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Commercialization

Starliner Has Landed

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 22, 2019
Filed under
Starliner Has Landed

Boeing Starliner Completes First Orbital Flight Test with Successful Landing, Boeing
“Shortly after its December 20 launch and separation from its booster rocket, Starliner experienced a mission timing anomaly that made it use too much fuel to reach the intended destination of the International Space Station. Flight controllers were able to address the issue and put Starliner into a lower, stable orbit. The vehicle demonstrated key systems and capabilities before being signaled to return to Earth.”
NASA, Boeing Complete Successful Landing of Starliner Flight Test, NASA
“Although Starliner did not reach its planned orbit and dock to the International Space Station as planned, Boeing was able to complete a number of test objectives during the flight related to NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, including:
– Successful launch of the first human-rated United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket
– Checked out the Starliner propulsion systems
– Tested space-to-space communications
– Confirmed Starliner tracker alignments using its navigation system
– Tested Starliner’s NASA Docking System
– Validated all environment control and life support systems
– Completed a positive command uplink between the International Space Station and Starliner”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

46 responses to “Starliner Has Landed”

  1. Skinny_Lu says:
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    I like the tent! I can imagine it being sold at Walmart. “Custom made inflatable, fits exactly snug around your spacecraft” Order yours from our website. =)

  2. Skinny_Lu says:
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    Seriously, I like what I saw this morning. Considering the whole mission, from integration, training, launch…. all the way to landing, post mission. It still amazes me the size of the support team “required?” to accomplish a Space Mission. Congratulations to Boeing. Keep refining the system…. and don’t forget about the videos you promised. =)

  3. Skinny_Lu says:
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    Hey Keith,
    Regarding your comment about the ratchet used to operate the hatch… Just curious…. Were you wishing it was custom made, or are you happy they used a common, inexpensive tool? I like they did not try to invent a “new wheel” for the job.

  4. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Looks like it was a successful mission except for one minor anomaly. They even managed to get all three parachutes to work.

    • ed2291 says:
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      Not getting into the proper orbit and not docking with the ISS was much more than a “minor anomaly.” I accept that they succeeded in some parts of their mission, but if NASA does not require a demonstrated docking then it is picking a favorite.

  5. Dewey Vanderhoff says:
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    It is good that the descent and landing phase of the Starliner mission profile worked as planned. That does not begin to gloss over the mission critical anomaly that began as soon as the Russian-powered Atlas delivered the capsule to orbit.

    Boeing’s PR department will be working overtime across the holiday week and beyond to get as much lipstick , rouge, and eyeliner on this pig as possible. Hopefully the anomalistic problem will be resolved with Boeing’s own out of pocket expense, not NASA’s or any other line item in the federal treasury …

    • Paul Gillett says:
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      Boeing trains its people well when it comes to Public Affairs.

      To hear the commentary from various personnel pre & post-landing on the NASA TV broadcast, you could be forgiven for thinking that the mission was a great success for the most part.

      That said, the landing was handled well and Boeing appears to have a well organized post touchdown operation.

  6. Robert Jones says:
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    One lesson learned: We need a larger network of communication satellites or else a return to a larger number of ground stations.

    • Nick K says:
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      I think there are 10 at least partially operational TDRS satellites. Seems like there are plenty already available in the constellation. Where were they when we needed them?

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        TDRS was right where it should have been. As dbooker states above, Starliner was pointing its antenna in the wrong direction due to the wrong clock. Boeing and NASA really “pulled a rabbit out of a hat” with this mission. It could have gone much worse since so many things on Starliner depend on that clock!

    • dbooker says:
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      No, it was stated that the TDRS ommunication error was due to clock. The capsule thought it was in a different place so the antennasooner were pointing wrong.

    • fcrary says:
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      Or perhaps someone checking about coverage and antenna availability during critical events. The communications delay shouldn’t have happened, but there are several ways to fix that.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      From what I understand, TDRS was not to blame. The wrong mission clock screwed up Starliner to the point that it was in the wrong orientation, so it was Starliner which prevented communications via TDRS.

      • fcrary says:
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        Which suggests they didn’t have adequate backup communications. Automatically switching to a lower gain, omni-directional antenna is pretty common when you have a loss of signal. This doesn’t strike me as a fault-tolerant design, and that doesn’t inspire confidence.

  7. Richard Brezinski says:
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    Great to see a successful landing with 3 parachutes. But there are a lot of open questions. Why the timer failure with no back ups? Why the inability to communicate when comm was desperately needed; was this an oversight and by whom? Why was news coverage so poor? no emmy winners this time! Why does Space X support their missions with a lean but fully capable group of flight controllers operating at bargain rates while Boeing needs not only their own people but an abundant number of NASA people in charge of a commercial vehicle. Since NASA is providing support does it means they get a refund for provided government services from Boeing? It accentuates that the old contractor requires a lot more support than newspace. Why is that?

