WASHINGTON — NASA and Boeing say they are working towards the first crewed flight of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft in early May, a final milestone before the vehicle is cleared for regular flights to the International Space Station.
At a series of briefings March 22, NASA and Boeing officials said preparations for the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission are proceeding well, with a launch scheduled for no earlier than May 1. That schedule is driven by the ISS manifest of visiting vehicles, which earlier this month delayed the mission from late April.
That mission will send NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the station, where they will spend about eight days before returning to land in the southwestern United States. The flight will take place nearly two years after a second uncrewed flight test, OFT-2, that also docked with the station.
“The CFT flight is really the introduction of crew into our vehicle systems, so a lot of our flight test objectives are about how that interface will work,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and Starliner program manager at Boeing. “It’s all about, does the vehicle perform with the human in the loop as expected?”
Those test objectives range from the performance of the spacecraft’s life support systems to the use of manual controls to operate the spacecraft should automated systems fail. Wilmore and Williams will test the ability to manually control and orient the spacecraft during a day-long flight to the ISS, and test maneuvering during a 6.5-hour trip from the station back to the ground.
“It’s a test pilot’s dream, if you will, everything that we’re doing from start to finish,” said Wilmore at another briefing.
CFT will be the final major milestone before NASA formally certifies the spacecraft for crew rotation flights, starting with the Starliner-1 mission in early 2025. “OFT-2 was the path to the Crew Flight Test, and this Crew Flight Test is the path to…
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