The first manned flight of Starliner, Boeing’s space capsule, will take place in February 2023. The project is being carried out jointly by the American company and NASA, which wishes to establish a second means of transport to the International Space Station ( ISS).
Since 2020, astronauts have indeed traveled to the ISS on board SpaceX vessels, but the American space agency wants to diversify its options. A series of setbacks, including a failed flight in 2019, delayed Boeing’s program. The company finally managed in May 2022 to reach the ISS for the first time – without a crew on board.
Necessary adjustments in recent months
Boeing must now make a second flight, this time manned, before receiving approval from NASA to begin regular missions. The test flight that will take place in February 2023, called CFT (Crew Flight Test), will carry two NASA astronauts, Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams. They will stay on the ISS for about eight days, where they will participate in research carried out in the flying laboratory.
Boeing hoped until recently to be able to carry out this test flight in 2022. But hitches during the empty test required adjustments to the vehicle. A problem had been detected in particular in the propulsion system: two thrusters used by the capsule to place itself on the right trajectory after takeoff had not worked.
Boeing teams determined that the problem had been caused by “debris”, without being able to identify with certainty where the latter came from. The ship was checked to make sure that this debris did not come from him. Filters were also removed to solve a pressure problem, and software had to be updated to avoid too much data flow.