Images courtesy of NASA and Boeing
Safety concerns force the delay of a July launch and first crew test of Boeing’s Starliner space capsule.
There are two new issues behind the delay: tape used to cover wiring harnesses that could catch fire in the oxygen-rich environment and fabric “soft link” connectors on the descent parachutes that could break – both, Boeing commercial crew program manager, Mark Nappi, says, requiring other failures to happen first before these dangers would arise.
On the chutes, Nappi says, “Under nominal conditions, they performed like they should have. It wouldn’t happen unless we had these multiple failures that we would see this failure mode come into play.” Nappi says while the system worked as expected with all three chutes operating normally, the danger would exist if just one chute were to fail.
Nappi says they’ve tested the tape to see how it burns and what makes it burn, which he says includes the oxygen-enriched environment inside the Starliner capsule, wiring with enough power to ignite it and a “nick” in the tape that would create the conditions to start a fire. The adhesive is the part or the tape that’s flammable, and Boeing will look into whether the tape can be covered with another material to prevent fire or if it would need to be removed and replaced which, with hundreds of feet of tape in use, could be a big job.
Nappi was asked whether Boeing has considered backing out of the program, and he says they’ve never had serious discussions about quitting the NASA commercial flight program. He says any talk about Starliner’s future is about what the company needs to meet the demand of at least one flight a year. “We know that there’s growing pains in developing a vehicle and flying a vehicle, and we’re really close,” Nappi says, “This is just part of the business to have these kinds of issues.”
Next for Boeing is to lay out the plan for more testing to determine what fixes might be needed with a flight this year still considered possible but a new launch date still far from being set.
You can listen to the entire NASA/Boeing news conference in the video below:
