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ISS Space NASA

Boeing's Starliner Docks with International Space Station. Hatch Opening Now (nasa.gov) 59

Posted by EditorDavid from the everything-but-astronauts dept.
Boeing's Starliner successfully docked to the International Space Station Friday night for the first time.

And right now, Boeing is beginning the official hatch-opening ceremon, in which the space station astronauts already on the ISS "open the hatch to the vehicle and retrieve some cargo that's packed inside," explains the Verge: NASA tasked Boeing with conducting an uncrewed flight demonstration of Starliner to show that the capsule can hit all of the major milestones it'll need to hit when it is carrying passengers... This mission is called OFT-2 since it's technically a do-over of a mission that Boeing attempted back in 2019, called OFT. During that flight, Starliner launched to space as planned, but a software glitch prevented the capsule from getting in the right orbit it needed to reach to rendezvous with the ISS. Boeing had to bring the vehicle home early, and the company never demonstrated Starliner's ability to dock with the ISS....

Using a series of sensors, the capsule autonomously guided itself onto an open docking port on the space station.... Docking occurred a little over an hour behind schedule, due to some issues with Starliner's graphics and docking ring, which were resolved ahead of the docking....

[Thursday] At 6:54PM ET, Starliner successfully launched to space on top of an Atlas V rocket, built and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Once Starliner separated from the Atlas V, it had to fire its own thrusters to insert itself into the proper orbit for reaching the space station. However, after that maneuver took place, Boeing and NASA revealed that two of the 12 thrusters Starliner uses for the procedure failed and cut off too early. The capsule's flight control system was able to kick in and rerouted to a working thruster, which helped get Starliner into a stable orbit.... Today, Boeing revealed that a drop in chamber pressure had caused the early cutoff of the thruster, but that system behaved normally during follow-up burns of the thrusters. And with redundancies on the spacecraft, the issue "does not pose a risk to the rest of the flight test," according to Boeing.

Boeing also noted today that the Starliner team is investigating some weird behavior of a "thermal cooling loop" but said that temperatures are stable on the spacecraft.
From the space station, NASA astronaut Bob Hines said the achievement "marks a great milestone towards providing additional commercial access to low Earth orbit, sustaining the ISS and enabling NASA's goal of returning humans to the Moon and eventually to Mars.

"Great accomplishments in human spaceflight are long remembered by history. Today will be no different."

A long-time Slashdot reader shares this schedule (EST): 5/20, 3:30 pm — Starliner docking with ISS.
5/21, 11:30 am — Safety checks completed. Hatches opened.
5/24, 12:00 pm — Starliner loading completed. Hatched closed.
5/25, 2:00 pm — Starliner undocking from ISS.
5/25, 5:45 pm — Coverage of Starliner landing begins.

Again, the streams will be broadcast at NASA Television. I don't know about any of you, but I know what I'm doing this weekend.
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Boeing's Starliner Docks with International Space Station. Hatch Opening Now More

Boeing's Starliner Docks with International Space Station. Hatch Opening Now

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  • Never change, EditorDavid! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Saturday May 21, 2022 @10:37AM (#62554660) Homepage

    To go along with "the official hatch-opening ceremon," we have the Slashdot non-editing ceremon!

    • I submitted a story about Starliner docking today, and I accidentally wrote "Starliner docket" instead of "docked" in the title. I was worried there for a while in case it was my first submission to be published - no doubt it would have been published with that glaring error!

    • The bending over and greasing up the taxpayers anus in preparation of the massive fucking by Boeing for their crappy behind schedule capsule.. Seriously How many SpaceX Dragons have flown ??? They still can't get their KC-46 tanker to work right ( which we've had tankers since the 50's) so in air refueling is not anything new.

    • So a hatch opening ceremon is a BIG thing eh?

      I read on another website, one that is "space news oriented", that this Boeing Starliner thingie had some issues on this flight.

      After digging around the Interwebs I found a transcript of those issues.

      "ISS calling Houston. We got a problem with this Boeing Starliner thing that you sent up to us."

      Houston: "What's the problem?"

      ISS: "The hatch is stuck. The dang thing won't open up. There's a sign on it saying, 'Pay us 50 billion more for the unlock code.' So what is

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      Don't you know that hatching is an important part of breeding your ceremon? Gotta hatch them all!

  • Congrats (Score:5, Informative)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Saturday May 21, 2022 @10:39AM (#62554664)

    Seriously, there are still a lot of hardworking engineers at Boeing who have probably been working a lot of hours to make this happen. It's not all corporate bean counters just yet over there. Having two viable human capsule options is amazing from where we were after the Shuttle.

    • Re:Congrats (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve ( 949321 ) on Saturday May 21, 2022 @11:14AM (#62554730)

      Seriously, there are still a lot of hardworking engineers at Boeing who have probably been working a lot of hours to make this happen. It's not all corporate bean counters just yet over there. Having two viable human capsule options is amazing from where we were after the Shuttle.

