Boeing's Problem Child Says 'Yeah but for Real This time'

NASA will hopefully send off the Boeing Starliner for the first time on May 17th, at 18:16 Eastern time, hopefully showing crowd's Boeing's heavy lift combo in actual launch circumstances.

The Starliner's first launch was supposed to take place on May 9th, but an issue nestled within the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket canceled the entire flight. For Astronauts Sun Williams and Butch Wilmore, it was a nice little dress rehearsal, letting them get snuggled in with preflight jitters until the voice crackled over the comms with the good/bad news that they would in fact be sleeping in their own beds that night... if they didn't have to stay in quarantine, that is. Instead, Wilmore and Williams have remained cloistered inside club NASA, waiting for their ride to be repaired. That day ended with NASA rolling back the Starliner and Atlas V to replace a faulty valve, which apparently continued to exhibit some anomalous behavior for some time afterward.

In a post-mission debrief, NASA said that the problem valve showed 'oscillating behavior' in the sunup to launch, with oscillations recurring twice more during fuel removal operations. After checking into the valve's history, data signatures, and running all the risk modeling, the United Launch Alliance determined the valve could not stay, and set about swapping it out for a new iteration.

As such, the May 17th date is better understood as the earliest it will launch, since the actual time to push could be moved for maintenance or weather requirements. So while it's not quite a "really-real-no-we're-serious-it'll-work-for-sure this time" date, it's fairly likely that the mission will be a 'go', which Boeing hopes will exorcize a few years of embarrassments surrounding the Starliner program. Boeing has had to stamp out issues and problems all over the program, which wouldn't ordinarily be a big deal for a clean-sheet spacecraft, but SpaceX has brought some much-needed competition to the sector - and their candid, open approach to debugging their failures in the public eye seems to go far in defusing the shame a botched rocket launch. In comparison, Boeing seems to be the aloof government contractor, imperiously issuing curt post-hoc excuses in place of SpaceX's breezy, down-to-earth tweets.

FMI: www.nasa.gov