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Good morning, and welcome back to NASA's Johnson Space Center
in Houston for a second in a series of three briefings today,
all talking about NASA's Boeing Crew Flight Test.
This mission is a flight test of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft
scheduled to launch in early May with our two NASA astronauts,
Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore.
Our briefing today will focus on the details of that mission.
Our guests here with us today will discuss the timeline and
all phases of flight that they'll be keeping an eye on
here. With us today, we have Mike
Lammers, Starliner Ascent Flight Director, Ed Vance, ICE
Starliner Rendezvous Flight Director, and Vincent Lacorte,
International Space Station Flight Director.
We'll be taking some questions here in the room, on the phone
and on social media. If you're joining us from the
phone bridge, please press * one to enter our question queue.
And on social media, if you have a question, please use hashtag
ask NASA. When you're asking your
question, please state your name and media affiliation as well as
who you would like to address your question to.
But first, we're going to start off with some opening remarks.
I'll kick it off with Mike Lammers.
OK. Thank you, Chelsea again.
I'm, I'm Mike Lammers. I've, I've been a flight
director in Houston for about 15 years and a number of programs.
But today I'm kind of excited to come talk to you as the
Starliner Flight Director. I'm the lead flight director and
I also do the ascent phase of the flight and in that role I I
lead the Boeing and ULA United Launch Alliance operations team
that gets the the crew both into the vehicle pre launch as well
as gets them into space. And it's it's been a culmination
of a number of years of developing how this flight
system works with Boeing and the United Launch Alliance as well
as developing procedures operation techniques and
training especially here at the end where we go through a lot of
the details of the mission and it's it's it's really just
outstanding to to talk to you about it and I know we're all
we're all really excited to get into the details of the mission.
Just up top again we're we're targeting launch of the early
May and we will have a rendezvous 24 hours later and
we're going to do a minimum of an 8 day mission and test
flight. And I stress it's it's a test
flight right. The the mission is to shake down
the vehicle with the crew on board.
We've flown it twice before, but this will be the first time with
the crew when we want to learn about it and and make it
available as a tool to transport crew up and down to the
International Space Station. Again, it's targeting a minimum
of an 8 day mission, but the total length is going to be
defined by orbital mechanics and the weather at our landing
locations which are in the Southwest United States.
I'll talk about that in a little bit.
Again, I'm here with with Ed and Vincent.
What we're going to do is we'll talk about each phase of flight.
I'll start with ascent, Ed. We'll go into the rendezvous,
Vincent. We'll talk about what what we're
doing docked. Then I'll hand back over to me.
I'll go through kind of the landing phase and then we'll get
into questions. Again, real happy to go into all
sorts of detail. We, we we live and breathe this
stuff. So if you have any questions or
things that you want more amplification on, we're we're
more than happy to go into that. So what I'll do is I'll talk
verbally a little bit before we go into the video, but I'm going
to start with the day before launch.
The way this system works is the the vehicle's going to be
stacked on the Atlas Five at the at what we called the VIF, the
vertical integration facility. I believe that stands for out at
pad 41. And the day before launch, in
the morning, the stack will be rolled out to the launchpad,
brought down hard on the launchpad and they'll do some
checkouts. And then we have a Boeing team
in Florida at the Boeing mission BMCC, Boeing Mission Control
Center. They actually handle.
They're the team of engineers and technicians that do all the
integration and test of the spacecraft.
They power up the spacecraft, powered up and down all the
time. In fact, just over these last
few days, they've been doing that to fuel the spacecraft.
They will power up the spacecraft.
My team in Houston will come on and watch with that as well as
the Boeing engineering team that's that's based in Houston
will be right down the hall from me and we'll bring the vehicle
up. We'll do some checkouts.
We'll make sure it can communicate through T Driss and
the communications network and do some file up links to the
vehicle and just generally make sure it's ready for launch the
next day. We'll also do a briefing for the
crew just to give them any last minute things that may have come
up and kind of a look at the what the weather.
