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NASA saftety panel raises doubts about Boeing Starliner test flight schedule.
[SpaceNews] NASA and Boeing announced Aug. 28 that the OFT-2 mission would launch no earlier than December. It will be followed by a Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, with three astronauts from NASA and Boeing on board, no earlier than June 2021. If those missions fly as scheduled and are successful, Starliner could begin regular crew rotation missions to the International Space Station at the end of 2021.

That schedule, though, is subject to resolving recommendations by a joint NASA-Boeing independent review team that investigated the problems with the OFT mission. That team provided 61 recommendations, primarily dealing with spacecraft software and “mission data loads” for Starliner. It later provided 19 additional recommendations involving a communications problem Starliner experienced during the OFT mission.

McErlean said of the 61 original recommendations, 27 were classified as “mandatory” to resolve before the next mission, while 13 were “highly recommended” to resolve before the next flight and the other 21 were considered a lower priority. Of the additional 19 recommendations, 15 were considered mandatory and 1 highly recommended.

However, he said, “Boeing has committed and is working towards correcting all of these items prior to OFT-2.” That requires, he said, working with the independent review team to both fully understand the recommendation and to ensure that corrective actions meet the intent of the recommendation.

That effort involves “a very intense and significant amount of work,” he said. “We continue to worry, and show a source of concern, as to whether or not their progress towards final resolution will, in fact, meet the current evolved schedule.”
In comments it becomes obvious most of the problems are software related. Most of the current solutions problems for the 737Max are software related too and Boeing has been working that problem for 2 years so NASA is a bit low on faith in their ability to deliver with older software design methodologies common at Boeing. In the comments alternate second sources are discussed. Problems with all of those are NASA's crew safety requirements and paperwork. One would think NASA could just have add one additional port at a location where something as big as StarShip could dock. Then in an emergency when they needed lots of material or people they could just contract with SpaceX for a StarShip flight or with several of the other companies with non-NASA-human certified spaceships for a flight and have the NASA passengers sign a waiver. Non-NASA-human certified for ISS include: Dream Chaser(Sierra Nevada Corp), Orion(Lockheed) and StarShip(SpaceX).

Posted by: 3dc 2020-10-05
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=583978