Boeing's Starliner Encounters Problems | Space News

Hello and welcome to Station 204. It's me, Jared, and it is time for your holiday edition of this week's Space News. Now we're gonna be talking about Starlink and also the weather and traffic reports, but Boeing's missteps on their first flight of Starliner? Yep, that's where we're gonna start. This is not the kind of story that you wanna see, but it happened. Starliner had an anomaly during its test flight. Here at Tomorrow, we firmly believe in all ships rise with the tide. When one of us does well, we all do. When one of us falters, we all do. Aerospace is an incredibly tight-knit community, so I can assure you that no one, absolutely no one, was pleased or out dancing in the street at Starliner's problems. The aerospace industry is not the split factions of talking heads that we see on the internet. We're a family, all working towards the same goal, getting people off of this planet. The launch of Starliner couldn't have been any more perfect. The United Launch Alliance Atlas V, flying for the first time in an N22 configuration, was a gorgeous sight, leaving Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on December 20th at 1137 Universal Time. N22 designates three things, N meaning no payload fairing, as Starliner sits alone on the top, the first two indicates the two strap-on solid rocket boosters were attached, and the final two refers to the Centaur upper stage having two engines. Unlike SpaceX's Crew Dragon, which is placed into orbit by the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and then uses thrusters to catch up with the International Space Station, Boeing's Starliner is placed by the Atlas V into a suborbital trajectory. This is done in order to help aid any forces and keep those forces minimal on the astronauts in the event of an abort. Now after separation from the Centaur upper stage, Starliner's own thrusters then kick in to place it into orbit, which it then can catch up with the International Space Station. It was at that point, immediately at separation when things began to go wrong. The mission elapsed timer was incorrect by an absurdly incredulous 11 hours of time. This led Starliner to think it was in an incorrect phase of the mission and burned through a large amount of its fuel for orbital maneuvers. Attempts were made for mission control to override Starliner's confusion and initiate a burn to catch the ISS, but a blackout with NASA's tracking and data relay satellite system prevented them from getting the commands to Starliner in time. That detail of being in a blackout with NASA's TDRS system is a pretty puzzling one. I mean, usually you've got assets on the ground that help prevent things like that, but we are still rather early in the investigation as to what actually went wrong. Remember, in aerospace, it takes quite a long time to go through all the data and try to figure out what actually happened, but of course, rampant speculation, that takes no time at all. Starliner did fire its engines and place itself into a stable orbit, but it ended up using up too much fuel, so much so that it couldn't perform a rendezvous and docking within NASA's safety parameters for the ISS. Now, that was the largest objective of this test flight, but there are some important things to remember here. First of all, there was no loss of vehicle, and the problem could have been detected, thwarted, and corrected by astronauts that would have been on board of Starliner. And in addition to that, there was no likelihood of loss of crew, so that means Starliner actually did perform correctly in its biggest priority, which is to keep the crew on board safe. But even with the safety of those astronauts secure, Boeing still didn't make it to the ISS with Starliner, and they are definitely deserving of all the flack they've been getting for that. Now, there's still a lot to do, such as tests of propulsion, power, and life support systems on board of Starliner, and if you go to space, you gotta make your way back. The mission was originally planned to last for eight days, but it was abridged to two, and landing was set to occur at White Sands Space Harbor. After a successful entry that subjected its heat shield up to 1,600 degrees Celsius, Starliner landed at 1258 universal time on December 22nd. Successful parachute deployment along with those airbags saw Starliner become the first American capsule to touch down on land. Ground crews were put through their paces and recovery efforts, and had the capsule open approximately one hour after landing. NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, who will command the next mission of this specific Starliner capsule, said that she was going to name it Calypso. So there you go, everybody. The capsule, it's already been named. So Boeing had a major screw up during their test flight of Starliner, but hey, that is why you test. In order to figure out where are all these problems going to happen, although most of the time you hope that the problems don't end up happening, especially ones as big as what happened to Starliner. Now, NASA has not said whether they're actually going to have Boeing refly a uncrewed test mission to actually have Starliner dock with the International Space Station. NASA has specified that they didn't say that you needed to do so before you could put a crew on the vehicle, but I don't know here. We're going to have to wait and see, and when we do find out, we will let you know. Now, to go from Starliner to talk a little bit about Starlink, here is Jade Kim. It's a Christmas miracle. SpaceX is officially taking the first steps towards cooperating with the astronomy community by testing out a less reflective coating on one of its 60 Starlink satellites set to launch later this month. In