NASA plans to retire the Worldwide House Station round 2030, so the alternatives are dwindling for NASA to make use of Starliner for all six of the crew ferry flights on contract. In November, Musk posted on X: “There isn’t a logical function to Starliner, on condition that NASA plans to deorbit House Station in ~5 years.”
Not so new administration
It’s going to fall to a brand new Boeing supervisor to supervise no matter turns into of Starliner.
Final week, Boeing confirmed John Mulholland is taking up as Starliner program supervisor. He replaces Mark Nappi, who held the highest job on the Starliner program since 2022 and is retiring from Boeing later this month.
Mulholland led the Starliner program from 2011 till 2020, when Boeing reassigned him to handle the corporate’s engineering sustainment contract for the Worldwide House Station. This adopted Starliner’s first orbital take a look at flight, with out individuals aboard, which ended prematurely resulting from software program points.
Though Mulholland was not in cost throughout Starliner’s most up-to-date setbacks, it was underneath his management that engineers made the design selections that led to a lot of Starliner’s issues. These embody the software program woes that saved the spacecraft from reaching the house station on the 2019 take a look at flight and the usage of valves within the ship’s service module that have been prone to corrosion. In 2023, simply a few months earlier than Starliner was imagined to launch on the crew take a look at flight, officers found a design downside with Starliner’s parachutes and located that Boeing put in flammable tape contained in the capsule’s cockpit.
And the issue that brought about Starliner’s thrusters to overheat in house final yr could be traced to the design of the spacecraft’s 4 propulsion pods, or doghouses, that retain warmth like a thermos throughout successive thruster firings. Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne, Starliner’s propulsion provider, accepted the doghouse early in this system, years earlier than Starliner ever flew in house.