What we're going to do on launch day is Butch and Sunny will will
wake up on launch day, go through some of their
preliminary activities. They're turned over to Boeing at
about 4 1/2 hours before flight, right?
Then Boeing manages all the crew activities both to get them
ready and out to the pad. At that time we'll do a, we'll
do a basically a weather check with the crew.
I'll run out a weather briefing with them and then they'll go
ahead and go into the suit room and get suited up with the the
Boeing and that David Clark technicians that do that.
As the crew is getting ready, the Boeing team in Florida will
do the final activation of the spacecraft and that involves
bringing the propulsion system up to pressure and activated and
then they're ready to turn it over to the team in Houston who
will manage the spacecraft. Keep in mind that the way that
this system works is we've got the spacecraft managed from
Houston in flight and then of course the launch vehicle is is
activated and run in Florida until we hit the point of
launch. At 4 hours before launch, again,
we're going to hand over to Houston, a little bit different
than Shuttle and Artemis. We manage a lot of the last
activities as far as commanding to the spacecraft actually from
Houston, the there's also besides that Boeing team in
Houston and Florida, we also have a small team in Denver that
works for United Launch Alliance that handles what gives me some
information on what the rocket is going to be doing during
flights. So we're all coordinating.
The crew arrives at the pad two hours and 50 minutes before
launch. They'll go up to the white room.
You'll see the padtechs help them strap in.
That process takes a little bit over an hour.
They'll start closing the Hatch at one hour and 20 minutes
before flight. I should note too, that the the
rocket is actually fully fueled before the crew gets out there.
So that's one of the last things we do is we load the rocket with
the cryogenic propulsion while we suit up the crew.
Again, we're at an hour and 20 before launch.
We'll get the crew in and then the get the Hatch closed.
We'll do a leak check on the spacecraft and the pad team will
clear the pad about 50 minutes before launch.
OK. The real meat of the countdown,
where you'll hear a lot of things on the on the audio that
they provide, that's at l -, 18 minutes, we'll begin the
transfer to internal power. That's where we go from the
external power to the onboard batteries that's commanded from
Houston. You'll hear some com checks
between the crew and the ULA launch conductor Doug Lebo, a
number of poles going through the count.
And then in the final four minutes you'll hear the launch
conductor give the crew an instruction to do a switch
throw. It's called last arm to auto.
That'll that's last is the launch abort system.
The crew will alarm the abort system at 75 seconds and then
they'll go ahead and launch. OK, so it's already been a a
busy day but now we have liftoff.
So that's where my real work starts.
This is going to be the first crude ascent that's been flown
out of Mission Control in Houston since the STS 135 in
2011. Can we go ahead and roll the
first video? I'll just talk for about a
minute and 1/2 through the ascent activities on the Atlas
5, the animation ascent. OK, again, we've got the Atlas 5
on the pad. Crew access arms retracted at 11
minutes, by the way, so there's a liftoff from pad 41.
OK, On the Atlas 5, most of your energy to make orbit actually
comes from the first stage with those two Sr.
BS and the RD180 engine. Actually, one of the first
things you'll hear from the crew here is roll program while we're
going through Ascent. Looking forward to hearing Butch
talk to us right off the pad again.
RD180's got 2 engine bells. That's actually a single engine
there in the first stage. First stage will burn.
The Sr. BS will burn for about a minute
and a half. You'll see them burn out.
We actually carry the empty casings for another minute.
Goes a little faster in the video, but we got to get above
the atmosphere to jettison them. We'll get through first stage at
4 1/2 minutes. There's about a 15 second pause
as first stage separates. That's the ascent cover that
covers the docking system. It'll be jettisoned and the
Arrow skirt will jettison as well.
And then the two RL 10s on the Centaur will take us on a nice
easy cruise to space. That'll take us up to about 12
minutes into the mission. Miko is 12 minutes.
We'll stay on the booster for about 3 minutes, and then we'll
have a separation at 15 minutes into the mission.
