Starliner, Explained (Part 1): Everything you need to know about Boeing's spacecraft

Boeing's cst1 100 Starliner spacecraft is once again preparing to take flight this will be the third launch of the capsule to date but crucially it will be the first time that it carries astronauts on board Commander Butch Wilmore this is a test flight so when you do test you expect to find things and we expect to find things and pilot Sunny Williams this is where the rubber beats the road where we are going to leave this planet and that is pretty darn cool their mission is dubbed the crew flight test it's a journey to not only reunite these seasoned astronauts with the International Space Station but also to prove the capability and Readiness of the Starliner spacecraft to support long duration astronaut missions as part of NASA's commercial crew program this will not be Boeing's first forid to human space flight of course in the future Americans will be thrust into space aboard the world's first reusable man spacecraft the space shuttle in 1996 Boeing acquired the defense and space divisions of Rockwell International for $3.1 billion they're the company that developed and built the six space shuttle orbiters that acquisition also made Boeing a co-owner of United space Alliance the company that operated and processed the shuttle on behalf of NASA they've also had a key hand in the International Space Station itself as well they are our primary sustainer and they're responsible for safety of all the equipment they built plus integrated safety across our entire spacecraft and so the processes that we're talking about that we use together for human space flight um have been around you know we've we've had the vehicle now for 25 years crewed for 23 years and now with Starliner they're preparing to F astronauts to and from the International Space Station once again there's a lot to this story so we're going to break it down into two parts in this first video we're going to talk about the history of Starliner what it is how it came to be and how we got to this point here preparing for the crew flight test and then in the second video we're going to talk exclusively about the crew flight test what it is the full profile of the mission as well as the astronauts preparing to flight and the training that they had to go through but first let's start with perhaps the most basic question what is Starliner the cruise space Transportation or CST 100 Starliner spacecraft is Boeing's designed to FY astronauts to and from the space station it stands about 5 m or 16.5 ft tall when combining the crew module with the service module it has diameter of about 4.6 M or 15 ft the crew module features 12 reaction control system thrusters that can generate 100 lb of force each the service module has 28 slightly less powerful RCS thrusters along with 20 orbital maneuvering and attitude control or omac thrusters that produce 1500 lb of thrust a piece there are also four launch abort engines which can generate 40,000 lb of thrust a piece space flight now was able to take a look at a training mockup of the capsule over at NASA's Johnson Space Center we use this trainer for different aspects primarily with the crew training but we also conduct engineering evaluations as we're uh making design changes maturing them and getting into an integrated system to to you know make sure it works in where it's supposed to you can see we have two seats uh in place there those are seats for our commander where Butch Wilmore will sit and we'll have uh the second seat there for sunny Williams who is our CFT pilot um and then we have some Cargo in seats four and five on that lower roow what we call uh and that's normally where we would be packing cargo while we have crew in the vehicle the seats in this particular configuration of Starliner are focused on the body sizes of Williams and Wilmore for this first crude Mission but as we learned from Nicole Jordan NASA's manager of the commercial crew programs spacecraft office they're designed to be quite adjustable she's been working with these seats for about 8 years this seat is built to be just ultimately adjustable and so one of the easiest ones to see is the seat pan which is what we call this part here you can see right here that it can has a wide range of adjustability and the you can also notice that as you get taller torsos the seat pan drops and that way your eye point is kept the same with respect to the displays and so you're not changing where your eye point is to see the displays as you modify the seat and that's only one of many adjustments but it's one of the easiest to see the crew module is designed for up to 10 flights with the Sur service module designed for a single use before the version of Starliner that will fly the CFT Mission headed out to the Launchpad we caught up with Mark soron inside Boeing's commercial crew and cargo processing facility where we talked about what the fueling process is like we have three different kinds of propellants on the vehicle and then we also have what are called pressurant so think of the pressure the propellant as the stuff that actually goes boom if you will and the pressure is push it right they they allow it to go where it needs go the crew module up top uses hydren alongside Catalyst beds and the thrusters meanwhile the service module uses a combination of nitrogen tetroxide and monomethyl hydren these are typical hypergolic that everybody uses for this kind of stuff very stable all by themselves but you put them in the right mixture at the right time they will explode to fully understand why the Starliner came into being let's dive into an Abridged history of the commercial crew Program start 2 1 there booster aition and liftoff of shut Endeavor as the spa program was drawing to a close NASA needed its own human rated spacecraft in order to stop paying tens of millions of