The annual watchdog report, tasked with measuring NASA’s safety, praised the agency handling of Beileagured Boeing’s Starliner mission last year, but revealed yet another issue discovered during the flight and questioned the engine’s needs for future spacecraft.
Founded in 1968, Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has been providing safety assessments for the NASA missions from 2024, paying particular attention to human risks, particularly from the International Space Station and commercial crew program providers SpaceX and Boeing.になったんです。 English: The first thing you can do is to find the best one to do. It has been announced.
The headliner was a long-lagged flight of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on Boeing’s first crew, suffering helium leaks and thruster failures in the propulsion system on its way to the ISS. That led to a few months of saga where I finally saw Starliner leave two NASA astronauts behind at the station due to the risk of eventually flying them home.
The ASAP report praised NASA’s call for astronaut safety, but as observers during the sundries meeting leading up to the decision, the agency needs to better define who is in charge. I warned him.
“Institutions do not estimate risk and assume safety, but instead demand evidence that the mission is safe and force opponents to prove that it is not,” the report states. .
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NASA’s leadership had directed post-mission reviews, but before it was completed, the ASAP Report raised at least one red flag in a public-private partnership promoting the commercial crew program.
“It is already clear that this case illustrates the pressing need for a clear role and responsibility for service providers regarding risk,” he said.
The report called for the ambiguity of the relationship between Boeing and NASA to consider issues rebuttalled by NASA during the first Boeing-led meeting for more analysis.
He also said it was unclear how the decision was made to abandon the fault tolerance requirements for some thrusters without flight or eligible data to justify the decision.
“These examples illustrate the panel’s concern that risk management choices could be unintentionally left to the contractor due to lack of clarity in the role.
ASAP members actually asked NASA about its potential disputes before Starliner began, saying that ASAP “has been assured that the risk management authority and responsibility are well understood.”
However, the ASAP report states that NASA’s research team likely found room for improvement.
“Anyway, the panel urges NASA to establish a clear contractual and programmatic direction regarding roles and responsibilities” within the Commercial Personnel Program, which includes the structure of the management team of commercial partners. The report states.
It was also revealed that Starliner had new issues when he returned to Earth, along with the issue of thrusters and leaks in the propulsion module that facilitated the decision to go home without astronauts.
“Overall, Starliner worked well in all major systems of undocking, deorbiting and landing sequences. However, in the crew module, additional monopropeller agent thruster failures were discovered. This is what we found. , unlike service module failures experienced during orbit,” the report states. “If the crew were on board, this would have significantly increased the risks during re-entry and confirmed the wisdom of the decision.”
Regarding Starliner’s path to certification, the ASAP report said it continues to monitor several open issues with the thruster and is seeking information on how NASA and Boeing will certify the spacecraft.
“Thruster issues have attracted considerable attention, but the panel has previously focused on other starliner issues that require resolution before certification,” he said.
This includes redesigning the battery and working to strengthen the landing airbag equipment.
“Beyond these technical issues, schedules and budgets pose a major challenge to Starliner certification,” the report added.
With the ISS set to be discontinued after 2030, Boeing will only have a contract to fly six rotational crew missions.
“Until the Starliner certification plan is well understood, it remains unclear whether a second provider is available before the ISS’s operational lifespan is over,” the report states. “NASA may recognize benefits by having a second reliable provider, but NASA must regularly review risk benefit analysis to ensure the overall risk of the plan. there is.”
Meanwhile, SpaceX, which has been certified by its Dragon Spaceship after a successful test flight of its crew in 2020, will launch nine operational crew rotation flights to the ISS on its 10th tap in March. It’s already flying.
That mission, Crew-10, is actually on standby by two Starliner astronauts left at the station. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Snie Williams have become part of a Crew 9 mission where their crew dragons had only two people rather than the regular four passengers. That means Willmore and Williams went home.
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However, homeland flights are not expected to occur until crew 10 arrives until short term of turnover between crew members at the station. While SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon Capsule delayed the launch of Crew-10 from the February liftoff planned by late March, SpaceX is one of the existing crew’s dragon spacecraft You could shift plans and skip the crew instead.
President Trump has confirmed that SpaceX founder Elon Musk asked Starliner Astronauts to be brought home as soon as possible, but it has not yet been announced how and what timelines will occur. .
Ultimately, Williams and Wilmore are potentially spending more than eight months at the station potentially on a mission that was just as targeted as their eight-day stay.
Original issue: February 7, 2025, 12:38pm EST
