Vocal Voices

Manages to launch and get on track to the ISS.

The bad news? The Starliner has 4 clusters of 3 attitude jets on it. On one of those pods, 2 of the three jets have failed. OK they can get by on one. For now.

I guess that has nixed the Starliner Crew mission for 2022. It's going to take them 6 months to investigate that and then they will need to reschedule the launch. Meanwhile ULA Atlas rockets continue to dwindle. Atlas rockets use Russian RD180 rocket motors and there are no more to be had. As each launch throws away the RD180, that resource is dwindling fast.

I guess they could always ask SpaceX for a lift...

Now docked at the ISS.

Although the docking ring would not open fully the first time and they had to close it and try again.

The Atlas V is due to retire in 2022/3 and the RD-180s needed to see it to end of life were pre-ordered and delivered. There are enough to see it through its planned missions - no big deal and definitely not a failure.

Also in 2022/3 the newer Vulcan-Centaur system will come online. It will use the Aerojet Rocketdyne RL-10C-X. It's evolution in action.

Things might not have gone as planned, few things so complex ever do, it is why we test, test, then test some more, but, as NASA says, a lot of useful data was received to now be analysed.

The capsule landed safely, as was expected, and Rosie the Rocketeer was unharmed.

Vulcan Centaur uses a BE4 from Blue Origin for the vulcan and the Centaur upper stage uses the Aerojet Rocketdyne.

The Vulcan booster has a 5.4 m (18 ft) outer diameter to support the Blue Origin BE-4 engines' liquid methane fuel.[20] In September 2018, after a competition with the Aerojet Rocketdyne AR1, the BE-4 was selected to power Vulcan's first stage.

Starliner did complete the first half of the mission, not without quite a few hiccups. But they did sort them out eventually.

There are some comparisons though. The SpaceX dragon made every move as predicted and hard docked, after soft dock, in 11 minutes. The Starliner had thruster failures, the soft dock assembly failed to correctly align and had to be closed and opened a second time and the hard lock took around half an hour.

There were other issues which also forced the miss on the first docking window and I heard some discussion of timer resets and stopwatch in the background as the commentry was ongoing.

The Starliner controls are right out of the shuttle program and the control of it seems to require extensive manual checking and intervention. It will work but it won't be easy. Coming back down will be another learning experience. On reading up on the first two Crew Dragon missions, the second mission return, with the human crew, had excessive wear on the heatshield after reentry. So there is always something to learn.

The nice part was the ISS with two different commercial crew modules attached at the same time. Progress, albeit quite late.