dollars per seat to Russia to fly American astronauts on board a soyu spacecraft NASA was paying an average of $ 56.3 million per seat between 2006 and the launch of Kate Rubin in 2020 the cost per launch Rose notably over the years as America stood without its own ride to space in order to reach the space station we will work with a growing array of private companies competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable the commercial crew program was born out of President Obama's fiscal year 2011 budget lift off of Aries 1X it would supplant the constellation program which only saw one launch in 2009 in May 2010 Phil McAllister one of the architects of commercial crew gave a presentation on behalf of the commercial crew study team in gston Texas in it he outlined NASA's goals for a new commercial transportation system for its astronauts one born out of competition we used and leveraged a lot of the lessons learned a lot of the experience of NASA over the years again we've been talking about doing this for decades so now we're actually doing it and being able to apply those Lessons Learned going forward and if successful we feel that there are significant benefits this could really transform human space flight for future Generations an initial 50 million of funds from the American Recovery and reinvestment act kicked things off in 2010 it was used to fund what was called the commercial crew development round one or CC Dev 1 of that Boeing received 18 million to advance the design of a spacecraft it called the CST 100 the fiscal year 2011 budget came with more money to support CC Dev 2 that contract awarded nearly 270 million across four companies blue origin got $22 million to develop its biconic space vehicle SpaceX received 75 million to develop the launch of boort engines and life support system for the Dragon capsule the Sierra Nevada Corporation received $80 million to work on its Dreamchaser space plane and Boeing received 92.3 million to advance the cst-100 three other companies received unfunded space act agreements Boeing and Sierra Nevada received an additional 20.6 and 25.6 million respectively by achieving pre-negotiated Milestones there will be no turning back once commercial human space flight into low earth orbit is a robust vibrant profit-making commercial Enterprise with many providers and a wide range of private and public users this is the ultimate goal and one that I believe unites us all where there was not Unity was concerning the commercial crew budget the original request by then NASA administrator Charlie Balin was for $1 billion annually it was a point of contention between NASA and Congress especially for those who saw commercial crew as a funding threat to this bace launch system rocket here's just one exchange from a March 2014 house subcommittee hearing discussing the budget for the commercial crew program the committee would indulge me I'd ask everybody to think back to my first hearings in uh when I became the NASA administrator when we started talking about commercial crew at that time we were requesting a billion dollars we requested a billion dollars over the next six years for a total of $6 billion for commercial crew that was based on my estimate and and that of the Augustine committee that said one provider would call cost about $2.5 billion we multiplied it by two and I and I added a billion so that's how I got to 6 billion we got zero the first year the second year we got 525 million at the time we were targeting 2015 for the availability of commercial crew we would Now find ourselves months away from launching Americans from American soil and I wouldn't have to worry about paying the Russians another $450 million over time when I kept coming back to the committee I said if we don't get full funding we're going to slip I came back finally and said we have slipped we now will not have commercial crew available until 2015 2017 and we may not have the competition that I need the committee implored us to down select a one we said please don't make us do that we need competition I think this committee and Congress agrees with you we don't want to be solely relying on the Russians for human access to space I mean we want to launch American astronauts uh from American soil and American rockets and chairman as I said before bus are about choices this committee this Congress chose to rely on the Russians because they chose not to accept the president's recommendation and request for full funding for commercial crew you can't have it both ways well we're getting away from that so I mean to R Congress would once again go on to underfund commercial crew of The 8483 Million requested for fiscal year 2015 NASA only received $800 million but the competition did continue and by September 2014 NASA paired down the companies to SpaceX and Boeing as the awardees of the $6.8 billion commercial crew Transportation capability contract that would include the value of up to six crew rotation flights each to the ISS the Boeing contract award was uh 4.2 billion and the SpaceX award was 2.6 billion now I want to make sure people understand that that contract value is for uh certification so full up certification development and certification efforts including the within the RFP we had a requirement for at least one uh crew demo like a demonstration flight to the ISS with NASA crew members on it um the there's a maximum of six missions under that contract value and uh a certain contract value amount for special studies so it's those three components are all in those um totals that I gave you for Boeing and SpaceX through all of the contracts up to this point Boeing was set to receive $ 44.82 billion in SpaceX 3.14 4 billion for its work on the cst1 100 Boeing opted to take over the space shuttle Orbiter processing facility which is situated next to the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida