Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

August 8, local time Monday, Boeing announced that it has postponed the first manned flight test of its interstellar spacecraft to at least March 2024.

Mark Nappi, project manager of Boeing's Commercial Astronaut Program (Commercial Crew Program), said the interstellar spacecraft should be ready to fly in early March or seven months later. But Napi said the exact launch date depends on the availability of the United launch Alliance's Atlas 5 carrier rocket and whether it conflicts with NASA's launch plans.

According to NASA's internal schedule, the International Space Station will have a docking port available from early April to the end of June 2024. Therefore, unless the schedule is changed in order to postpone the cargo mission, the earliest launch date for the manned test flight of the interstellar spacecraft may be April 2024.

Starline test flights have been delayed several times, Boeing reported that its interstellar spacecraft program has lost 1.1 billion dollars. The interstellar line spacecraft is one of two space vehicles that NASA helped develop to take astronauts to the space station. The other spacecraft is SpaceX's manned dragon spacecraft, which conducted a manned test flight in May 2020. The seventh NASA mission of the manned dragon spacecraft, known as Crew-7, will be launched in about two weeks.

The development of interstellar spaceships faces more difficult challenges. In December 2019, the aircraft's first unmanned test flight nearly caused a disaster, and due to software problems, Boeing agreed to conduct a second unmanned test flight without astronauts. The mission was carried out in May 2022, and eventually the interstellar line spacecraft successfully docked with the space station.

This laid the foundation for a manned test flight scheduled for this summer, in which NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore plan to participate. However, in late May, just weeks before the mission was about to launch, Boeing and NASA found problems with the interstellar spacecraft's parachute and flammable tape inside the spacecraft.

On June 1, Boeing announced that it would investigate these issues. NASA also said it would conduct an independent investigation.

In the two months since then, Boeing and NASA have been busy investigating the slides and flammable tape. In a conference call with reporters on Monday, Napi and Steve Sticky, head of NASA's commercial astronaut program, gave an update on the progress made in the investigation since the problem was discovered on June 1.

Napi said workers have begun to remove flammable tape from the interior of the spacecraft. The glass cloth tape is wound around the wires inside the interstellar line to protect it from friction during flight. So far, they have removed several kilograms of tape from the starship.

From a schedule point of view, perhaps a more important problem is the parachute of the starship, and the "soft connection" joint on the top cover is found to be not safe enough. Airborne, the maker of parachutes, is using stronger Kevlar materials to make a new soft connection for parachutes, Napi said. Boeing plans to test the new parachute in mid-to-late November, which will allow time for analysis before launch next spring.

Napi said he is confident that these tasks will be completed within a limited time. After all, these tasks are quite "simple."

Testing and Evaluation in 2019, SpaceX decided to replace its manned dragon spacecraft with a more stringent parachute design, changing from a "Mark 2" parachute to a "Mark 3" parachute, forcing it to repeat the entire testing process. The process involved about 24 drop tests from different heights, which took more than half a year for SpaceX.

NASA official Stitch said the agency only asked Boeing to complete an additional test to verify the performance of its upgraded parachute. He said SpaceX's improvements to the parachute were "significant". By contrast, Boeing's improvements are quite simple.

Stitch added: "given that the redesigned soft connection is very close to what we have tested in all previous parachute landing tests, we feel that we only need to conduct one test. What I want to say is that compared with our design for manned dragon spacecraft, the design of the interstellar spacecraft has changed very little."

In addition to hardware improvements, Boeing must be subject to three independent investigations. According to Stitch, Boeing has an "independent panel" reviewing the company's actions. In addition, NASA Chief engineer Joseph Pilichotti (Joseph Pellicciotti) has interviewed the head of each subsystem of the interstellar line spacecraft to make sure there are no other possible surprises. Finally, Pilicotti and NASA's Center for Engineering and Safety have conducted their own independent reviews of the reliability of the interstellar line spacecraft.

All these assessments must be completed before NASA conducts a flight ready to review and determine that the interstellar spacecraft is finally ready for manned flight.

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