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Cake day: June 10th, 2023
  • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksMtoSpaceflight@sh.itjust.works•The ISS is nearing retirement, so why is NASA still gung-ho about Starliner?English
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    7 hours ago

    Dissimilar redundancy is a good idea, but so far it’s been Dragon providing redundancy for Starliner, not the other way around.

    Musk has long had an appetite to move on from the Dragon program and pivot more of SpaceX’s resources to Starship, the company’s massive next-generation rocket.

    While SpaceX want to shift from Dragon to Starship at some point, I doubt Gwynne Shotwell would let the Dragon program end prematurely, especially if there are still customers.

    The next Starliner flight will probably transport only cargo to the ISS, not astronauts. But NASA hasn’t made any final decisions on the matter.

    One drawback of flying a Starliner cargo mission is that it will use up one of United Launch Alliance’s remaining Atlas V rockets currently earmarked for a future Starliner crew launch. That means Boeing would have to turn to another rocket to accomplish its full contract with NASA, which covers up to six crew missions.

    So, who would pay to crew-rate this “other rocket” (presumably Vulcan)? Would Boeing pay for that?

    Stich said NASA is looking at transferring the rights for any of the agency’s commercial crew missions that don’t fly to ISS over to the commercial space stations.

    That sounds like a good move for NASA, but I’m not sure that Boeing want to continue Starliner.

    Kelly Ortberg, who took over as Boeing’s CEO last year, told CNBC in April that the company planned “more missions on Starliner” and said work to overcome the thruster issues the spacecraft encountered last year is “pretty straightforward.”

    “We know what the problems were, and we’re making corrective actions,” Ortberg said. “So, we hope to do a few more flights here in the coming years.”

    The Boeing CEO isn’t going to come out and say “yeah, Starliner is a business failure, we wish we hadn’t done it”, but that seems to be what Boeing’s actions imply. “A few more flights” doesn’t sound like Boeing are hustling for non-NASA customers, or that they would even be open to the prospect. If a program like Polaris or Axiom tried to purchase flights on Starliner, would Boeing be interested in selling?

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