Boeing's Starliner Is Delayed Another Year - Were the Alternatives Better?

hello it's scott manley here since july the situation with boeing starliner spacecraft has gone from bad to worse if you remember back in july it was going to be one of four long-awaited space flight projects that we're finally getting to take off we had virgin galactic and blue origin both flying the passengers for the first time we had the russian nauka module for the space station launching and right at the very end of the month nasa had scheduled starliner to complete its second orbital flight test to the space station if you remember it had to cancel it had to do a second orbital flight test after the first orbital flight test never reached the space station largely due to software problems so in the days before starliners launched they were going to have to wait for the nauka module to get to the space station and they had technical problems it was delayed when it got there there was a unplanned thruster firing that caused the space station to perform a backflip and all that time starliner's launch is getting pushed to you know pushed backwards but then as they're getting ready to launch they find a problem with a number of valves inside the propulsion system these valves were stuck they wouldn't move and they couldn't solve this problem from the control room so they moved the vehicle back into the integration facility looked inside it couldn't solve the problem there and they have since demated starliner and its uh centaur upper stage and that booster was just used this weekend to launch lucy to the trojans so this is clearly a problem they've spent a lot of time looking at it and now we've heard that the technical problems with the propulsion system will likely mean that they don't get a second orbs off light test until mid 2022 which is like seven years after the first you know operational test flight was supposed to happen although to be fair several years of that delay are due to congress playing silly buggers with the funding for it now um we do know that the problem with the valves is that you know there's moisture had leaked into the far side of the valves and reacted with the oxidizer causing corrosion you know nitric acid can form from the oxidizers used and that has damaged the valves and so that's unfortunate the real question is how did the water get in there and that's something they haven't quite figured out they don't know how how to remedy this it could actually just be a software problem it could be that some procedure went in the wrong way and water was allowed to ingress in through reaction control thrusters or something or it could be something else you know we don't really know and that's why they're looking at mid next year for flying this meanwhile in the last couple of weeks nasa has sort of lost patience somewhat and has reassigned two of the astronauts who were assigned to starliner back in a big press event in 2018 where they announced the cruise for these new spacecraft two of them nicole mann and john casada have been shifted off of starliner onto crew 5 which is going to be a spacex dragon spacecraft launched about a year from now in the fall of 2022 these are both rookie astronauts and it's clear to me that nasa really would like to get their rookies some space flight experience the crew that are remaining on starliner are largely veterans with the exception of jeanette epps although i do know that there are two spare seats on crew 4 and crew 5 which are being left open in case russia wants to actually participate in a seat exchange but i wouldn't be surprised if she ends up flying on one of those two flights but the fact that they've taken two people off of starliner and moved them to fall of 2022 tells me that we're not seeing a crude flight demo of uh starliner until late 2022 and then a an operational flight's definitely not happening until 2023 because they want to have them like six months apart from the crew dragon flights so that is not good and yes okay everyone's gonna be like oh boy what happened to you like yeah look what's not often talked about is what options were available what what things did we miss out on because this was part of the commercial crew development program ultimately it started with commercial crew development which was launched in 2009 back the new administration came in and they were very much committed to making sure that privately funded space flight was a thing so they began expanded the commercial cargo you know commercial uh orbital transportation services to now include crew back in 20 2009 and a lot of companies came forward like dozens of companies came forwards right uh the i mean there's obviously the well-known ones you get spacex boeing ula orbital sciences sierra nevada blue origin but there was a long tale of other companies you may have forgotten right x-core aerospace andrew's base t-space planet space not all of these were proposals for fuel vehicles some of these were just a proposal seeking money to develop you know supporting hardware for example ula wanted uh money to man rate or human rate the uh atlas v paragon space they wanted money to develop life support systems that could be used by other uh other participants so the first actual monetary awards happened in 2010 and yes ula got money for human rating the atlas 5. there was about 18 million dollars to develop starliner 20 million dollars to develop dream chaser um blue origin had a capsule that they were talking about which so they get money to develop the launch abort system and the composite pressure vessel for their design and paragon got some money for life support so a year later they actually picked four full full up vehicles for proper development right and the four that were picked were obviously sierra nevada the spacex dragon boeing starliner and blue origin's biconic space vehicle crew capsule design which would have flown on a rocket powered by clusters of the be4 engines used in new shepard now they did a lot of wind tunnel testing on this biconnect capsule i know that um i don't know anything about it it's a complete mystery what this thing would look like other than it's called a biconic capsule which you know usually implies certain geometry and certain landing systems so the next round blue origin would be eliminated and when it came time to actually write the contracts for flights to the space station dream chaser didn't make the cut and that left boeing and spacex but that 2011 round included a lot of interesting stuff that didn't make the cut now a couple of them did actually continue developing their vehicle uh with unfunded space act agreements where they would get cooperation from nasa but no actual money atk was continuing with their liberty rocket so liberty was very much a modification of the aries one design they had a five section shuttle booster as a first stage and the second stage was a hydrogen fueled stage now on the on the aries that would be propelled by a j2x engine on the liberty that would use a pair of vulcan engines which are the european engines used in the first stage of the ariane so so they also had