The first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner reusable spacecraft planned for July 21 was canceled Thursday night after teams found two new issues with the capsule.
A parachute line failure threat and the discovery that tape wrapping critical engine wires is a fire risk have grounded the spacecraft indefinitely, Boeing leadership said in a press conference Thursday.
Boeing’s design center in Huntsville designed the Starliner structure and the company’s Phantom Works division, which has an operation in Huntsville, built the power systems.
Mark Nappi, Starliner program manager, said the team found problems with the parachute system and the tape that covers electrical wires on the spacecraft. He described both as new issues that cropped up and the company has spent the last week studying.
The parachute issue centers on small fabric sections called “soft links” in the lines that go from the capsule to the chutes. “They were tested recently because of a discovery we found during the review process where we believed that the data was recorded incorrectly and we possibly had a lower failure load limit than we previously had understood,” Nappi said. “We tested those and, sure enough, they did fail at the lower limit.”
That decreased the safety factor “pretty significantly,” Nappi said. “The issue was found, it was tested and validated and what we need to go work on is is there any recovery from this.”
The second issue also discovered “very late, a couple of days old,” was with the tape that wraps wire harnesses in the capsule protecting the wire from contact that could cause a short.
“That tape was tested late in the process, and it was determined to be flammable,” Nappi said. “There’s some ambiguity in the specifications on the use of that tape; regardless we have used it quite extensively on Starliner and so we needed to address the fact that tape is flammable.”
The crew has worked on both issues for a week, Nappi said, and “decided to stand down the preparation for the (crewed flight test) mission in order to correct these problems.” Nappi said. The crew and NASA understood and support the decision.
“It’s highly unlikely that we would go in and cut this tape off,” Nappi said, because there are “hundreds” of feet of it inside the capsule. Boeing is instead looking at “essentially another type of wrapping over the existing tape in the most vulnerable areas that reduces the risk of fire hazard.”
Starliner has flown twice without a crew, the last time in May 2022. This flight was to have carried astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station.