    • Nick K says:
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      Since Shuttle stopped flying NASA has plenty of people in their operations organization, not a lot of astronauts flying, and plenty of people available to man mission control. No doubt they are keeping that organization fully staffed and funded. ISS does not require that many people especially with only one or 2 US crew on board. Remember the recently departed AA was out of ops and he made sure the people in that organization were taken care of even if the rest of the program collapsed. And, Shuttle was supposed to be commercially operated after 1986 by USA (that was why USA was invented) but NASA’s ops organization refused to go away then too, artificially keeping costs higher than they needed to be. You’d think the excess engineering talent would be put to work on design and development of all the new Artemis systems but maybe there is no budget for it.

  8. Egad says:
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    I was amused to see how much sections of the MWIR video shot from NASA’s WB-57 plane resembles the (in)famous Navy UFO footage which, IIRC, was shot with similar cameras. Perhaps the lesson is that such cameras don’t have very good resolution at longer ranges.

  9. james w barnard says:
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    Question: Why is Boeing allowed to land the Starliner on land, but SpaceX, which originally was to do likewise, restricted to water landings? Or has that changed for the Crew Dragon?

    • Skinny_Lu says:
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      Propulsive landing (with the Super Dracos, landing on 4 legs like the Falcon 9 Booster does) of the Crew Dragon on land was shut down by NASA, so SpaceX went back to water returns under parachutes. Boeing went with the “Russian Soyuz model”, using airbags to cushion the landing instead of retro rockets.

      • Jack says:
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        The Soyuz doesn’t use airbags. It uses small rockets just before touchdown. As can be seen beginning at 17:40 in this video. https://www.youtube.com/wat
        A screen shot form video….
        https://uploads.disquscdn.c

      • james w barnard says:
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        Since SpaceX now uses parachutes, it would seem they could also touch down on land, even if they had to fire a short burst from the Super Dracos, or retro attitude control thrusters. With a water landing in the ocean they have to desalinize the spacecraft and the parachutes, adding to cost of turnaround. (We used nylon chutes on the Shuttle SRB’s, and successfully washed the salt out of them. Don’t know the effect of salt water on the material of the Crew Dragon chutes, however/)

    • Jack says:
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      NASA didn’t like the way SpaceX wanted to it so NASA said no you’re not.

  10. Skinny_Lu says:
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    I can see how Boeing (with NASA’s approval) could *possibly* design the next mission with additional time spent validating the close proximity operations in lieu of having completed the OFT with an actual docking to Station. Only based on the merits of the on-orbit testing requirements that could not be met in this first flight, I can see a path for putting crew on the next Starliner flight and not having to repeat the missing OFT docking & undocking before crew flies in it. I’m sure they can fix the timing issue & validate by thorough ground testing before the next flight. No?

    • fcrary says:
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      From the sound of it, they could deal with the timing problem by having the crew verify (even manually enter) the time. The latest I’ve heard is that the clock was set immediately before separation based on information from the launch vehicle. Apparently they weren’t communicating very well. That’s not hard to work around. But it could be considered a symptom of deeper problems. Also, flying a crew without testing docking might result in problem, and having to call off the docking and going back to Earth. That’s more like the “It’s a test” and “Still testing” approach of Rocket Labs or SpaceX. It’s unlike Boeing but they are under pressure to make CST-100 operational.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        One of the blogs mentions that the Starliner was taking MET from the Atlas, which unfortunately starts MET at an earlier point in the countdown. It’s the kind of mistake that could be missed. But continuous telemetry seems like a good idea too, why is there still a gap in
        TDRSS coverage?

    • Steve Pemberton says:
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      This has all reminded me of the exercises some of the early cargo spacecraft to ISS had to go through on their first flight, like the first ATV which had to do three weeks of orbital testing before it could dock with ISS. Lots of detailed requirements like fly to X meters from ISS then hold in place for Y minutes, then accept an abort command from the station and retreat to the holding position at Z meters. Then do the same thing at different ranges. I think they now understand it all well enough especially with the modern equipment used to be able to “process” a first time spacecraft much quicker prior to docking. So I think your idea is plausible.

  11. dbooker says:
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    The after landing news conference left me baffled. A reporter finally asked an intelligent question & to his credit Jim Chilton answered. The clock was off by 11 minutes!!! Now as a professional software engineer I’m just aghast that their autonomous navigation program didn’t check any sensors (GPS for altitude, inertial measurement, etc) before blindly firing it’s attitude control thrusters? When something occurs such as orbital insertion burn, a success or failure flag isn’t set that can be checked?

    Sorry there is much bigger concern here of the software than that it just got the wrong time from the Atlas. This is supposed to be an autonomous system. You can’t simply rely on one thing, the clock, as input. Much of the software design staff and software QA team should be fired.

    Can you imagine a self driving car relying only on the dashboard clock?

    WTF??? Where were all the NASA civil servants when they did the design
    reviews?

    • Skinny_Lu says:
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      it was off by 11 HOURS, not minutes.

    • fcrary says:
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      Actually, one of the ideas behind commercial crew (and cargo) is to reduce the number of NASA civil servants sitting in on design reviews. But it’s not clear that is an issue. Those NASA experts have lost plenty of robotic spacecraft for pretty stupid reasons. Deploying landing gear should not accidentally switch off the rockets when the spacecraft is still a few hundred meters above the surface. When you are getting divergent and conflicting trajectory solutions (because the contractor didn’t mention what units the small forces file used) you shouldn’t just average the results and hope for the best. I rather like the book, _Space Systems Failures_, by Harland and Lorenz. (Although the example of EMI, from the Forrestal fire, is completely wrong. The NASA report on EMI they relied on just made something up to sound convincing. That, by the way, is another way to crash spacecraft.)

  12. fcrary says:
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    Calypso is a fine name, but I’m not sure which ship it refers to. According to space.com that’s what they named a different CST-100, the one they plan to use for the first flight with a crew onboard. Other sources say it’s the name for the CST-100 that just landed, and others say that those are the same vehicle.

    • robert_law says:
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      suni wants it for this space craft which she will fly on the first operational mission , aparently OFT2 is on anuther capsule , I think Boeing have Three ?

  13. dbooker says:
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    Glad to see the on target landing. For 4.8 billion was not too impressed with the refurbished 1960s camper trailer being backed in with a pickup. And then leveled by hand? Nobody thought to go down to Lowe’s and get a couple of battery operated drills? Really? This is all that 4.8 billion gets you?

  14. Henry Vanderbilt says:
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    There’s been a lot of focus on Boeing’s cultural problems over the last couple days, but I think we may be missing a more fundamental issue here.

    I think it’s fair to say that the NASA-supervised development process in Commercial Crew has intentionally applied large amounts of time and money and manpower and paperwork to the goal of getting every nitpicking detail right the first time. It’s the established NASA way.

    As opposed to the old “Right Stuff” era model of fly early, see what breaks, fix it and fly again, rinse & repeat – historically, producing far more rapid progress at far lower cost (along with occasional spectacular blowups.)

    So, tell me again what we gained here for spending those extra years and billions on attempting to make Commercial Crew first-flight perfect, rather than continuing the older faster looser development model from COTS (as some of us vehemently argued for)?

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Short version: There is no substitute for flight testing. Therefore skimping on flight tests during initial planning is a “bad thing”.

      • Henry Vanderbilt says:
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        And delaying flight tests until your reviews and simulations show the vehicle is “perfect” is also a bad thing. Fly early, fly often, fly as soon as you have an early system iteration complete enough to fly and return useful information.

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          Agreed. And part of this is planning on having a few failures. So you have to budget for multiple copies of the test hardware. That way in case one fails during a flight test, you don’t have to suspend flying until you build another copy. You only have to wait for the failure investigation to conclude what the root cause was and fix it.

          • fcrary says:
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            That really is a major change from the current corporate culture. It means not thinking of it as a failures when the test produces unexpected results. Boeing just successfully demonstrated that orbital insertion doesn’t work when the clock is set to the wrong time. Of course, that may not have been the best or most efficient way to prove that. But you can’t have that test-break something-fix-retest approach when people get in trouble because things don’t go as planned. It also adds a large random component to the schedule and budget. That sort of thing drives most aerospace managers nuts.

        • 6sbportsidevital says:
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          Another problem today is that there is a real fear of ‘failing’ any test. With high-profile projects, failure is perceived negatively. So now we have a system that requires testing to validate the ‘perfection’ of a design (absurd).

  15. cb450sc says:
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    “- Tested Starliner’s NASA Docking System” How do you test the docking system without actually docking??

  16. hikingmike says:
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    Calypso was a nymph in Greek mythology, who lived on the island of Ogygia, where, according to the Odyssey, she detained Odysseus for seven years. … According to Etymologicum Magnum, her name means “concealing the knowledge” (καλύπτουσα το διανοούμενον, kalýptousa to dianooúmenon), which – combined with the Homeric epithet δολόεσσα (dolóessa, meaning “subtle” or “wily”) – justifies the eremetic character of Calypso and her island.

    Maybe it’s better thinking of the more recent derivatives but I read the Odyssey and that was my first thought.