Boeing astronaut ship stalls in orbit

[Eugene]

Source: BBC

Boeing astronaut ship stalls in orbit

By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent
20 December 2019

The Boeing company is going to have to cut short the uncrewed demonstration flight of its new astronaut capsule.

The Starliner launched successfully on its Atlas rocket from Florida, but then suffered technical problems that prevented it from taking the right path to the International Space Station.

It appears the capsule burnt too much fuel as it fired its engines, leaving an insufficient supply to complete its planned mission.

Starliner will now come back to Earth.

A landing is expected at New Mexico's White Sands testing range in about 48 hours.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50855395

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[RainCaster]

1. Boeing ran out of fuel?

Isn't that a rather simple bit of math?

I'm not very impressed by their engineering if they can screw up on such a simple thing as this.

[sdfernando]

2. Seems more likely a software glitch cause the craft to burn too much fuel

If everything worked correctly this wouldn't have happened and the craft would have had enough fuel....this isn't like a airplane where the pilot can have quite a bit of extra fuel loaded. These are quite precise calculations with very little margin for emergencies.

Flying into space is still an immensely dangerous act. It as never, and likely will never be like flying on plane between cities.

[redqueen]

3. There is nothing about space travel that I simple. nt

[krispos42]

4. It might have burned more fuel trying to maintain its orientation

If it had to keep adjusting the direction of the thrust to control the flight orientation of the craft, it might have burned more fuel than anticipated.



Just wild-ass guessing here.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Something went wrong with clocks timing the mission, and manual override didn't work

(in the best Star Trek tradtion)

But telemetry from the Starliner showed an internal timer was not in synch with the actual time and as a result, the orbit insertion rocket firing was not carried out. Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center, acting in a backup capacity, then radioed up commands to fire the rockets as required.

“The backup procedure is to send a command so that it will do the orbital injection burn the way it’s supposed to do it,” Bridenstine said. “The spacecraft was going from one satellite to the next. In this particular case, it didn’t make lock on the next satellite, so we couldn’t get the command to the capsule.”

https://www.wcbi.com/boeing-starliner-wont-dock-with-space-station-after-glitch-2/

Boeing currently believes the failure lies with the spacecraft’s Mission Event Timer (MET), an internal clock that starts running as soon as the spacecraft leaves the launch pad and is used to orchestrate automated systems during the mission. For reasons that are not yet known, the MET either failed or was not properly synchronized, which led to the engines not firing according on schedule. To make matters worse, the CST-100’s Reaction Control System (RCS) depleted the vehicle’s propellant reserves by attempting to make maneuvers that were unnecessary at the time.

Quite simply, the Starliner was confused about what tasks it was supposed to be performing after separation from the Atlas V booster. Normally, ground control would have been able to see the error and intervene, but as luck would have it, the event occurred during an expected communications blackout.

Once ground control reestablished communications with the vehicle and got it back on course, it became clear the planned rendezvous with the Station was out of the question. Both NASA and Boeing have been quick to point out that, had there been a human crew aboard this mission, they would likely have been able to switch over to manual control and resolve the issue on their own.

http://investrecords.com/2019/12/21/boeings-starliner-fails-to-reach-space-station/