Cites Issues With Spacecraft's Abort Engines

Boeing will not attempt an uncrewed test flight of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle until very late this year or early in 2019, according to the program's project manager.

In a conference call with reporters, John Mulholland said that the first manned flight for the Starliner will not happen until mid-2019 at the earliest, according to a report from SpaceNews, which did not participate in the call but obtained a recording of the session for "selected members of the media." Mulholland said that the reason for the delay is a problem with the abort engines that cropped up during a static fire test in June at NASA's White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.

“During the startup of that test, all engines responded nominally,” Mulholland said. “At approximately one and a half seconds, we issued shutdown commands to the engines, and several of the abort engine valves failed to fully close.” That caused hypergolic propellant to leak from the engines, but did not damage the test article, he added.

“We are confident we identified the root cause and are implementing corrective actions now,” he said, not specifying what that root cause was. The corrective actions include both “minor design changes” and operational changes, he said, “that we believe will allow those valves to fully close with significant margin in all potential operational scenarios.”

Mulholland said that Boeing has also adjusted the schedule for other key tests "to optimize the program flow."

The Boeing executive said that he believes the updated schedule is "realistic", but did admit that there could be further delays."

(Image from file)

FMI: Original report