Starliner Free Flight (In)Capability

Chris Gebhardt of NASASpaceFlight.com had a great piece on Starliner’s current status:

The latest confirmed schedules from NASA show the uncrewed mission, dubbed the Orbital Flight Test (OFT), slated for No Earlier Than June 2018, followed quickly in August 2018 by the crewed flight test.

However, comments made by Chris Ferguson last month at the Paris Air Show seem to indicate that the crewed flight test is moving from its August timeframe.

According to Mr. Ferguson, Director of Crew and Mission Operations for Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, the first Starliner crewed test flight is aiming for “last quarter of 2018” – which would be a shift of two to five months into the October to December 2018 timeframe.

Later on in the article:

Here, Mr. Ferguson noted his desire for Starliner to perform the rapid sequence 6 hour launch to docking profile currently employed by Soyuz crew vehicles and Progress uncrewed resupply vehicles from Russia.

At most, Mr. Ferguson stated his desire for Starliner to employ 24-hour launch to docking profiles – due in part to the vehicle’s design, which limits its free flight capability (from launch to docking and then undocking to landing) for an entire mission to just 60 hours.

It seems that Boeing took Charlie Bolden too literally: his oft-heard refrain was that NASA turned over LEO to commercial companies and wanted beyond LEO to itself. Boeing designed and built a vehicle that literally can not fly beyond LEO without help.

SpaceX, on the other hand, built a vehicle with much more capability than was explicitly asked for by NASA—they’re working towards a private lunar free-return flight with Dragon 2 that will most likely piss off certain people within NASA if they do it before Orion can get there with NASA astronauts aboard.

SpaceX took the opportunity to build capability that would be useful—and lucrative—beyond their ISS contract. After all, that is the point of any program aimed to be commercial by name. Boeing built just what was needed and nothing more, and that’s going to haunt them if and when they pursue anything other than NASA crew contracts.

Between the weak free flight capability and the expensive launch vehicle—an Atlas V 422, which means paying for two solid boosters and two RL10 engines—I’m forced to ask again questions I asked long ago: what the hell else is Starliner going to do?