Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner programme, designed to offer both NASA and commercial space companies with the means of delivering astronauts to low-Earth orbit space stations such as the International Space Station (ISS) and the Blue Origin / Sierra Space led consortium’s Orbital Reef station, has had a very chequered history with the number of issues far outweighing the number of successes.

On all three occasions the CST-100, comprising a capsule with a capacity for up to seven crew – although 4 plus a measure of cargo is liable to be the usual complement, together with a service module – has reached orbit, it has done so while encountering a series of issues / failures.  Indeed, such is the nature of some of the problems, they actually led to delays in getting the second flight test off the ground. More significantly, some of the issues were potentially known about as far back as June 2018. It was then, during a hot fire test of one of the vehicle’s RS-88 launch abort motors, when four of eight values on the vehicle’s propellant flow system failed, releasing 1.8 tonnes of highly toxic  monomethylhydrazine propellant and causing a fireball that engulfed the test rig.

Whilst blaming engine supplier Aerojet Rocketdyne for the hot fire test incident, Boeing simultaneously sought to keep the news of the incident quiet, and limited the circulation of information relating to it to a few senor programme managers at NASA, who agreed to also keep the incident out of the public eye as much as possible so as not to further delay the programme, which was already behind schedule.

Although it is near impossible to state with certainty that this event market the start of successive failures of management both within Boeing and NASA as to how Starliner and its various issues and problems were both handled and communicated between the two parties, it fits with a pattern seen throughout the last several years of Starliner’s troubles.

All of this has now been made clear in a comprehensive report released by the new NASA Administrator, Jared Issacman, in the wake of an in-depth investigation covering several months into the Starliner project. Released during a public press briefing, the 311-page report (partially redacted) goes into extensive depth relating to the three Starliner flights to orbit to date: the uncrewed Orbital Flight Test 1 (OFT 1, 2019) and its follow-up Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT 2, 2022), and the first Crew Flight Test (CFT 1, 2024) which famously resulted in heady reports of the mission crew – Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore being “stranded” in space as if they were utterly helpless when in fact they are working aboard the ISS.

The report goes to great length to outline the core technical issues with Starliner relating to the four “doghouse” thruster packs mounted equidistantly around the circumference of Starliner’s service module and containing multiple large and small thrusters designed to provide the vehicle with flight motion and manoeuvring capabilities, together with the software issues which proved to be the undoing of the original OFT 1 mission which ultimately left the vehicle unable to rendezvous with the ISS and attempt an automated docking.

But most startlingly, the report reclassifies the Crew Flight Test 1 as a Type A mishap. This is NASA’s most extreme rating for malfunctions aboard crew carrying vehicles; for example, both the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle losses were classified as Type A mishaps on account of the loss of all board both vehicles. Type A mishaps have several main criteria: Injuring or fatalities during flight; loss of a vehicle or its control; damage exceeding US $2 million.

At first glance, and given that a) Williams and Wilmore did manage to maintain control over their vehicle and make a successful docking with, and transfer to, the ISS; b) there were no injuries or fatalities; and c) US $2 million in damages is an exceedingly small amount in the scheme of things, reclassifying CFT 1 a Type A mishap might appear to be more a knee-jerk reaction than might be warranted. However, the events experienced during CFT 1 make it abundantly clear that designating it a Type A mishap should have occurred at the time  of the flight – or at least immediately afterwards as the situation was fully understood.

The key point here is the second criteria for specifying a Type A mishap: the loss of the vehicle or its control. During CFT 1’s approach to the ISS for rendezvous and docking, the vehicle suffered a critical failure of five thruster sets required for manoeuvring control ( in NASA parlance, the vehicle lost its required 6 degrees of freedom manoeuvring). Regardless of the fact that the crew regained the use of four of the thrusters units in short order and went on to complete a successful docking at the ISS, at the time the failure occurred, Starliner was effectively adrift, unable to correct its orientation or motion – or even safely back away from the ISS to avoid the risk of collision. In other words, loss of the vehicle’s control had occurred.

Nor, as it turns out, was this the only issue. During its re-entry and descent through the atmosphere, the Starliner capsule Calypso suffered a failure with one of its RCS thruster systems, resulting in a “zero fault tolerance” situation – meaning there was no back-up for the failed unit during what was a critical phase of the vehicle’s flight.

So why wasn’t CFT 1 designated a Type A mishap immediately after the fact? Here the report is uncompromising in its assessment: NASA managers overseeing the Starliner contract were more concerned with getting the vehicle certified for routine crew operations than with admitting it still has major flight qualification issues which should disbar it from routine use to launch crews. It is in this approach of directly pointing the finger and throwing back the covers on how NASA and its contract have been functioning within the Starliner contract that the report – despite the redactions within it – is uncompromisingly clear in apportioning blame.

