We've known for some time that Starliner is in trouble especially after the planned July 21 crewed test flight was cancelled back at the start of June. Today, due to a Boeing quarterly earnings update call reported on by Ars Technica, we learned a bit more about just how bad things are.
On Wednesday, as a part of its quarterly earnings update, Boeing announced that the Starliner program had taken a loss of $257 million "primarily due to the impacts of the previously announced launch delay." This brings the company's total write-down of losses on the Starliner program to more than $1.1 billion. Partly because of this, Boeing's Defense, Space, & Security division reported a loss of $527 million during the second quarter of this year.
Starliner was funded by the same fixed-price contract approach as SpaceX's Crew Dragon. As a result, the cost overruns are Boeing's responsibility and not NASA's.
As a reminder/for new readers, after preparing for the crewed test flight since the start of the year, the flight was called off for the foreseeable future due to a couple of serious problems that were discovered before Memorial Day weekend and investigated over it. First, Boeing discovered that so called "soft links" in the lines that run from the ship to its parachutes were not as strong as they previously believed. Second, hundreds of feet of P-213 glass cloth tape that wrap wire bundles inside the spacecraft were found to be flammable.
NASA's program manager for Commercial Crew, Steve Stich, said the agency has been working on the issues but more remains to be done. In particular, it sounds like someone in NASA thought with two issues like these discovered in the final weeks of preparation for the mission, it was prudent to double or triple check the rest of the spacecraft.
The identification of two serious problems so close to the spaceflight prompted NASA to take a broader look at Starliner and determine whether there might be other problems lurking in the spacecraft. "On the NASA side, we really stepped back and looked at all aspects of flight preparation," Stich said.
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Stich made his comments Tuesday during a media teleconference to discuss the forthcoming Crew-7 mission on SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle. Nine years ago, when NASA down-selected to Boeing and SpaceX to provide crew transportation services to the space station, Boeing was considered the prohibitive favorite to deliver first for NASA. However, SpaceX will launch its seventh operational mission and eighth overall crew mission for NASA next month.NASA has already announced that SpaceX will fly its Crew-8 mission for NASA in February or March of next year. Given the ongoing delays, it is now possible that Crew-9 flies next fall, before Boeing's first operational mission, Starliner-1. NASA has not named a full four-person crew for Starliner-1 but has said that astronauts Scott Tingle and Mike Fincke will serve as commander and pilot.
Back on June 1st when I relayed the news that the crewed flight test was
scrubbed for July 21, it seemed prudent to suggest it might be off the books
in '23 and end up in '24.
NASA's Launch Manifest
was last updated in April, so it's outdated already, but the mention of an
operational Starliner flight is that Starliner-1 mission a year from
now.
NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test: NET July 21, 2023
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7: NET mid-August 2023
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8: NET February 2024
NASA’s Boeing Starliner-1: NET Summer 2024
It seems to me that if the first line, the Boeing Crew Flight Test, gets delayed six months to January 2024, that Starliner-1 crew rotation flight will get delayed until December of '24 at the soonest.
The Orbital Flight Test, OFT-2, Starliner after arrival at the launch complex yesterday, May 18, 2022. Trevor Mahlmann photo.
Odds on Starship being crew certified and flying before Starliner?
ReplyDelete^This.
DeleteFire them, and demand repayment of the contract costs for failure to perform.
ReplyDeleteOr, just deduct it from DoD payments to them over the next 12 months, and see how fast they catch up.
It would be fun to watch, if only for the novelty of the approach by the trough monitors in D.C.
The flammability issue of the glass tape is most troubling. Things like this are known issues, and to NOT ensure the material meets stands before OKing it for use is inexcusable.
ReplyDeleteThat's the worst part about this. The vehicle has been being worked on since '16 (pretty sure) and suddenly someone notices it, six weeks before a manned flight? How did it get that far along?
DeleteI don't know how things have changed since I retired in 2013, but Boeing has a high engineering turnover rate, and they tend to throw engineers from one department into another department without caring whether they know anything about the new subject matter at all. They treat engineers like a fungible commodity, one is like another.
DeleteThings like this are how this happens. Working at Boeing was truly hell if you were invested in doing good high tech work, but heaven if you wanted to get away with doing basically nothing except a little politics.
Not to defend Boing, but the Apollo 1 fire occurred in a pure 02 atmosphere at 2 psi overpressure. As I recall Apollo ran a low pressure O2 environment to reduce the mass of the LEM and stress on the lunar excursion suits. Before the fire nobody must have thought about flammability issues.
Delete60 years later, the ISS runs at sea level pressure and atmosphere composition which means most (if not all) manned flights are the same environment. Is the wrapping material they used actually that flammable in air? Is it rated for aircraft use today?
An excellent question - which I can't answer.
DeleteAnother factor to consider: the capsule has flown twice already. Yeah, the first flight was an unmitigated disaster, but the one thing it didn't do was catch fire. Was it an appropriate test of the glass tape? Another question I can't answer, but it calls into question (to me) that the tape isn't so dangerous that they need to disassemble and rebuild the Starliner capsule before they fly it.
Re: glass tape
DeleteAligned with the incredulity expressed here over why only now is flammability an issue, I offer that some govt inspector (looking at you, FAA) acted to prolong this phase of flight activity (before it passes from his domain to the next) by rehashing previously resolved concerns.
Or, someone (looking at you, FAA) changed the criteria by which the glass tape fell of of compliance.
(I can be completely wrong about FAA here. But such is my despisement for that agency. I could write lengthy chapters featuring personal and professional experiences, and of those with who I have been closely associated, which have met head on the 'willful ineptitude' of that agency. You simply would not believe the shenanigans arising from FAA personnel.)
Meanwhile, FAA person(s) remain primary suspect.
You simply would not believe the shenanigans arising from FAA personnel.
DeleteYes. Yes, I would. I've done the certification reports on commercial avionics for them. Them and the FCC.
My father held a personal FAA DER (Designated Engineering Representative). He died in 2000. Even then, he was getting disgusted with the FAA engineering cadre. His complaint was that though they held appropriate degrees, they didn't know squat about aircraft. They had never worked on aircraft at all.
DeleteI think that can be extended to spacecraft now. Over at Behind The Black, Robert Zimmerman posted this on the FAA and the next Starship launch, FAA: No Starship/Superheavy launch until we say so!, which points to the FAA's arrogance and ignorance.
If you follow the links back to the manufacturer's SDS the tape is rated non-flammable.
DeleteWhat is you opinion of UFO's and the possibility that the government has UFO craft that they are reverse engineering. I don't believe it. Also I see zero new technology in the aerospace field that could be ascribed to reverse engineering of UFO's. At this point I think they are in the same category as Bigfoot.
ReplyDeleteI think it's just a distraction. Psyop, I suppose. "Talk about this instead of that crime family stuff."
DeleteI'm too much of a believer in that Ben Franklin quote that, "three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." If you want to learn what's going on in those mysterious places, try hanging out in the bars in the area. Sip slowly and listen intently.
I'll believe it when they display the UFOs and the bodies.
It's a distraction, a laser dot for the peepul to keep focused on. There was an article by someone credible, in 2018, who said that the next distraction would be a manufactured pandemic, which would be followed by war in Europe, which would be followed by UFOs. Sorry, I don't remember who this person was, but I remembered what he said.
DeleteTo borrow a quote, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.....
ReplyDeleteBut none of them were "Alien Technology"......
Well, alien if you think Russia is alien or Nazi Germany is alien... Lots of 'alien' technology out there...
Delete