Again, we're sub orbital still here.
We got to do another burn. Starliners actually got a pretty
spectacular orbital maneuvering system.
You'll see the four engines kick in there.
We'll do that at 31 minutes into the mission, and that'll push
the crew into orbit and get a get them heading on to
rendezvous. OK, so with that, as in the real
world, we do one more burn at an hour and 15 minutes.
But then I had it handed over to Ed and his rendezvous team.
All right. Thanks, Mike.
My name is Ed Van Sis and I've been a flight director since
class of 2009, certified in 2010.
So like Mike, about 14 or 15 years as a flight director.
Experience International Space Station, Artemis 1A, little bit
gateway flight director for for about a year.
Lots of projects inside the space station and now I've been
working Starliner since 2016. So really all three of us up
here have maybe different exact projects that we've worked on,
but we all have a significant experience across multiple
programs for the agency and also been working Starliner for for
quite some time. It's been really an honor and
actually humbling to be able to work on Starliner from the days
of when it was a PowerPoint presentation all the way up now
to having two flights behind us to get ready to go put crew into
orbit on on this third flight. The the teams that we get to
work with are are truly amazing and highly capable and
everything that they do and getting to be at the forefront
of leading the teams, not just the flight controllers but and
and the real time engineering teams as well.
But all the all the folks that are working in the factory and
with ULA and and all the other organizations we work with and
of course with NASA as well and the commercial crew program and
and the ISS program, just having that capability and and
experiences is just quite a pleasure.
Like Mike said, we're we're getting ready to put this
vehicle and this crew through a test flight and various phases
of of a test. So that's what you're going to
hear a lot about as we are working through the missions.
Obviously the primary goal is to get the crew up to the space
station and to get them back home to the Southwest US safely.
But in that process we are doing a lot of purposely, doing a lot
of tests of the vehicle as you would with the test flight of an
aircraft or anything else. So you'll you'll hear a lot
about from Vincent, you'll hear a lot about different test
things that we're going to do while we're docked.
But we also want to put the vehicle through some some
experiences that we don't anticipate being needed on a on
a normal 6 month mission to the space station.
But we know the vehicle should be capable of handling them if
the crew were to to need them. And so we want to check them out
on this test flight as well just to be able to say that yes, not
only the the normal mission will go fine, but then all of the
capabilities the vehicle has on maybe not a good day, all of
those work as well. So that's going to be the focus
of the bulk of the cruise afternoon after launch.
So they they got up early, they went through everything that
Mike just described. Now they're in space.
They just completed the the first Co elliptic burn and you'd
think that now it's just a a great relaxing ride to the space
station and it will be for that six month increment mission.
But like I said, we're putting the crew right to work getting
them out of their seats, out of their suits and then right into
some demonstrations. And we will be doing a bunch of
things with the spacecraft to make sure that it can help the
crew and the crew can also maneuver the spacecraft as they
need to. So we'll be doing things like
purposefully pointing it in a in an orientation that's say, not
exactly the the nominal the normal orientation for the
mission, and then having the crew manually fly the spacecraft
back into the the direction it should be pointing.
We also want to make sure that if for some reason the vehicle
doesn't know where the communication satellites are
located, that the crew can manually fly the spacecraft to
point the antennas at the satellite.
Another another thing that we'll be doing this day is tricking,
if you will, the spacecraft into thinking that it doesn't know
where it is in space. So we're going to de allocate a
couple of its Inertial Measurement Systems to They're
still running, but the vehicle computers are not actually
looking at them. So effectively the the computers
don't necessarily know where they are.
And then the crew will manually fly the spacecraft to look at
stars and use our star tracker to then rebuild its Inertial
navigation base. And we'll see how their manual,
manual way of doing it compares with what the still running
computers are are seeing and see how well that compares and they
should all compare very equally and we should be able to run off
of that solution that the crew comes up with.
