After 2.5 years of delays, Boeing's Starliner is on its way to the International Space Station.
The ULA Atlas V rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Thursday. Orbital Flight Test 2 ( OFT-2 ) is an uncrewed mission carrying Starliner.
If everything goes according to plan, Starliner will dock with the International Space Station on Friday evening and spend four to five days attached to the lab before coming back to Earth for a parachute-aided landing in the western U.S.
Boeing and NASA celebrated a huge milestone with the separation of Starliner from the Atlas V on Thursday. The capsule was unable to rendezvous with the International Space Station during the original OFT due to some software issues. It failed to get off the ground when OFT-2 first rolled out to the pad last summer, and it took about eight months to fix the malfunctioning valves.
The 150th launch for the rocket company, which is a joint effort of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, took place after OFT-2's liftoff.
At a post-launch press conference on Thursday night, NASA and Boeing experts praised their teams for the hard work that led to the successful launch.
The manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program said that today was a huge day for commercial crew. One small Starliner malfunction was mentioned as he listed the hurdles and launch milestones of the day.
The two Starliner's thrusters didn't fire as expected during the orbital burn. The first failed in one second. The backup was able to fire for another 25 seconds before it failed. Starliner was able to complete the crucial burn without incident after a tertiary backup was activated.
The four doghouses on the Boeing spaceship are referred to in industry parlance as doghouses, which each contain three orbital maneuvering and attitude control (OMAC) thrusters used to perform significant maneuver burns. Boeing representatives said that the two OMAC thrusters that malfunctioned, and the third that stepped in to compensate, were all in the same doghouse.
The system was supposed to be redundant, and it performed as it was supposed to. Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for Boeing's commercial crew program, said that the team is working on why the anomalies occurred.
The issue was not something that needed to be solved before the OFT-2 mission was completed. Stich pointed out that Starliner had performed a second burn with the same OMAC thrusters, putting it on course to rendezvous with the International Space Station.
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The second burn that we did used the third thruster in the doghouse, and it performed well for the entire burn. It doesn't look like it's common to all three. Mark said that they started firing right. Stitch said that the first one fired and the second one picked up.
We will have to go through a little bit more trouble and see if we can figure out why the two thrusters didn't complete the burn.
On Friday evening, Starliner will catch up to the space station. Once within about 2 miles of the lab, the craft will demonstrate stop-and-retreat maneuvers. The time is 2310 GMT.
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