their own capsule but they were very much making it clear that they could put any spacecraft on top of that just in case one of the other competitors or proposers wanted to fly their spacecraft on something that had already been declared incredibly dangerous the other one that was interesting was or the other one that was unfunded but continued with an agreement was excalibur almas which is a british company or was a british company based in the isle of man and they were big into promoting space tourism and they'd actually bought a bunch of old russian hardware from the soviet era almaz project they had a pair of va reentry capsules this these were the capsules that were designed to fly on the proton rocket and they were designed to be reusable reentry capsules funny thing about the va on the proton was that the lift weight of the proton was so big that they thought they might as well put two capsules on there and that meant that only the top capsule would have a launch escape system so any crew in the bottom one would die if the rocket exploded yeah so unfortunately yeah that that continued but it never really went anywhere i believe the company is now defunct and the hardware is hopefully headed for museums because that's kind of cool stuff now there were three other proposals that didn't even want to continue orbital sciences who of course developed the cygnus spacecraft and the antares they had the prometheus space plane and that was very similar to dreamchester both dreamchaser and prometheus were derived from the hl-20 lifting body space plane and that itself is largely derived from the russian bar design which is another space plane that would have been kind of cool and interesting prometheus i guess its distinction between the dream chaser was that it doesn't have a service module so it would birth directly to the space station it also had much larger wings so i guess it could glide better um the next one was t space so transformational space they had us their spacecraft called the cvx and they've been pitching their commercial space capsules since like 2005 or even earlier they had a lot of ideas for the uh the new plans for space that followed the um followed the columbia disaster and one of their designs they have a video showing their capsule the crew capsule being carried on its side under an aircraft and then dropped flipping into the vertical using a parachute and then flying to space from there that is a ridiculously weird process but other than that it's a pretty generic uh space capsule finally there was the united space alliance they were proposing let's just keep flying the space shuttle except we'll take on more responsibility so the united space alliance was a corporation that was spun up essentially to be to handle all the myriad of contracts that were supporting the space shuttle you know you had all these contractors all over the country and having nasa deal directly with them they decided to create an umbrella corporation that would deal with all these companies and nasa would just deal with this usa corporation so it wasn't like some random person saying we'll just continue to fly the space shuttle this was the same company that had largely been responsible now i know a lot of people who keep saying oh we should have just kept flying the space shuttle instead of putting people on soyuz and look i understand the space shuttle was an amazing vehicle in all sorts of ways and yes it had been declared too dangerous and people had wanted to stop it flying and bush had basically said stop flying it by 2010 but look you couldn't continue to fly the space shuttle as a ferry vehicle for the space station and the reason for this is the space shuttle had only about a few weeks of on-orbit endurance it would dock to the space station and it could it would have to leave after a few weeks so if it flew up any crew they could only stay up there for a few weeks rather than like six months at a time they had they couldn't leave people on the space station because then they would have no return vehicle if there was an emergency the only returned vehicles that were flying at that time were soyuz so if you wanted to fly people to the space station on the space shuttle you would also have to fly up a soyuz and dock it to the space station and have it there waiting to take people home uh so you could actually put them i guess in the you know cargo bay of the space shuttle or you could launch them on an r7 which was already developed so if you're launching soyuz why launch them empty when you could just put crew in them so that was why the space shuttle would never make sense as a ferry vehicle but look it's very clear that of all the different options there wasn't really a serious alternative other than perhaps the the dream chaser and frankly i love the dream chaser i think it looks beautiful i really want to see it fly it's i hope it works well as a cargo spacecraft because it has many benefits but i also see that getting that crew rated would be eve a much bigger risk than trying to get starliner crew rated even even in retrospect i think that it's probably still the right decision but yeah i don't know about blue origin of course blue origins are complete unknown like i don't know if this capsule still exists as an internal project and might fly on new glenn yeah you never know you know there's another thing about starling that's worth covering and that's it's space tourism potential because of course spacex is flying passengers to space now they're flying a crew to the space state a private crew to the space station early next year on axiom one early on in starliner's inception boeing announced with great fanfare that they would have a fifth seat on board for a private passenger that could fly on nasa flights and that sounds like a great idea but it doesn't actually work in principle first of all i don't think anybody's gonna fly the starliner to orbit for private events largely because it's more expensive than dragon and doesn't appear to offer anything better the fifth seat i don't think any passengers are going to use that because if you have if you go up to the space station the star line are supposed to stay for six months and private passengers aren't going to be on the station for six months i i think that's highly unlikely so the only option would be if a starliner goes to the space station and there's another starliner waiting at the space station to take that crew home and then the passenger can transfer over so it's a very niche option however as i pointed out it's very likely that starliner is not going to fly until early 2023 and that means that they're contracted for six flights spacex will have flown five flights by that point so having two starliners overlap is not actually a ridiculous proposition on the other hand i think it's more likely at that point that nasa might just pay to fly an extra astronaut and find a way of basically giving more money to boeing i'm scott manley fly safe [Music] you

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 546,473

Keywords:

Id: OM2UpLIpRhI

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021