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

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."

Comments

"American-made ships"

[klingens]

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....

Re:"American-made ships"

[JoshuaZ]

That's a good point, where in contrast SpaceX's Falcon 9 really is American made with the Merlin engines being made in the US. Every other year or so they announce a plan to build the RD-180 in the US - ULA announced it again late last year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180#US_production_of_the_RD-180 but there are a lot of technical difficulties with making a version of it in our factories. The Russians have done some very subtle and very careful engineering with it (which gives the engine its very good power to weight ratio and high ISP) and them duplicating would be tough. At the same time, there have been some issues with RD-180 quality control so it might be better just for that reason to produce it in the US, aside from all the national security concerns about relying on a Russian rocket engine for national security launches.

Re:"American-made ships"

[Anonymous Coward]

But if it's the same Boeing I used to work at, they'll have to subcontract out all the engineering. There's nothing left at that company other than a bunch of managers.

Re:"American-made ships"

[harperska]

We'll see what comes of the Vulcan, the promised replacement for the Atlas V, which will have american made BE-4 engines. Maybe the Vulcan will be in production once the Starliner is finally ready to fly.

Re:"American-made ships"

[Geoffrey.landis]

It's not really american when the Atlas V, the rocket which this capsule ist built for, still uses russian RD-180 rocket motors.

The Boeing Starliner "is to be compatible with multiple launch vehicles, including the Atlas V, Delta IV, and Falcon 9, as well as the planned Vulcan.[9] "
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:"American-made ships"

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for ULA and I can assure you that a rocket is a lot more than an engine and fuel tank. You are forgetting a sophisticated suite of Avionics, reaction control systems, pneumatics, and pyros for staging, payload separation and flight termination, just to name a few items. If you think the engine is the only difficult part to get right then you should tell that to SpaceX. Most of their problems including their recent launch failure have been caused by components other than the engine. The Atlas V also uses an American made RL-10 engine for the second stage.I work for ULA and I can assure you that a rocket is a lot more than an engine and fuel tank. You are forgetting a sophisticated suite of Avionics, reaction control systems, pyros for staging, payload separation and flight termination,

Man-rated Dragon hasn't flown

[werepants]

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.

Re:Man-rated Dragon hasn't flown

[WindBourne]

Actually, SpaceX has 2 more tests for it, and they are ready:
1), the in-flight abort test.
2) sending the dragon to space on its own.

IOW, not much is left for the first manned spaceX flight.

Re:Man-rated Dragon hasn't flown

[werepants]

IOW, not much is left for the first manned spaceX flight.

My point isn't that I think Dragon V2 has issues - it's just incorrect to claim (as the summary did) that it has flight heritage, because it really is a different vehicle than the cargo-only Dragon. I agree that SpaceX is on track and only a short way from that first flight, though.

I look forward to their first test flight in 2023

[NotDrWho]

Assuming it doesn't get pushed back again.

Doing this stuff is hard

[Mr. Droopy Drawers]

Although we proved it in the 60's, this stuff is hard. You've now got private companies competing, not cooperating via NASA to deliver this stuff.

The problem here is our federal government hot cancel contracts and retire heavy lifting vehicles. Frankly, the shuttles were not in immediate need of retirement. Endeavour, the newest, was built in '92 and could have been kept in rotation until there was a viable American-controlled alternative.

In the Reagan administration, the USS Iowa and Missouri were pulled out of mothballs to patrol the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, the USS Missouri served longer in this second period than it did in its maiden one.

Re:Doing this stuff is hard

[werepants]

The problem is, to keep even a single shuttle flying, you have to maintain most of the infrastructure that was required to keep an entire fleet running. Low flight rate was one of the reasons that the shuttle never met cost projections in the first place, because you're paying for these huge facilities and workforces that are perpetually running at 25% capacity because of low launch rates. So keeping a single shuttle in play would have exacerbated this problem and ended up making our per-flight cost go through the roof, and so it probably came down to an "all-or-nothing" sort of calculation. And nobody wanted to risk killing another crew because of trying to stretch an orbiter beyond its useful life.

Note: many of these same problems are set up to plague SLS, the follow-on program to the space shuttle, which is hugely expensive, over budget, and behind schedule. If you're a fan of low-cost American space access, you should root for more funding of Commercial Crew and the other COTS efforts, and cancellation of this giant congressional effort to repeat shuttle's mistakes.

Re:Race for the flag

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Stranglehold??

[rfengr]

Russia does not have a stranglehold; like they are preventing others from doing so. The US has dropped the ball, which is shameful.

Re:Stranglehold??

[Grishnakh]

No, he's correct. We don't spend much on health care. Medicare and VA don't add up to much of the federal budget. Medicaid is state-level. Everything else is private, so it's out of government hands (except for the laws like ACA which govern it; we're talking about funding here though).

Out of the federal budget not funded directly by FICA taxes (which are specifically for SSI/Medicare), NASA is barely noticeable, the military is huge, and corporate welfare is also huge.

Re:Stranglehold??

[thinkwaitfast]

The US spends as much on space as the rest of the world combined.

https://www.rt.com/usa/199480-...

Re:Race for the flag

[Rei]

I would expect that the speed at which they get to Falcon 9 reuse would have an impact on the Falcon Heavy schedule (that speed, in turn, being relative to the rate that they keep landing them - the more they have on hand, the more risky they can afford to be in their return-to-flight testing program for them). Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy cores are extremely similar and made on the same lines, and the engines are identical. So the more line capacity they free up, the more they can dedicate toward the Heavy.

Re:Race for the flag

[TomGreenhaw]

I'm OK with aggressive deadlines that get pushed out. Aggressive time lines presses a team to be as productive as possible. On the other hand, the courage to delay when its not ready regardless of the financial consequences is in my mind to be admired.

This is what differentiates a quality organization from those stock market driven pointy haired managed fiascoes all to common in business today.

Re:Race for the flag

[Kjella]

I'm OK with aggressive deadlines that get pushed out. Aggressive time lines presses a team to be as productive as possible.

Until it becomes a de facto expectation that you won't meet the deadlines and they'll be pushed out anyway because they were some PMs wet dream. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you want it in three weeks you set the deadline to three days, because nothing will really happen until you start raising a stink about how late it is while the project that actually schedules three weeks waits three months instead. And as a consequence of the schedules being unrealistic, there's no real retrospective done with the PMs on the missed estimates because everybody more or less knew they were imaginary anyway. Overly aggressive deadlines are a sympton of dysfunction, not productivity.