The teardrop-shaped CST-100 Starliner’s rendezvous with the orbital research outpost, currently home to a crew of seven, took place nearly 26 hours after the capsule’s launch. from the US space base at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Starliner lifted off on Thursday atop an Atlas V rocket provided by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin United Launch Alliance (ULA) joint venture and reached its scheduled preliminary orbit 31 minutes later despite the failure of two onboard boosters.
Boeing said the two faulty boosters pose no risk to the rest of the spaceflight, which comes after more than two years of costly delays and technical failures in a program designed to give NASA another vehicle to send its astronauts into space. orbit.
The docking with the ISS took place at 8:28 p.m. EDT (0028 GMT Saturday) as the two vehicles flew over the southern Indian Ocean for a distance of 271 miles (436 km), according to commentators on an online broadcast. direct link by NASA.
A ROCKY ROAD TO ORBIT
The outcome of this flight was very important, as the first test flight carried out at the end of 2019 almost ended in the loss of the vehicle following a software problem which prevented the spacecraft from reaching the space station.
Later problems with Starliner’s propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne, led Boeing to cancel a second attempt to launch the capsule last summer.
The Starliner was grounded for another nine months as the two companies argued over what caused the fuel valves to stick and which company to fix them, Reuters reported last week.
Boeing said it has finally resolved the issue with a temporary workaround and plans a redesign after this week’s flight.
In addition to investigating the cause of two boosters failing shortly after Thursday’s launch, Boeing said it was monitoring some unexpected behavior detected with the Starliner’s thermal control system, but capsule temperatures remained stable.
“It’s all part of the learning process for operating Starliner in orbit,” Boeing mission commentator Steve Siceloff said on the NASA webcast.
The capsule is due to leave the space station on Wednesday for a return flight to Earth, which will end with an airbag-softened parachute landing in the New Mexico desert.
Success is seen as essential for Boeing as the Chicago-based company struggles to emerge from successive crises in its airliner business and space defense unit. The Starliner program alone has cost nearly $600 million in engineering setbacks since the 2019 mishap.
If all goes well with the current mission, the Starliner could fly its first crew of astronauts to the space station as early as fall.
For now, the only passenger is a research dummy, oddly named Rosie the Rocketeer and dressed in a blue flight suit, strapped into the commander’s seat who collects data on the crew’s cabin conditions during the voyage, plus 800 pounds (363 kg) of cargo delivering the space station.
The orbital platform is currently occupied by a crew of three NASA astronauts, an Italian astronaut from the European Space Agency and three Russian cosmonauts.
Since resuming crewed flights to orbit from US soil in 2020, nine years after the end of the space shuttle program, the US space agency has had to rely solely on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon capsules, Elon Musk’s company, to make NASA astronauts travel.
Previously, the only other option to reach the orbiting laboratory was to hitchhike in Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
(This story corrects metric conversion in paragraph 15)