But again it's a test flights, we want to see how well the
vehicle does in all these scenarios that we've thoroughly
tested out on the ground with all our avionics systems down
here. But want to see how the
spacecraft is really performing. And one other final thing that
what we're doing is we're putting all all of our thrusters
through a a human manual flying checkout.
So we want to make sure that not only can we point in space, but
also can we do translations as well.
So if we're close to the space station and the computers have a
hard time controlling Starliner, we want to make sure the
astronauts can manually fly away.
And to ensure we have that capability, we're going to give
the crew full manual control on this first day and just test
everything out. So we'll do some demonstrations
of that and that last part is really important for the safety
of the space station. So we have that manual
capability and we talked about the, the engineering teams that
are here in Houston, the ones that are in Florida as well and
the other NASA programs involved.
We're going to take a look at all this data while the crew's
sleeping and have the the Boeing teams that that we are embedded
with. We'll take a look at all that
data, bring recommendations to our mission management team and
ultimately take that to NASA to certify that this manual flying
capability is also something we're ready to use in proximity
to the space station if we were to need it.
So all that's happening while the crew's asleep and then
they'll wake up the next morning and we can go ahead and show the
video here for the free flight and the orbit.
So this is kind of the end of the cruise day.
There is the kind of representation of what they're
doing at the in those tests that I was talking about.
So we're pointing the nose towards the Earth trying to see
where we are with respect to the communication satellites.
We also fly in this tail to the sun attitude.
So our our solar arrays are at the the back of the Starliners.
We want to make sure we keep those pointed at the sun.
But the crews inside there and they're getting ready for bed,
and we'll do some more checkouts overnight while they're
sleeping. They'll wake up in the morning.
We'll be pretty close, you know, a couple couple 1000 kilometers
away from ISS and do a rendezvous.
That was exactly the same automated rendezvous we did for
the last flight. We'll fly up underneath the
space station and then around out in front.
And we'll we'll actually pause a little bit out in front of the
space station, do some more manual flying just to make sure
that's exactly the way the crew expects it.
Then we'll press in. And at 10 meters, we'll do our
final approach and dock, and then Sunny and Butch will get to
get everything situated inside the cabin and get ready to come
into their new home for the next few days.
And Vincent's the expert on the space station side, so I'll hand
it over to him to explain all that to you.
Thanks, Ed. So good afternoon, everybody.
My name is Vincent Lacorde. I'm the lead International Space
Station Flight Director for CFTI was selected into the office in
2015. I'm going to walk through our
dock time frame with International Space Station.
Our main goals of the dock mission are a few.
There's the practice and validate the planned operations
for long duration missions. We're also going to perform some
contingency operations just in case we were ever to need those
in contingencies. And then we'll do some cargo
operations. Our lead planners who are Richie
Chan, Lowe's and Izzy Lasky did a great job of trying to fit all
the puzzle pieces together and have figured out that we can do
our mission in a minimum of eight dock days.
So we have a few graphics I'm going to show you to kind of
show you how the mission will look day by day.
So the first of all, just as Mike said, we usually dock about
24 hours after launch. Once you arrive and dock to the
space station, you're going to get the crew is going to egress,
get out of their asset and entry suits.
Then they're going to repress the vestibules and be able to
open the hatches. And then they'll go on to the
space station and we'll have our welcome ceremony that you'll get
to watch on NASA TV. Then the ISIS crew members
conduct a safety briefing will they'll be able to take Butch
and Sonny and remind them of where all the emergency hardware
lives on the International Space Station, in case we have any
contingencies when they're on board.
Now let's go ahead and go to flight day three, which is dock
day #2. On this day, we're unloading all
of the cargo and we're also configuring the vehicle for
quiescent operations. If you can imagine when you're
when the Starliner is there for six months, you don't want to
use all the power and leave all of your equipment running the
whole time. So what the quiescent OPS does
is it basically powers off all the redundant equipment that you
don't really need. The crew will still be able to
go inside the capsule. They have good lights, good
displays, good ventilation, things like that, but all of the
extra computers and stuff like that will be powered off.
