Safety concerns ground Boeing Starliner indefinitely

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is grounded indefinitely due to safety concerns with the capsule’s parachutes and wiring.

The anomalies, which were discovered last week, were discussed during a press conference Thursday night, during which NASA and Boeing announced the Starliner’s first planned crewed flight was on hold.

That launch, which has faced many delays and setbacks, was slated to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) on July 21. Now officials are not certain whether it will get off the ground at all this year.

“It’s feasible, but I certainly wouldn’t want to commit to any dates or time frames,” Mark Nappi, Boeing Starliner program manager and vice president, told reporters Thursday. “We need to spend the next several days understanding what we need to do to solve these problems.”

Last week, two major safety issues were discovered when the vehicle was going through preflight inspections. The first affects Starliner’s three main parachutes. Engineers discovered the “soft links” used on the suspension lines of the chutes have a lower failure load limit than previously thought.

Testing revealed that if one of Starliner’s parachutes were to fail, the other two would not be able to support the weight of the capsule. According to Nappi, one of NASA’s safety requirements is that the capsule must be able to land safely with only two parachutes.

Boeing engineers also discovered that the protective tape covering the capsule’s wiring harness is flammable. Nappi said there are hundreds of feet of this tape throughout the capsule. To that end, Nappi has said the team is looking for solutions to mitigate damage to the spacecraft that could result from removing all this tape.

“We’re looking at solutions that would provide for essentially another type of wrapping over the existing tape in the most vulnerable areas that reduces the risk of fire hazard,” he said.

Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said the entire team feels the pain of another delay.

“I would say everybody is a bit disappointed,” Stitch said during the press conference. “But you could see people ready to go roll up their sleeves and go see what the next steps are.”

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is one of two capsules built by commercial companies as part of NASA’s commercial crew program to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. The other, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, has launched seven crewed flights for NASA plus three additional private crewed missions for customers like Axiom Space.

Due to the nature of the contract awarded, Boeing will likely be responsible for any costs associated with modifications to the vehicle and any costs due to the delays.

Boeing was awarded at least seven crewed flights for NASA, including this initial crew test flight, which will have NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore fly to the space station to make sure Starliner has what it takes to routinely fly crew. Nappi says that despite the multiple delays and extra costs, Boeing remains committed to the Starliner spacecraft and its NASA obligations.

“We’ve been talking about the future of Starliner and how we’re going to move forward,” Nappi said. “We know that there’s growing pains in developing vehicles and flying vehicles. … This is just part of the business to have these kinds of issues.”

Boeing and NASA are expected to continue to assess the vehicle and determine how long it will take to correct these issues before announcing the next possible flight date. Traffic at the space station is busy this summer, with an opening likely in the fall if the teams can have the vehicle ready by then.

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