KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Even a profitable crewed check flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner automobile may create a brief hiccup in plans to change seats between industrial crew automobiles and Soyuz spacecraft going to the Worldwide Area Station.
At a Might 3 briefing right here, NASA and Boeing officers mentioned that they had accomplished a launch readiness evaluate for Starliner’s Crew Flight Check (CFT) mission, scheduled to launch no sooner than 10:34 p.m. Japanese Might 6 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5. Officers mentioned they had been working no points with the spacecraft, and forecasts known as for a 95% probability of acceptable launch climate.
The CFT mission is meant to be the ultimate check flight for Starliner earlier than NASA certifies it to be used on crew rotation missions to the ISS. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will put the spacecraft by its paces on the mission, slated to final a little bit greater than every week.
“It’s thrilling to usher in Starliner and the ULA Atlas 5,” Steve Stich, NASA industrial crew program supervisor, mentioned on the briefing. “We’ve been striving for industrial crew to have two unbiased house transportation programs. That’s been our aim from industrial crew’s inception and we’re very near reaching that aim.”
A profitable CFT mission would enable NASA to certify the automobile in time for an early 2025 launch of the primary operational Starliner mission, designated Starliner-1. NASA has already introduced three of the crew members for that flight: NASA astronauts Scott Tingle and Mike Fincke and Canadian Area Company astronaut Joshua Kutryk.
The fourth particular person to fly on that mission has not but been assigned. “The ultimate crew project for Starliner-1 will likely be introduced following evaluate and approval by the company and its worldwide companions,” NASA mentioned in November when it introduced the addition of Kutryk to the crew.
Because the Crew-5 mission within the fall of 2022, one seat on industrial crew missions has been assigned to a Russian cosmonaut, a part of a seat barter settlement finalized in July 2022 between NASA and Roscosmos. In change, a NASA astronaut will get a seat on Soyuz flights to the station, an strategy NASA calls “built-in crews” that ensures there will likely be at the very least one American and one Russian on the ISS ought to both Soyuz or industrial crew automobiles endure issues that floor them.
On the Might 3 briefing, although, NASA officers mentioned it was unlikely {that a} Russian cosmonaut could be assigned to Starliner-1. “We count on, on the Roscosmos aspect, they’re extra more likely to need to see a long-duration flight additionally, so we expect they’ll need to begin to fly with us on Starliner-2,” mentioned Dana Weigel, NASA ISS program supervisor.
That would seem to disrupt the continuing sequence of seat exchanges between NASA and Roscosmos. “We’re nonetheless working by that with our Roscosmos counterparts. It’s our want to proceed to do built-in crew,” she mentioned, including that NASA and Roscosmos don’t have an settlement but in place for exchanging crews within the timeframe that can embrace Starliner-1.
Any lapse in built-in crews, she added, could be short-term. “The expectation is, even when we are able to’t make that swap work, we’ll return to the built-in crew and swapping for the entire remainder of the flights.”
As soon as Starliner is licensed, NASA plans to alternate between that automobile and Crew Dragon for ISS crew rotation missions. Boeing is underneath contract for six operational missions, which underneath that alternating flight strategy would run by 2030, the scheduled retirement of the station.