it was converted to the commercial creu and cargo processing facility or C3 ppf the space allowed for a staged flow of the work being done on the spacecraft and what Engineers would come to describe as a womb to tomb facility we have the privilege of being on the Leading Edge of human space flight and uh frankly it's one of the most important things we do it's one of the most exciting things to we do and arguably the most inspiring thing we do for the Next Generation in 2015 Boeing held a ceremony welcoming press and dignitaries to see the C3 PF and the progress made toward the goal of a 2017 flight it was also during this ceremony where they publicly named to the spacecraft please welcome the CST 100 Starliner through the development and testing phase both Starliner and dragon phm setbacks that pushed back their launch timelines some of these challenges were highlighted in the reports from NASA's office of Inspector General as was the case in 2016 while past funding shortfalls have contributed to the delays technical challenges with the contractor's designs are now driving the schedule for Boe these include issues relating to the effects of vibration generated during launch and issues regarding vehicle Mass a change in capsule designed to enable a water-based landing and related concerns that the capsule could take on excessive water have contributed to delays for SpaceX SpaceX ran into parachute and Thruster problems during its development campaign it had 27 parachute tests with the final one happening on May 1st 2020 less than a month before launching its crew demo 2 mission on May 30th for Starliner back in 2016 Boeing announced the delay of its pad aort test from October 2017 to January 2018 which would ultimately push the uncrewed orbital flight test off of its planned December 2017 date teams were finally able to accomplish the paded boort test on November 4th of 2019 and it paved the way for oft the following month two one and lift off a big milestone came with the first orbital flight test on December 20th 2019 the spacecraft flying on this mission was the third of three Starliner capsules developed the mission began as intended with the liftoff of the atlas 5 rocket at 636 a.m. eastern from Cape Canaveral space force station however not long after spacecraft separation an issue became abundantly apparent there was a problem in the software controlling the internal timer of the space craft that caused it to think it was much further in the mission than it was in reality and that caused it to perform Maneuvers at the wrong time and ultimately missed the orbital insertion burn you know we build a spacecraft right here at the Kennedy Space Center and of course I had I went by before coming here to address the team and yeah these are passionate people who are committing a big chunk of their lives to put Americans back in space from our soil so it's disappointing for us but that doesn't mean we're not going to diagnose it figure out what the right thing to do to go forward whether it's another what kind of next flight test we fly and keep going instead of docking with the International Space Station as intended the starlander spacecraft ended up orbiting the Earth about 33 times before it made a safe landing in the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on December 22nd earlier this year we spoke with Leroy K the deputy Starliner program manager about the mission he says knowing what they know now had the same issue come up but with crew on board they could have reacted even faster than they did back in 2019 so in some ways it's fortuitous that it happened the way it did uh because first we found the problem so we could fix it um and secondly it led us to some other discoveries as we dug deeper post Mission into the what we call rcca or the root cause corrective action um that led us down some other paths where we said you know um similarly these other areas where we have critical timing we want to look at those as well and make sure that we don't have um any issues Boeing and NASA spent the next 2 and a half years working to fully understand what had happened during its fourth quarter earnings statement in late January 2020 Boeing noted that it was setting aside $410 million to conduct a second uncr test flight of Starliner if that's what NASA wanted an independent review team was also convened to study the anomaly and the best path forward my direction to the team was we have to go look at some of the areas between here and Landing where we have some uh similarly uh time critical events in the software where there's handshakes between Hardware software and firmware and I need you guys to come back and convince me that we don't have any issues in those areas uh it turned out we did through the analysis of the jointly L NASA Boeing independent review team or IRT three primary concerns were identified from this first test flight number one an eror with the mission elapse timer caused it to be off by 11 hours which means the spacecraft thought it was in the wrong part of the mission after separation from the Rocket's upper stage number two there was a software issue with the service module disposal sequence that if left unchecked could have caused the service module to collide with the crew module after separation however a software patch was uploaded to prevent this and number three there was an intermittent space to ground forward link issue which made it difficult for the by control team on the ground to control the vehicle and send it commands after we get back on the ground safely and we started to look more closely um it led us to ultimately a a a conclusion that you know we had not done enough what we call Integrated Hardware software integrated testing in our Laboratories as part of our what we call V&V verification validation process our requirements were um to to to validate and