an attempt to preserve the night sky's observability for astronomical viewing, this experimental new coating could perhaps be the solution to what was shaping up to be a crisis in the astronomy community. With 120 satellites already in orbit and up to 30,000 additional satellites slated to launch, with potentially 42,000 in orbit at a later time, professional and amateur astronomers alike were understandably shaken at the prospect of having the night sky considerably washed out. And that's not even considering the several other mega constellations in the plans. And with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope set to receive its first light in 2020, astronomers want to make sure that its much-anticipated observations are as unimpeded as possible, since the LSST will be the primary asteroid-hunting telescope for humanity. And you have to take imagery for that at dusk and dawn when Starlink satellites will be at their most visible and intrusive. Now, there are still a few tests this special new coating still needs to pass, such as how the reflectivity is going to alter the satellite's thermal performance. But if successful, this may be the very solution we need to be able to eat our satellites and have them too. Happy holidays, friends of tomorrow! Time to get into our space traffic report. Now, we will be omitting Starliner's launch because we already talked about it, but even without that, let me tell you, we still got a lot to cover. Heading down to the Guiana Space Center, our dose of some rumble in the jungle came courtesy of a Soyuz STA booster lifting off on December 18th at 0854 Universal Time. Going into polar sun-synchronous orbits, the upper stage fired six times to deploy payloads into three distinct orbits. Of those payloads, Cosmos SkyMed's second generation one, an Italian radar surveillance satellite was deployed, along with the highly anticipated European Space Agency Space Telescope characterizing exoplanet satellite known as CHEOPS, which will look at previously discovered exoplanets from NASA's Kepler and TESS missions and examine them in much greater detail. Lifting off from the Taiyan Satellite Launch Center on December 20th at 0322 Universal Time, a Chinese Long March 4B placed a collaborative remote-sensing satellite between China and Brazil called CBERS-4A into orbit successfully. Also deployed was the first satellite flown by Ethiopia, which will perform agricultural, forestry, and resource management data gathering. And here are your upcoming departures. To talk about this week's weather in space, here's Dr. Tamitha Scope. Space weather this week has been a bit calm, but it's beginning to pick up a little bit. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see there's a small coronal hole that's rotating in through the Earth's strike zone. Now this coronal hole we've actually seen probably the last three or four rotations. In fact, it actually did bring us up to storm levels at least a couple of times, but unfortunately now it's beginning to close, so we're not really gonna see the kind of fast solar wind that we've seen from it in the past. It has bumped us up to active conditions for a few hours, but it's really looking like it's already beginning to subside. This means we've got aurora at high latitudes, but you mid-latitude aurora photographers, you're likely gonna have to sit this one out. Now after this coronal hole rotates through the Earth's strike zone, there's really not a lot else going on, except if you look at the East Limb in the Northern Hemisphere. Look at that bright region that's beginning to rotate into Earth view. This region actually is a new region from the new solar cycle, and for just a brief moment, it actually did become a sunspot. You can actually see it in white light. Now unfortunately, it looks like this region's already beginning to dim a little bit, so I doubt it's gonna get a new designation from NOAA. However, it did for just a fraction of a moment become a sunspot, and that is good news for amateur radio operators and emergency responders who are begging for SolarCycle25 to hurry up and come on. Well, this is another sign that yet it is coming along, and as we switch to our backside sun, you can see that region as it began to really kind of evolve, starting late on the 17th and early into the 18th. Now again, you can kind of see it beginning to diminish just a little bit, but we are gonna keep our eyes on it because it could potentially boost the solar flux a little bit and increase the dayside propagation for all of you HF operators. For more details on this week's space weather, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com, and happy holidays. And of course, we wouldn't be able to do the shows of tomorrow without you, our citizens. Your help makes every single aspect of this possible. It is truly mind-blowing to me that we're able to give this kind of level of detail in news about space flight simply because you feel we're worthy of being given something from you. So if you've got something out of this and would like to help give something back to tomorrow, you can head on over to youtube.com slash T-M-R-O slash join. And as always, if you can't contribute via tomorrow slash join, that's perfectly a-okay. Subscribing to us, hitting that notification bell, watching and liking our videos, and sharing our work supports us as well. By doing that, you are our mission specialists, making our objective possible, getting every person everywhere excited about space. And that's it for this holiday edition of Space News. And remember, until the next one, keep exploring. Hello, and welcome to station 204 for your holiday special of this. Such as how the new, okay, this is my day. Thanks, thanks, that came from the, I felt that one, felt that here.