WASHINGTON — NASA says the first crewed launch of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle remains on schedule for the middle of April as the company completes work to resolve the latest technical problems with the vehicle.
Speaking at a Nov. 20 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee, Phil McAlister, director of the agency’s commercial space division, said preparations for the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission were on schedule for a launch as soon as April 14.
“We are on track for that launch,” he said. “We’ve still got a lot of things to do, obviously.”
He said NASA and Boeing had closed out all the work on all the issues from Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2, the second uncrewed test flight of the spacecraft in May 2022. They have also completed 98% of the “cert products,” or certification paperwork, needed for CFT.
The mission, which will fly NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station for a stay of at least eight days, had been scheduled to take place this year after the completion of OFT-2. However, NASA and Boeing said in August they were delaying the mission to no earlier than March 2024 to resolve two problems found during preparations for CFT: removing tape in wire harnesses in the capsule that is flammable and redesigning “soft links” in the spacecraft’s parachutes to increase their safety margin.
McAlister said he believed that the tape remediation work was complete. Boeing, in a statement to SpaceNews, confirmed that the company had removed more than 1,300 meters of the tape from the Starliner capsule. The company also wrapped the flammable tape in some areas with a non-flammable tape or covered it with a “non-flammable multi-layer fabric sleeve.”
“We went zone by zone and identified all the tape and what would be the risk to removing the tape,” Dave McCann, Boeing’s chief engineer for the Starliner program, said in the…
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