verify a lot of our um capabilities by analysis much of it by test but many things all bu analysis and as it turns out we decided bu analysis for some of these things wasn't good enough and we weren't happy with that anymore and even though we were meeting our requirements having done that we took the extra steps to go add a lot more integrated testing as a part of the review NASA also performed an organiz gational safety assessment of Boeing's work on the commercial crew program during a March 6 teleconference Doug Lao NASA's then Associated administrator for human space flight discussed 61 corrective actions that Boeing needed to take however he stopped short of saying that a second test flight would be needed the will we require a test flight uh quite frankly right now we don't know uh we uh the the the findings um and the corrective actions that Boeing has laid out they have to now come back to NASA with a plan of how they're going to go ahead and address all of those uh that plan will have a schedule it will have all of the technical aspects to it it'll have all the details of um of when and how they're going to go ahead and and address them and then NASA will evaluate that plan we'll evaluate the results of their work we will do our own inspection of the results of their work and then we'll be in a position to decide whether or not we need another test flight or not in April 2020 Boeing announced that it would in fact be flying a second uncrewed demonstration of Starliner we've chosen to refly our orbital flight test to demonstrate the quality of the Starliner system Boeing said flying another uncrewed flight will allow us to complete all flight test objectives and evaluate the performance of the second Starliner vehicle at no cost to the taxpayer in July 2020 NASA provided an update on an independent review of oft it gave 80 recommendations for both NASA and Boeing to address issues regarding the software and oversight of the review process NASA officials reiterated the hope to fly of2 in 2020 but it would depend on Boeing's Readiness and the space station availability SpaceX meanwhile Was preparing to fight its first operational mission in November 2020 after the success of its crude demo 2 flight in May of that year by August 2020 Boeing declared it was making quote excellent progress towards of2 the company said the mission could come by December 2020 or January 2021 but by the time December actually rolled around Boeing announced that of2 was pushing to late March 2021 in a statement Boeing said the company is more than 90% complete in closing out all the recommended actions developed by a Joint Nasa and Boeing independent review team even those that were not mandatory ahead of Starliner uncrewed flight test they also noted that while this work was in progress the crew module used on oft was being refurbished while a new crew module was being built for the crew flight test which was targeting summer 2021 at the time in February 2021 a new of2 launch date was announced April 2nd the 8-day delay from March 25th to April 2nd came after a power surge damaged some of Starliner avionics during testing but in March the launch date came under some uncertainty and in May to April the date was pushed again this time to the August or September time frame in a statement Bo said it would be Mission ready in May if there was an earlier opportunity to launch but they were challenged by the availability of the ISS ula's Atlas 5 Launchpad and the Eastern range as luck would have it they were able to find that window of opportunity on July 30th 2021 and now it was all starting to feel tangible the Starliner spacecraft was rolled out of Boeing's commercial crew and cargo processing facility to meet up with its Atlas 5 ride to space it was stacked on top of the rocket and rolled out to the Launchpad but then an issue with Russia's nowc come module Thruster on the ISS caused the launch date to shift to August 3rd prior to that on July 29th the then newly confirmed NASA administrator Bill Nelson said the flight Readiness review went quote smooth as glass he expressed his confidence in the of2 flight while also saying why having two providers for the commercial crew program was always important competition is good not only only for the obvious reasons that it brings about the most efficient productive and cost effective work product but what it does it gives you a backup uh the proofs in the pudding uh years ago when this competition for commercial crew started uh what if we hadn't had two competitors uh and what if it had only been Boeing and so uh right there that's enough demonstration for you of why we want competition trouble reared its head again for Boeing though when they encountered a valve issue in the Starliner service modules propulsion system teams tried to work through the issue while the rocket was out at the Launchpad and then again inside ula's vertical integration facility but both proved unsuccessful Boeing made the call to return Starliner to the C3 PF on August 13th in a Tel conference with press in October of 2021 officials said the launch was being delayed until sometime in the first half of 2022 to allow more time to work on the valve issue we looked at the options um of how to go forward and we felt the best path was proceed with the current service module um by keeping the same service module um and crew module configuration um it's putting us somewhere in the first half of 2022 and um you know of course that's pending spacecraft Readiness uh the availability of the atlas 5 getting a date on a range and of course working with our ISS Partners to um ensure that we've got a port to dock Boeing noted that it was going to take some of the impacted valves to conduct thorough testing at multiple NASA centers and they said it was unclear why they were having an issue now we have seen this propulsion system