The ISS is nearing retirement, so why is NASA still gung-ho about Starliner?

One of the disadvantages of piloting a starliner freight mission is that he will use one of the remaining Atlas V Rockets of United Launch Alliance currently intended for a future launch of the Starliner team. This means that Boeing should turn to another rocket to complete his full contract with NASA, which covers up to six crew missions.

While Boeing says that Starliner can start on several different rockets, the difficulty of adapting the spaceship to a new launch vehicle, like Ula’s Vulcan, should not be overlooked. At the start of Starliner’s development, Boeing and Ula had to overcome a problem with unexpected aerodynamic loads discovered during blower tests. This prompted engineers to design an aerodynamic extension, or skirt, to go under the Starliner spacecraft above its Atlas V launcher.

Starliner has undergone delays from the start. A budgetary crisis of NASA in the early 2010s pushed the program for about two years, but the rest of the calendar slips largely fell on the shoulders of Boeing. The setbacks included a fuel leak and a fire during a critical ground test, parachute problems, a overhaul to accommodate unforeseen aerodynamic forces and a computer synchronization error which reduced Starlinener’s first attempt to reach the space station in 2019.

All this led to the first test flight of the program with astronauts last summer. But after having met helium leaks and an overheating of propellants, the mission ended with Starliner Return to Earth,, While the two crew members of the spacecraft stayed on the international space station until they could go home on a Dragon Spacex spacecraft this year.

The result was a spicy disappointment for Boeing. By entering the test flight of the crew of last year, Boeing seemed to be about to join SpaceX and win income as one of the NASA certified crew transport suppliers for the ISS.

For several months, Boeing officials were surprisingly silent about Starliner’s future. The company refused to publish declarations on its long -term commitment to the program, and a Boeing program manager withdrawn unexpectedly from a press conference in NASA marking the end of the Starliner test flight last September.