Boeing To Give A Second Shot To Its Starliner Capsule Through An Unmanned Test Mission To The ISS
It is well known that Boeing is the major player in space. Boeing is constantly facing many problems, setbacks, and legal issues in the past. After the emergence of space X, Boeing has been facing many issues of the past. Space X has been founded by Elon Musk. But on Friday Boeing is gonna rebuilt its aura and reputation. This Friday Boeing will try to do an uncrewed test of its Starliner astronaut capsule to the ISS. ISS means international Space station and it is a major thing for space companies. But the rival Space X which is a main in NASA’s Commercial Crew program has already trained three astronaut missions and is way ahead of Boeing.
The starliner chief John Vollmer said that this mission is of real importance for us. He told that the hard work of 18 months is being tested now. For them, this is a very serious issue and they are taking it in that way. The CST-1 Starliner capsule will launch soon and it’s humanless and pod-designed as well. The process is simple as it will launch without humans on Friday, go in space, and dock in the International Space Station (ISS) for ten days and after going through the earth’s atmosphere again it will come home back to the earth. It will land in the hot Mexican desert that means landing will be safer and it won’t harm the human race at all.
The first orbital test of Boeing was done in December 2019 and it has given immense confidence to the management, but at that time company was facing some crisis so it took a long time to come here and launch this again in 2021. Moreover that CEO, Dennis Muilenburg is confident of the clean launch of the vehicle, He told that a clean launch can bring the fortunes back for Boeing. He spoke to the NASA officials before the liftoff at Kennedy Space Center.
In 2019 Starliner failed and didn’t reached the ISS but instead reversed and came back to the Mexican desert after two days. This was due to series of software failures just after the launch. There was an unexpected blackout that prevented the mission control from making things better or taking the remote manual control of the vehicle.
NASA and Boeing both established an independent team of investing officials and veteran engineers to investigate the causes of the failure and thus recommended about 80 fixes in which 61 was to Boeing’s software and 19 was direct to the capsule. Since then Boeing has been extra conscious of its software checks and validations. The starliner’s communication system was updated and Boeing bought new software from Space X which helped them a lot.
Since Boeing is private and its costs are also fixed, Boeing is at higher risk this time, there is a lot of pressure from peers NASA, Space X, Blue Origin, and Russia. It would be really interesting to see how things go this time, let’s hope for the best and we will keep you updated for sure
