Boeing making progress on Starliner software for test flight in March - Spaceflight Now

Boeing said Monday it has re-qualified software for the company’s Starliner crew capsule after programming errors cut short the spacecraft’s first orbital test flight in 2019, and technicians at the Kennedy Space Center have connected the crew and service modules for the next unpiloted Starliner test flight to the International Space Station in March.

NASA and Boeing officials are officially targeting March 29 for the second Starliner Orbital Flight Test, a repeat of the first test flight in 2019, when software problems prevented the capsule from docking with the space station.

The OFT-2 mission will lay the groundwork for the next Starliner test flight to carry three NASA astronauts to the space station later this year, followed by the start of regular crew rotation flights.

Meanwhile, a Boeing spokesperson said technicians inside the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center mated the crew and service modules last week for the OFT-2 mission, a major milestone in readying the spacecraft for launch.

One change to the hardware for the OFT-2 mission is the installation of a new docking system cover on the nose of the Starliner crew module.

The crew module from the OFT-1 mission is being refurbished for Boeing’s Crew Test Flight, the first Starliner mission with astronauts.

NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to develop the Starliner and Crew Dragon spaceships to ferry astronauts to and from the space station.

Both programs have encountered technical delays, but SpaceX successfully launched its first two crew missions — a test flight and its first operational crew rotation mission — last year, restoring orbital human spaceflight capability to the United States for the first time since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.

The software re-qualification effort involved ensuring the Starliner simulators and emulators were properly configured to mimic how the real spacecraft works in flight.

The higher-than-expected fuel usage prevented the Starliner spacecraft from docking with the International Space Station.

Phil McAlister, NASA’s director of commercial spaceflight, said last week that SpaceX’s next Crew Dragon mission — with four astronauts — is scheduled to launch in March or April, around the same time as the Starliner OFT-2 test flight.

The space station has two docking ports to receive commercial crew capsules, but the next Crew Dragon flight — known as Crew-2 — will arrive at the complex before departure of the current Crew Dragon mission.