In particular, the report highlights numerous issues with the way the contract – and by extension – all commercial partnership contracts are handled by NASA. Chief among these is that, whilst charged with overall oversight responsibilities for such programmes, NASA took an almost completely hands-off approach to Starliner, bowing to Boeing when it came to most critical decision making on the overall fitness  for purpose of the system. Challenges to internal decision making at Boeing were muted or non-existent, and when it was felt Boeing were obfuscating or failing to be properly transparent, NASA tended not to challenge, but simply started mistrusting their contractor, allowing further breakdowns in communications to occur.

For its part, Boeing felt it could compartmentalise issues into individual fault chains and fixes, rather than seeing and reporting them as they were, a series of interconnected chains of design issues, faults and upsets. As a result, issues were dealt with on a kind of patch-and-fix approach, rather than a systematic examination of chains of events and proper root cause analysis. In this, the report particularly highlights the fact that whilst Boeing has a robust Root Cause / Corrective Action (RCCA) process, all too often it was never fully deployed in dealing with issues, the priority being to find a fix for each issue in turn and move on in the belief things would be rectified once all the fixes had been identified and implemented.

The report goes into a number of recommendations as to how NASA must handle future commercial partnerships such as the Commercial Crew Programme (CCP) of which SpaceX and Boeing are both a part, and how it should exercise full and proper oversight and lose its hands-off attitude. Time will tell in how these changes will affect such contracts – not just with Boeing and CST-100, but also with the likes of SpaceX and the development of their lunar lander, a project where NASA has again been decidedly hands-off in it approach to the work, allowing SpaceX to continually miss deadlines, fail to produce vehicle elements in time for testing, and to seemingly pushed vehicle development to one side in favour of pursuing its own goals whilst still taking NASA financing to the tune of US $4.9 billion.

In respect of Starline itself, the root cause(s) of the thruster issues on the vehicle still has/have yet to be fully determined. However, Issacman has made it clear NASA will not be withdrawing from the contract with Boeing; instead he has committed NASA to refusing to flying any crew aboard Starliner until such time as Boeing can – with NASA’s assistance – demonstrate that the issues plaguing the vehicle have been fully understood and dealt with properly and fully.

Whether that can be done within the next 5 years of ISS operational life remains to be seen.

Artemis 2: WDR Success; Launch Again Delayed

The Artemis 2 Space Launch System (SLS) rocket successfully completed its pre-flight wet dress rehearsal (WDR) test on Thursday, February 19th, 2026, potentially clearing the path for a mission launch in early March – or at least, that was the hope.

As I’ve noted in recent Space Sunday updates, the WDR is a major test of all the ground systems associated with launching an SLS rocket, together with the on-board systems and all ground support personnel  to make sure all systems are ready for an actual launch and staff are up-to-speed with all procedures and possible causes for delays, etc. Such tests run through until just before engine ignition, and include fully fuelling the booster’s core stage with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

The WDR had previously revealed issues with the propellant loading system at the base of the mobile launch platform on which the rocket stands ahead of lift-off, with various leaks being noted the both the first Artemis 2 WDR and previously with the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission of 2022.

The original Artemis 2 WDR suffered issues with the liquid hydrogen feed into the rocket and with a filter designed to keep impurities out of the propellants. Both the problem valves and the filter were swapped-out ahead of the second WDR together with the replacement of a number of seals which showed minor signs or wear. Following the second WDR test, an initial review of the gathered data was performed, and the results gave NASA managers the confidence to officially name March 6th, 2026 as the target launch date for the mission, marking the opening of a 5-day launch window in March, with a further window available in April.

However, within 24 hours of the target launch date being announced, NASA was forced to issue a further mission postponement when another issue was discovered – this time a helium leak in the booster’s upper stage.

The new leak is entirely unrelated to those within the umbilical propellant system on the mobile launch platform and lies within the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) pressurisation system.

The ICPS plays a critical role in both lifting the Orion vehicle to its initial orbit following separation from the booster’s core stage, and then moving it to a high altitude orbit prior to it and Orion entering a trans-lunar injection orbit, where – after the ICPS has separated from Orion, it will be used as a target for a series of planned rendezvous and simulated docking exercises to test Orion’s ability to carry out the precise manoeuvring required to dock with Moon-orbiting Moon landers and (eventually)with the Gateway station.

However, in order to function optimally, the ICPS requires a  “solid” – that is a specific rate of flow and pressure for the helium. Fluctuations in the flow – such as caused by a leak – cannot be tolerated. This means that in order to fly, Artemis 2 requires the issue to be properly addressed. This is something that might be done whilst leaving the vehicle on the pad; however, it might require the vehicle to be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to allow complete access to the ICPS. At the time of writing, engineers at NASA were still evaluating which option to take.

But one thing is clear – with just two weeks between the discovery of the issue and the opening of the March launch window, there is precious little time to fully investigate and rectify the issue. As such, NASA is now shifting its focus towards having the mission ready for lift-off in time to meet the April 2026 launch window.