We'll also get to do some emergency hardware transfer.
I'm getting ready again for some of the contingency operations
that we're going to practice later in the mission.
Let's go again to Dock day #3. On dock day #3, we're going to
do some of our operational checkouts.
The first main one we're going to do is called our Safe Haven
checkout. If you can imagine if you have
an emergency on ISS, you want to be able to get in your Earth
return vehicle, isolate yourself and make sure you're in a safe
environment. So that's what we'll practice.
Butch and Sonny will go into Starliner.
They'll close the Hatch. They'll basically completely
power up the vehicle on their own to practice if they were
getting ready for an emergency undock and return.
So basically make sure all that all that stuff works in a kind
of a steady environment on entry.
We have a system called a supplementer that provides
cooling for the vehicle that uses water.
If for some reason there's any kind of leak or any kind of
where we need additional water, we have the capability to refill
that on board even though you normally would not need to do
that. So we'll get to practice that
again just to make sure all the hardware connects correctly,
make sure all the procedures are accurate.
So that way if we need that in contingency, we're ready for
that. On the long duration mission
we'll have 4 crew members and So what we'll do is we'll borrow a
few ISIS crew members, have them float into Starliner with Butch
and Sonny and we'll practice that that day of free flight to
see how would we Orient ourselves with four crew
members. So we'll get to practice that
before the the long duration mission and then we'll get to do
a Boeing event where we'll have all of the engineers and
employees who worked really hard to get Starliner on board.
They'll get to interact with the crew and spend some time with
them and see all that great hardware they built in space.
We'll go to the next day, dock day #4, so usually seven day in
the six month mission. Seven days before the mission
ends, you'll take that quiescent config and do a complete power
up and basically check out all the missions systems to make
sure all the computers come on, make sure all the the equipment
is working. We're basically going to test
that out. On dock day #4.
Butch and Sonny will basically sit in the capsule and watch all
of displays and watch all the units come up so that way they
can understand how all the systems are working.
Now let's go to flight day number six, which is dock day
#5. We put this sample day in there.
As Mike said, Orbiter Dynamics will really drive what day we're
able to undock. So if it's longer than a day
mission, this is one of the days we'll put in.
So we'll give the crew 1/2 day off.
Again, they're very busy on all these days, so they'll get a
little bit of rest. We've also trained Butch and
Sonny to be able to do basically all of the key International
Space Station tasks that could exist for them, so they're ready
for any preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance tasks as
well as a lot of science tasks. So we'll we'll ask the space
station program what extra activities are available and
Butch and Sonny will go back to their International Space
Station lives on their previous missions and get to do some of
those tasks that they remember doing.
Let's say let's go to dock day number six.
At this point, we're really now focused on the end of the
mission. So we're going to load all the
cargo that's going to come home on the Starliner and start some
of that undock preparations. That emergency equipment that
was in Starliner, when I'll take that out and put it back on the
the ISS where it lives. One of the other training
simulations we fly on Starliner is on entry.
It's all automated, but there is the capability that if needed
the crew can take manual control and fly an entry for Butch.
He's just going to practice that right before a lawn.
So he doesn't need a lot of practice.
But on six month mission you want the crew to be able to to
get in that simulator and really practice those entries to make
sure they're ready in case they need it.
We'll get to practice that on dock.
Day number six, let's go to the next day.
Now we'll really do a full undocked power up, make sure the
vehicle is completely ready. We're going to have a conference
with the crew to walk through all of their flight test
objectives, make sure they give us feedback.
So that way if we need to adjust any procedures or just any
hardware, we can do that before Starliner One and then we'll
have our standard departure news conference.
Then we go to our next day. What we did is we went ahead and
put in a sleep shift day because again, because of aerodynamics,
you don't always get to undock at the same time of day.
So this give us a chance to sleep shift the crew for any
anytime we need. And then we go to dock day #9,
which will be our last day on the International Space Station.
