NASA Further Delays First Operational Starliner Flight

NASA will rely on SpaceX's Crew Dragon for two crewed missions to the ISS in 2025 while evaluating whether Boeing's Starliner requires another test flight for certification. SpaceNews reports: In an Oct. 15 statement, NASA said it will use Crew Dragon for both the Crew-10 mission to the ISS, scheduled for no earlier than February 2025, and the Crew-11 mission scheduled for no earlier than July. Crew-10 will fly NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers along with astronaut Takuya Onishi from the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. NASA has not yet announced the crew for the Crew-11 mission.

Earlier this year, NASA had hoped that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner would be certified in time to fly the early 2025 mission. Problems with the Crew Flight Test mission, which launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, led NASA to conclude in July that the spacecraft would not be certified in time. It delayed that Starliner-1 mission from February to August 2025, moving up Crew-10 to February. NASA also announced then that it would prepare Crew-11 in parallel with Starliner-1 for launch in that August 2025 slot. "The timing and configuration of Starliner's next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing's path to system certification is established," NASA said in its statement about the 2025 missions. "NASA is keeping options on the table for how best to achieve system certification, including windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025."

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[saloomy]

Adm. Levine? For Diversity? ULA has you covered: https://www.ulalaunch.com/care... [ulalaunch.com]

Or are you referring to military in leadership? Because ULA has you covered there too: https://www.ulalaunch.com/care... [ulalaunch.com]

Ditch Boeing ASAP

[backslashdot]

And please get rid of SLS. Cancel it now. Call your congresscritter and insist on it. I am serious. That thing is a cancer. The money should go to Stoke Space, Blue Origin, Relativity Space, Rocket Lab, Astra, Firefly, SpaceX, homeless guy down the street etc. Flush it down any toilet but Boeing's.

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[Randseed]

I've often wondered whether from a medium-term cost-benefits analysis we should be concentrating on something like near-Earth asteroid mining and creating a moon base. In the short term, double down on SpaceX since they have something that mostly works. Get some infrastructure up there that can refine, process, and manufacture equipment. The major cost right now is getting out of the Earth's gravity well, so the more that we can do out of it the better. I'm probably not explaining this well because it's 4AM