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Astronauts Won't Be Flying To Space In Boeing's Starliner Until 2018 (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the all-eyes-to-spacex-now dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Boeing Starliner, one of two new spacecraft meant to break the Russian stranglehold on sending people to orbit, has hit a snag. Originally scheduled to start flying next year, the Starliner won't carry a crewed mission to the International Space Station until 2018 at the earliest. Six years is long enough. Ever since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle NASA has been pushing for privately built craft capable of ferrying astronauts to orbit, which would let the agency buy American-made ships and end its dependency on renting seats aboard Russian spacecraft. The Starliner and SpaceX's Dragon were chosen, and 2017 was to be the year. But while SpaceX has sent its ship to the ISS on multiple uncrewed cargo resupply missions, the Starliner won't make such trips until 2017 and won't carry people until 2018 at the earliest. SpaceX maintains that it will be able to send crews to orbit in 2017.GeekWire explains: "For Boeing to shift its crewed test flight from 2017 to 2018 isn't as much of a slip as it might sound: The company's earlier schedule had called for the visit to the space station to take place in mid-December."

3 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. "American-made ships" by klingens · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not really american when the Atlas V, the rocket which this capsule ist built for, still uses russian RD-180 rocket motors. A rocket is a fuel tank and a rocket motor mostly. It's not the fuel tank that's hard to build....

  2. Man-rated Dragon hasn't flown by werepants · · Score: 3, Informative

    FTFS:

    SpaceX has sent its ship to the ISS on multiple uncrewed cargo resupply missions

    To be fair, the Dragon that SpaceX has flown is a very different vehicle than the Dragon V2, which is the capsule rated to carry astronauts. So while they do have a leg up on Boeing in some respects (and will likely beat them on schedule) neither capsule is really flight-proven at this point.

  3. Re:Race for the flag by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Falcon Heavy was deliberately pushed back because upgrades to the Falcon 9 increased its payload to the lower end of Heavy's original design, resulting in a lower cost launch in those paylaod ranges. Basically there was no point to rushing the Heavy because there wouldn't have been an immediate market for it. Sure, there was some slippage just because reasons, but much of the delay was of the "oh wait, we don't need that right now after all" type.