We'll get to do our farewell TV events.
The crew will get in there as an entry suit, we'll close the
Hatch and then we'll get ready to leave.
And at this point, we'll hand back over to Mike who will kind
of walk you through the operations of how you undock and
how you entry and land. OK.
Thank you, Vincent. So again, we mentioned where we
are now is we're on, we're on undocking day and the crew is in
the vehicle. I'll show a short video here in
a second. But undocking happens about 6
1/2 hours prior to landing. That's a little bit longer on
this test flight than it would be for a direct descent mission
at the end of a six month increment.
We added some time for the crew to do a couple more flight
tests, and these are really important ones.
Starliner is really unique in that it has a backup system, We
call it a backup system where the crew, you know, they have a
rotational and a translational hand controller and they
normally go through three flight computers that fly the vehicle
automated. But as it turns out, we can have
the crew engage backup control where they're actually firing.
The the commander can fire The Jets directly, bypassing the
computers. And that's just designed so that
if you had a really unlikely computer failure, the crew can
actually manually control the vehicle in this backup mode by
what I like to call stick and rudder flying.
In fact, they can even deorbit and and land in that mode.
So what we're going to do is we're going to spend about an
orbit with the Butch, engaging the various.
There's a couple of different jet manifolds that they can they
can engage to get some experience flying and back up
And just to make sure that get some feedback on how the vehicle
flies with respect to all the experience that he has, both,
you know, and our training Sims on the ground.
And then, of course, the other spacecraft and even aircraft
that he's flown before. So again, we'll go ahead and do
that. Over a couple of Revs, we do a
deorbit burn, and you'll see this in the video.
But we do a deorbit burn over the Pacific and we target a
landing in the Southwest United States.
We've got 3 landing areas, White Sands Missile Range in New
Mexico. There's actually two spots that
we can land there. It's a it's a really quite a big
place and the the other and that's where the previous two
Starliners have landed. There's also a landing area at
Wilcox Playa that's an area east of Tucson, AZ.
It's actually just off of I-10 or a Dugway proving Ground,
which is West of Salt Lake City. And that gives us kind of a
spread, geographical spread that allows us to to get
opportunities every day depending on where orbital
mechanics puts us. So we'll go ahead, we'll roll
the video here. This is only about a minute and
then we'll be finished. OK.
So there's undocking. I think you'll see right after
we undock, we back down the corridor, There's a cover that
this is a little early in the video.
There's a cover that closes over the docking system.
We fly 1/4 lap, we get go up over the zenith of ISS and then
we do a departure burn. I don't believe we show the
deorbit burn here, but this is some of the tests that we're
doing with the the backup control that I mentioned.
When we do the deorbit burn, it's pretty quick.
It's less than a minute and the deorbit burn will happen.
The service module is separated, it does the disposal burn and it
burns up over the Pacific. The capsule will go ahead and do
a guided the orbit using its own propulsion system, which was
activated shortly before this landing sequence begins at
30,000 feet. There goes the forward heat
shield and then we put out a couple of drogues.
You'll see those jettison here in a second.
Hopefully we'll have video from the NASA WB 57 for this.
When it happens, Mains go out reefed at 8000 feet and then
they'll dis reef 3 mains and takes about.
That's the bucket handle that gets us in the correct attitude
for landing. We're on the mains for about 3
minutes. You should see here in a second
the forward heat shield is dropped and then the airbags
deploy and the crew touches down and the crew will jettison the
shoots manually. They do a switch throw.
That'll cause a lot of the vehicle systems to power down.
Well, as they power down, we'll bring the crew up.
Actually on a satellite phone. The landing team is 4 kilometer
on a on an offset on on a on the edge of something we call the
four kilometer circle just to make sure that they're safe from
the falling parts that are coming off the vehicle.
There are things like mortar lids and those droves that you
saw before. Once the vehicle's on the
ground, that team will approach and they're actually on the SAT
phone call with me and the and the crew.