work successfully it's the same propulsion system that we used during uh our SM our service module hot fire as well as our pad aort test as well as of1 um and had not seen any of these issues so there was no reason to believe that we would uh that we would have a concern here spywood vmer said in October by mid December Boeing decided to take the service module that was going to be used for the crew flight test and instead move it up to the of2 mission the move would allow Boeing an opportunity to finally launch the of2 mission in May of 2022 after extensive analysis the company concluded that moisture got into the oxidizer isolation valves and caused corrosion as NASA and Boeing finally approached the of2 launch day Mark nappy the VP and program manager for Boeing's commercial crew program office said they' done extensive work to understand and mitigate the valve issue at least in the short term uh we do have root cause we know that these these nitrates which are the type of corrosion particles that form inside the Val valve that that made it stick are formed um through the chemical reaction of aluminum which is the body of the valve is made of the nto which is the propellant that we use and some moisture getting into the system so the trick for this flight was to eliminate that moisture and make sure that it doesn't uh it it doesn't cause those nitrates to form and with those changes in place and lift off the of2 mission finally launched on May 19th 2022 an important they were able to make it through the orbital insertion burn and begin the journey to the ISS but as this was a test flight some issues did crop up after a spacecraft separation two thrusters failed the first one uh was had fired it fired for a second and then it shut down uh the flight control system did what what it's supposed to and it turned it over to the second Thruster it fired for about 25 seconds and then it shut down again the flight control system took over did what it was supposed to went to a third Thruster and we had a successful uh or orbal insertion the day after launch Starliner made its approach and finally docked with the ISS it looked beautiful coming in and it was just uh really special to to get to see uh See It come out there and it was uh it was you know once it parked out there on the doorstep for a little while it was almost like it was just giving us a chance to admire it for a little bit longer before uh before finally coming into dock after spending a handful of days on orbit Starliner undocked from the orbiting outpost on May 24th and landed in the Sands of New Mexico on May 25th bringing of2 to a close in a post Landing briefing Steve Stitch NASA's manager of the commercial crew program described some of the similarities between of2 and spacex's UNC crew demo 1 back in March 2019 we had challenges between demo 1 and demo 2 that people may forget about uh we had a major redesign of the propulsion system between demo 1 and demo 2 I I don't I don't see that here uh on what we saw on this flight uh we between demo 1 and demo 2 we did a redesign of the parachute system on Dragon uh again I don't I don't see that here on Starliner relative to these parachutes we've worked with Boeing and done numerous drop tests the parachutes perform fine now 2 and a half years after its first orbital flight test Boeing was finally looking at its first astronaut mission to the ISS the crew flight test after returning the of2 Starliner spacecraft to the Kennedy Space Center in June by August 2022 NASA and Boeing announced their intention of launching the crew flight test in February 2023 that was pushed back to April though in order to accommodate the ISS schedule for things like the docking of the SpaceX Cru 6 Mission the last of its original contract the makeup of the crew flight test changed notably since Boeing astronaut and Mission Commander Chris Ferguson withdrew his name in 2020 citing family considerations I'm deeply committed to human space flight I'm dedicated to the Starliner program and I'm passionate about the team that has built her but next year is very important for my family I have made several commitments which I simply cannot risk missing I'm not going anywhere I'm just not going into space next year the Boeing team has been very understanding the crew is doing wonderfully and thank you for your understanding too we'll delve more into the full evolution of the crew in our next video but lero Kane said in the run up to CFT Boeing was moving into doing some great work with the final crew selected for the mission Nas astronauts Butch Wilmore and sunny Williams that time frame is where we really ramped up the crew engagement our plan was always that we had about a year or 18 months before when we planed to launch CFT we would have more flight crew engage more regular flight crew engagement with the with the larger team they' always been there and and working um behind the scenes but more engagement with the larger team to include a lot of these large integrated activities that we do where we have the Boeing Mission Control Center to United launch Alliance control center that at the ASO in Florida um the flight control team here in Houston um our mission support team here in Houston we have these very large integrated activities that the crew was now part of at the end of March NASA and Boeing announced yet another delay to the mission this time to no earlier than July 21st 2023 in his remarks Steve Stitch said they were still going over the abort procedures and he added that there was also still work needed to be done to validate the data for the parachute system on board Starliner at this time there's really no uh issues or concerns with the parachute system uh those the parachutes are installed in the vehicle they're in good shape it's just a matter of going through all that data and and looking at the data and making sure we're