      While I agree with your last sentence, there's still a ton wrong with Boeing in general. Earlier in the week the head of Ryanair (Americans - Ryanair is in Europe something like Southwest Airlines is in the USA, with the difference being that Ryanair hates its customers) went ballistic in an interview and mentioned how Ryanair bought some "white tail aircraft" and Boeing is too incompetent to deliver them - ever. White tail aircraft are planes that an airline purchased and then pulled out of the contract before making the final payments but after the planes were built. So basically a customer changed their mind and left Boeing holding the bag on a cancelled sale. I imagine Ryanair got a good price on these and apparently all that needs to happen is to change the paint on the outside and just deliver them to Ryanair, but both of those things are currently more than Boeing is capable of doing it seems. Ryanair's CEO also said that not only is top Boeing management incompetent but their sales staff is too. It's great that Boeing got Starliner working for now, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if things get a lot worse. Perhaps there never will be a manned crew flight for years to come for reasons never explained. it's hard for me to believe that Boeing's overall incompetence at present is somehow going to be kept isolated from the space division.

      • Yeah Boeing for sure has problems but considering O'Leary's reputation and past comments I am going to take that story with a grain of salt until maybe we hear something of the other side of the story. He probably has a point though.

        It's a critical time for Boeing for sure, from the outside it looks like they are trying to restructure a bit and having some turmoil. They could come out of this better than before or worse.

        If they continue to fall apart and Airbus, the more governmental aligned conso

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Boeing is a massive company organized into three discrete business units: “Commercial Airplanes”, “Defense, Space, and Security”, and “Global Services”.

        The defense and space guys (rockets, satellites, fighter/bombers) work in a completely different bureaucracy from the commercial guys (737/747/777/787) different management hierarchy, different technology stack, different manufacturing process, different geography, different security protocols, etc.

        People in different pr

      • You forgot the best part, where he called Boeing Management "headless chickens".

        https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]

  • Finally after three attempts.

    Another great government project, late and over budget.

    • Hey, the former McDonnell-Douglas bigwigs wearing Boeing's skin have to get their offshore accounts filled with billions in taxpayer funds SOMEHOW. They might as well eventually build a rocket in the process, I guess.

  • A 2019 report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General calculated the estimated average cost per seat to be $90 million for Boeing and $55 million for SpaceX. Given Boeing's poor performance NASA should renegotiate.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by marcle ( 1575627 )

      I think NASA trusts Gwynne Shotwell more than Musk.

      It's undeniable though that Musk's shenanigans hurt the value, and trusworthiness, of his companies.

    • You make a good point, but the unknown is whether he really intended to take over Twitter. It seemed plausible at first, but then the later events concerning that deal suggest it might not have been sincere, perhaps some other publicity stunt or market & money bending ploy.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by grogger ( 638944 )
      Musk is not fronting the full 44 billion himself - he has backers and is looking at under 20 billion in personal exposure. Also both Tesla and SpaceX are each worth way more than 44 billion so he is not using the company of SpaceX as collateral; he is probably using a portion of his Tesla shares - he received 22 billion in options last year alone and paid 11 billion in taxes on that.
  • Now the US has two trampolines we can afford to use.

  • Today, Boeing revealed that a drop in chamber pressure had caused the early cutoff of the thruster, but that system behaved normally during follow-up burns of the thrusters. And with redundancies on the spacecraft, the issue "does not pose a risk to the rest of the flight test,"

    So, 2 of 12 thrusters failed, a 3rd one automatically took over. From what I read it is not clear whether the 2 that had failed were on the same cluster. Each cluster has 3 thrusters so if 2 failures were on the same, and then the 3rd failed as well they would not be able to do the correct burn, which I would call troubling. So did they reach the limit of their redundancies or not?
    It is unfortunate (and I guess a not ideal part of Starliner's overall more costly design) that the thrusters are on the service

    • OK when is the next launch? How long will this investigation take? Having 2 launch systems is great! One to use and one(NASA's favorite) to burn cash.

  • Angry Astronaut not pleased (Score:4, Interesting)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Saturday May 21, 2022 @04:01PM (#62555134) Homepage

    Angry Astronaut on YouTube released a video about this. He describes how the Starliner had a valve fault which went to fallback, and then that had a fault so it went to another fallback. It's good that they have multiple levels of fallback and the mission was able to continue, but... not good that there are these unexplained failures, and he thinks NASA shouldn't have let Starliner dock with the ISS.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNfLWZiUkW4 [youtube.com]

  • When will it work reliably, some of us would like to trust it won't kill them?
     

  • Maybe it got there, but barely, with multiple malfunctions. Only the 3rd redundancy worked. Would you fly on that airline?

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