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NASA Will Only Tolerate So Much Danger
An investigation into what really went wrong with Boeing's last space mission turned up serious issues.
10 Feb 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/boeing-nasa-starliner-software-problems/606361/
A lot went right during a recent attempt to reach the International Space Station. A lot went wrong too.
The rocket launched just before sunrise on a cool, late December day, cutting a streak of gold across the sky in Florida’s Cape Canaveral. The capsule it carried, which was designed and built for NASA by Boeing, was smoothly delivered past the edge of space. If the test had gone off without a hitch, the next time this spacecraft flew, it would have had astronauts inside. The capsule was supposed to stay in space for a week and dock to the ISS. But two days later, the capsule was back on Earth with its parachutes strewed across the New Mexico desert. It was healthy and in one piece, but its cargo was undelivered, and its mission cut short.
Now NASA says the mission could have gone even worse.
An investigation of the bungled mission has revealed more problems than officials and engineers alike expected to find. The flaws stem not from hardware, but from the flight software coded by Boeing engineers. The capsule, known as Starliner, turned out to be more dangerous than anyone realized.
“We don’t know how many software errors we have,” Doug Loverro, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told reporters on Friday. “We don’t know if we have just two or we have many hundreds.”
[snip]
Timing is everything, especially in spaceflight, and that’s where Boeing’s Starliner first had trouble. Thanks to a software glitch, Starliner incorrectly set its internal clock hours before it launched, which meant that after it separated from the rocket and reached space, the capsule missed the moment it needed to fire some thrusters and push itself into the right orbit. In a cruel twist, mission control lost contact with Starliner just then because, it seems, of interference from radio noise on Earth, possibly from cellphone towers. By the time engineers could command Starliner again, the capsule, disoriented and idling, had used up too much fuel to finish its climb toward the ISS.
With no choice but to return Starliner home, Boeing engineers started combing through the software and found another issue. Before Starliner begins its final descent to Earth, it must shed a service module that helped nudge it toward the atmosphere. But the way the software sequence was set up, the thrusters on this module wouldn’t have fired correctly. A rocky separation could have destabilized Starliner, causing it to tumble. The two spacecraft could’ve even bumped into each other, in which case the impact could have damaged the heat shield. Starliner needs that shield to survive the fiery drop of reentry, with astronauts on board or not.
“It’s hard to say where the service module would have bumped, but nothing good can come from those two spacecraft bumping,” Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing’s space and launch division, told me.
Boeing engineers rewrote the software and sent the new version to Starliner barely three hours before the capsule touched down in New Mexico. If they hadn’t intervened, NASA says, Starliner could have been lost.
NASA Shares Initial Findings from Boeing Starliner Orbital Flight Test Investigation
7 Feb 2020
https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcr...-starliner-orbital-flight-test-investigation/
An investigation into what really went wrong with Boeing's last space mission turned up serious issues.
10 Feb 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/boeing-nasa-starliner-software-problems/606361/
A lot went right during a recent attempt to reach the International Space Station. A lot went wrong too.
The rocket launched just before sunrise on a cool, late December day, cutting a streak of gold across the sky in Florida’s Cape Canaveral. The capsule it carried, which was designed and built for NASA by Boeing, was smoothly delivered past the edge of space. If the test had gone off without a hitch, the next time this spacecraft flew, it would have had astronauts inside. The capsule was supposed to stay in space for a week and dock to the ISS. But two days later, the capsule was back on Earth with its parachutes strewed across the New Mexico desert. It was healthy and in one piece, but its cargo was undelivered, and its mission cut short.
Now NASA says the mission could have gone even worse.
An investigation of the bungled mission has revealed more problems than officials and engineers alike expected to find. The flaws stem not from hardware, but from the flight software coded by Boeing engineers. The capsule, known as Starliner, turned out to be more dangerous than anyone realized.
“We don’t know how many software errors we have,” Doug Loverro, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told reporters on Friday. “We don’t know if we have just two or we have many hundreds.”
[snip]
Timing is everything, especially in spaceflight, and that’s where Boeing’s Starliner first had trouble. Thanks to a software glitch, Starliner incorrectly set its internal clock hours before it launched, which meant that after it separated from the rocket and reached space, the capsule missed the moment it needed to fire some thrusters and push itself into the right orbit. In a cruel twist, mission control lost contact with Starliner just then because, it seems, of interference from radio noise on Earth, possibly from cellphone towers. By the time engineers could command Starliner again, the capsule, disoriented and idling, had used up too much fuel to finish its climb toward the ISS.
With no choice but to return Starliner home, Boeing engineers started combing through the software and found another issue. Before Starliner begins its final descent to Earth, it must shed a service module that helped nudge it toward the atmosphere. But the way the software sequence was set up, the thrusters on this module wouldn’t have fired correctly. A rocky separation could have destabilized Starliner, causing it to tumble. The two spacecraft could’ve even bumped into each other, in which case the impact could have damaged the heat shield. Starliner needs that shield to survive the fiery drop of reentry, with astronauts on board or not.
“It’s hard to say where the service module would have bumped, but nothing good can come from those two spacecraft bumping,” Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing’s space and launch division, told me.
Boeing engineers rewrote the software and sent the new version to Starliner barely three hours before the capsule touched down in New Mexico. If they hadn’t intervened, NASA says, Starliner could have been lost.
NASA Shares Initial Findings from Boeing Starliner Orbital Flight Test Investigation
7 Feb 2020
https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcr...-starliner-orbital-flight-test-investigation/