And they'll we'll go ahead and turn the vehicle over once
they're at the location. And then they'll go ahead and
make sure that do the usual safety checks that you do around
the capsule. And they'll take the crew out,
they'll do the medical checks and then the crew will be
helicoptered to a landing field and then they'll be flown back
to Houston. So that's that is the mission
summary. Great.
Thank you so much. That was a huge wealth of
information. Thank you to all of our briefers
for that in depth. Going over of the timeline,
we're going to switch over to some questions now.
We're going to be taking questions here in the room.
So if you have one, go ahead and raise your hand.
We'll also be taking questions on our phone bridge.
So if you are on the phone, go ahead and press * one.
If you've got a question for one of our briefers, again please
state your name, affiliation and who you'd like to address your
question to. We can go ahead and start right
here in the room. Hey, Mike, I made Rick Wall
Street Journal, not sure who this would go to.
Steve and Mark talked a little bit earlier about how Boeing is
using NASA flight OPS for for this mission.
First of all, just to be crystal clear, that's you guys, that's
your teams. And then second.
Could you talk a little bit about decision making during the
mission if there is an anomaly given that given NASA flight OPS
role in the Boeing's like ultimate responsibility and
authority and management. Over CFD, how does decision
making work and something? Goes wrong.
Thanks. So I'll take a little bit of
that, but I'll also let like Vincent to weigh in too.
So what you really have up here, you have three members of the
Johnson Space Center Flight Operations Directorate that are
NASA civil servants. But we also have APR 2 Starliner
mission operations flight directors that are operating out
of the white flight control room embedded with Boeing for design,
development, test flight mission execution of Starliner.
And you have one space station flight directors.
He's running his flight. Vincent's running his team down
on flight control Room 1 just like space station 24/7. 365 is
being run from there and his focus and his responsibilities
are for the safety and protection of the space station
and execution of the entire NASA mission.
So I'll let and I'll let him go into details on that versus our
side of things is focused on the crew safety vehicle safety
mission success of the Starliner mission for and with Boeing.
But also of course since we are providing a service to NASA and
the commercial crew program primary focus for us too is of
course safety and and mission success for the space station.
So it is a partnership with Vincent and his team and NASA
and ISS team but there are some pretty clear distinctions.
So we have for those of you familiar with our operational
products, we have flight rules, we have launched commit criteria
that are Boeing products that tell us the limitations, the go
no goes things like that for Starliner that are part of
Boeing process. We we work in developing those
with our mission operations flight control teams, the
mission engineer or the Boeing engineers and then the Boeing
management. So Mark and Leroy that you
talked with earlier and we get all those approved so that we
know how to go operate in the Starliner spacecraft at the
nitty gritty level. But we also then work with
commercial crew program and ISS to ensure that what we're doing
is within the requirements and and safety paradigm of of what
NASA needs for really taking care of their astronauts.
Even though they're our friends, they're the NASA astronauts, we
need to take good care of them. So that's it is a collaboration,
but there's still a distinction on the the extent to which were
embedded within Boeing and and their design and development
test versus Vincent's role. Yeah.
So I think from the International Space Station
flight director role, it's very similar to how we do SpaceX,
right. Once we get inside integrated
operations, the International Space Station Flight Director
has operational authority and they're making the ultimate
calls on, again, go being go to dock, go to undock.
Those kind of decisions on the same way we would work with a
SpaceX mission director because they are the experts in the
SpaceX capsule. The same way I'd work with Ed
and Mike that they're the expert in the Starliner capsule.
So if there's any anomalies on the Starliner vehicle, again my
team is not the expert. We will listen to them and get
their to get their advice. And then we have space station
flight rules where we document if they have failure of X
computer or we still go or we not go based on what we're done
and see what risk we will take. So again in a lot of ways for us
we've practiced this for years but it's very similar how we do
other vehicles where again my job is to make sure the ISS is
in the right configuration for docking, make sure all of our
systems are at the right redundancies and then to
communicate with Ed, Mike, Chloe and Rick and on their side to
make sure that I understand the situation and what what their
vehicle is doing. And again the the good news for
us is we we sit right down the hall from each other right so
off console it's very easy to work together and and get good
situation where it's on any anything they're working.
