which would detach with small tanks, and a heat shield for the second stage doughnut, to land back with. The center engine would detach after burning and make a free return around the Moon to reenter and possibly be helo-captured.
Could you imagine what ISS operations would be devolving into right now if it were not for Dragon and soon Starliner?
Da comrade. The special tonight is borsh.