Boeing's Crew Flight Test Starliner spacecraft is mated to its Atlas V rocket ahead of its first astronaut launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.Starliner is still set to fly on its historic first flight with astronauts on June 1, but that could change as the team works through"complicated" issues following a small helium leak."It's so complicated. There's so many things going on.
He said the situation caused Starliner's team to pay more attention to the manifolds; while NASA says the pre-checks were robust,"maybe in a perfect timeframe. We might have identified this earlier." But that is precisely the role of a test flight, to identify such issues, he noted. The other 27 thrusters in the RCS are not leaking at all, he emphasized, and analysis determined Starliner could handle up to four more thruster leaks — or a leak of up to 100 times higher in this one zone. Additionally, engineers tested the system through several pressure changes and the leak was"relatively stable" through those changes, he said.
"And that took a little time for our team to go work through," he continued, saying it involved NASA teams in guidance and navigation, structures and propulsion alongside Aerojet Rocketdyne and Boeing teams."So we have that restored that redundancy for the backup capability in a very remote set of failures for the deorbit burn.