ORLANDO, Fla. — Boeing and NASA are making “significant progress” on addressing issues seen on a test flight of the company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft last year, an independent NASA safety panel says, although key problems with the spacecraft’s thrusters remain unresolved.
Paul Hill, a member of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), said at a Jan. 30 public meeting that the committee was briefed on the status of the investigation into Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission recently. That mission launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, but the spacecraft returned to Earth three months later uncrewed because of agency concerns about the performance of spacecraft thrusters.
“NASA reported that significant progress is being made regarding Starliner CFT’s post-flight activities,” he said. “Integrated NASA-Boeing teams have begun closing out flight observations and in-flight anomalies.”
He didn’t elaborate on the specific issues that the teams had closed out but stated that it did not include the thrusters, several of which shut down during the spacecraft’s approach to the station. The propulsion system also suffered several helium leaks.
“The program anticipates the propulsive system anomalies will remain open,” he said, “pending ongoing test campaigns.” He added there are teams studying the root cause of the thruster problems, developing recommendations for changes to future missions and assessing “technical and organizational factors” that may have played a role.
Hill said ASAP was satisfied with the progress and course of action by Boeing and NASA. “The details shared by NASA gave us confidence that they are focusing on the right core issues and the related path to safely flying Starliner.”
While the ASAP meeting did not provide many technical details about the Starliner investigation, it was perhaps the most detailed public update into the investigation since Starliner’s return nearly five months ago. Neither NASA nor Boeing have provided much information about the investigation since the landing.
The ASAP briefing did not discuss when Starliner might fly again, and whether it would be another test flight with or without crew on board or as a long-duration crew-rotation mission. “The timing and configuration of Starliner’s next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing’s path to system certification is established,” NASA stated in October.
“NASA is keeping options on the table for how best to achieve system certification, including windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025,” the agency stated then, but has not offered an update since then on where Starliner might fit into the station manifest.
Boeing announced Jan. 23 that it expected to take another charge against earnings in the fourth quarter of 2024 because of Starliner that could be in hundreds of millions of dollars. The company didn’t give more details during a Jan. 28 earnings release and analyst call, and hasn’t yet submitted its 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that would include that information.
Mark Nappi, the Boeing vice president who was Starliner program manager during the CFT mission, is no longer in that position. Nappi appeared on a panel Jan. 30 at the SpaceCom conference here in the role of senior program advisor for space exploration initiatives at Boeing, noting the change was part of longstanding plans by him to retire from the company in February.
The panel, on public private partnerships, only briefly touched on Starliner. Asked what he would have changed about the structure of the commercial crew program to improve the spacecraft’s cost and schedule performance, he pointed to requirements. “I think we would go back and revisit those requirements and make them more efficient.”