really ready to go fly safely he noted that they would also perform one last ground test that involves the shoots connected to the forward heat shield cover it is used to actually remove the cover off the very top of the Starliner spacecraft that then exposes the the other parachute systems to deploy and we're going to do a test at the highest possible uh regime that it could see in an abort uh part of the flight and so we'll do that test on the ground and just to make sure that system can deploy properly fast forward to June and another issue popped up this time from one of Boeing's suppli in a statement Boeing said we were notified by the parachute supplier of an issue identified through testing that reduced our safety margin our engineering team provided additional analysis and given that we determined the safest course of action was to stand down for the July launch opportunity the announcement came on the heels of NASA's Aerospace safety advisory panel expressing its concerns with the timeline in its official minutes the panel wrote that it is imperative that NASA not succumb to the pressure even unconsciously to get CFT launched without adequately addressing all the remaining impediments to certification in a June 1st teleconference Boeing officials said two issues were found late in the verification process the first had to do with the so-called soft Links of the parachutes and the other was an extensive amount of flammable tape found within the spacecraft we found them because our process is rigorous we found them late because those elements of the process by definition they come at the end of the process so that's just the way it works nevertheless the less doesn't ever make you feel good all these delays over the years not only impacted the potential astronaut fight schedule for NASA but also Boeing's bottom line after the valve issue was discovered back in the summer of 2021 Boeing's Q3 financial statement noted a $185 million hit from the Starliner program stacked on the original $410 million estimate to fly out the of2 mission that brought the overrun to $595 million during the 2022 Q2 earnings call Boeing noted a $93 million charge quote primarily driven by launch manifest updates and additional costs associated with of2 the total cost now ballooned to $688 million the trend continued though following the 2022 2 Q3 earnings call a filing with the Security and Exchange Commission pointed to another $195 million loss reflecting increases to estimated costs related to completing the crew flight tests losses now stood at $883 Million by the time the latest announcement of delays came related to the flammable tape and the parachute concerns Boeing's 2023 Q2 earnings statement reflected another $250 million hit that brought the total to to more than $1.1 billion in delay related losses during an update on August 7th 2023 NASA Steve Stitch sounded optimistic about the progress made to address the tape and parachute concerns he noted that a number of independent review Systems had also been put in place an independent team within Boeing to look at all the areas that were previously closed out NASA's chief engineer reined every subsystem manager and NASA's chief engineer his deputy and the head of the NASA engineering and safety Center all worked with technical experts to review the major issues still remaining for flight we did brief this plan to the Aerospace safety advisory panel last week and they were they were pleased with our plan of independent reviews and they felt like this was exactly what we both we wanted to do on the NASA side the Boeing side and then as also pointed out by the Aerospace safety advisory panel during that teleconference they announced March 2024 as the new CFT Target date by October 2023 NASA detered that actually April was a better month for the ISS schedule Leroy Kane said to tackle the parachute issue the team decided to move up the parachutes originally intended for Starliner 1 to instead be used on the CFT mission in early January NASA and Boeing conducted a final drop test to validate the adjustment back in the fall when we made that decision uh we already put the steps in place to ensure that we would then have the next set of shoots which will now be for Starliner one and and they're not even on the critical path for Starliner one in 2025 Boeing also managed to remove about a Mile's worth of the problematic tape from within the spacecraft or otherwise negate it as an impacting factor and now in may 2024 Starliner is once again back on top of an atlas 5 rocket it is finally poised to launch the first crude Mission roughly a decade after its selection by NASA to work alongside the SpaceX crew dragon and as for Kane a man who worked with the shuttle missions going back to S ts26 the return to flight following the Challenger disaster the weight of this crude flight test is very much within him the hardest thing to do is get that first inch off the ground and I know how hard that is even now when I watch missions that aren't ours that but that were interested in because we're we're you know involved even if just tangentially when I watch space walks I mean it makes my palm sweat um that'll never go away from me I know too much and and and so that's part of what you just have to understand that's required in this business and if you don't feel that way then you don't understand it well enough be sure to stay tuned for part two of this two-part Series in which we'll introduce you to the crew in full of the CFT Mission the training that they had to go through as well as talk about the full mission profile in its entirety from liftoff to landing and until then for space light now I'm Robinson Smith we'll see you on the next one for

Channel: Spaceflight Now

Views: 106,753

Keywords:

Id: j_cloqobD0I

Length: 36min 46sec (2206 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024