So that's the benefit right of working at Johnson Space Center
where Boeing has has contracted NASA to fly their vehicle.
It's easier to be sometimes easier to be on the same page
because we do work at the same place and and see each other all
the time. Great.
Thank you. We'll take a question on the
phone real quick. Marsha Dunn with The Associated
Press. Hi, I'm wondering how long could
the Starliner and its crew stay at the space station if
something goes amiss during Aspen and the initial part of
the flight, are you taking up extra rations just in case?
And is Boeing, NASA working with SpaceX to be on emergency
standby just in case? I'm just wondering the backup
plans. Thanks.
I can go to answer first like the cargo.
So we have, we basically bring a lot of supplies for the crew for
for kind of that initial mission.
We have some extended supplies and capes they stay but
obviously ISS has has plenty of food and water for example.
So really we're prepared for them to stay as long as they
need to. Obviously there's certain
weather requirements that we need to meet on on CFT and so we
have no issues if we need to stay stay any longer.
Yep. As far as duration goes, this
this is there's really no hard constraint on the vehicle.
This is the spacecraft that's designed to stay at space
station for six months, and there's nothing essentially
limiting that if you needed to. As far as being on standby, you
know those are. I'm not aware of of any of that.
OK. We're going to go to a question
in the room. Go ahead.
Hi Elizabeth Howell from space.com.
This is probably for Ed. So can you talk about during the
close proximity operations to the ISS aside from obviously the
flight activities of flight task activities, Sunny and Butcher
doing, are there any key difference with how a SpaceX
direct and close proximity operations those?
So I'm first going to admit that I've been focused on Starliner
for a long time and have not been a flight a NASA flight
director for a Crew Dragon mission.
So I don't have tremendous depth of detail to really give you a
point by point comparison. But I have worked a couple of
Dragon cargo missions in in previous years, so at a high
level the trajectories are basically the same.
Because largely because of what Benson described, with the way
that ISS wants to have vehicles approaching and the way they
want to manage the traffic plans.
So at a very high level, all the spacecraft that come up to the
ISS are going to come up from below and behind and then do
some sort of of rendezvous. If you're docking to the forward
part of ISS, obviously you'll go below, behind, in front, and
then and then kind of come up. The way that we do that with
Starliner is a little bit different than with the Dragon.
So the profiles will look a little bit different just
because the sensors that we use, the sensor suites for rendezvous
are all, you know, different technologies, different way of
doing things, different mission rules, different waypoints if
you will to to to get on that trajectory.
The way that the space station is monitoring the approaching
vehicle is very similar. It's obviously not exactly the
same, but it's very similar and then largely from that level I
can say that it's pretty close to the same.
I can't really do a good comparison for you on you know
timeline of events or the the manual capabilities of the
manual actions that crews might be doing.
But from that perspective it's it's pretty pretty similar.
We'll take another question in the room.
Thanks. Hi, Irene Clots with Aviation
wake up from M2 questions. So first one is considering that
redundancy in Starliner, do all systems need to be operational
to meet the launch commit criteria or are you able to fly?
If something is operational, you can provide any detail on that?
And then the second, just to clarify again the relationship
between Boeing and NASA for the Starliner missions, for all
intents and purposes, are you all sort of on leave from NASA
on your official jobs and working as subcontractors to
Boeing, So Boeing is your customer during these missions.
You're no longer sort of representing NASA as you would
if it wasn't a Starliner mission going on.
Thanks. Yeah, I'll good questions.
I'll I'll take your second question first because maybe
here's here's another way of of of of thinking about it and I
realized that that it it can be, it's challenging to describe
sometimes the relationship but I'll give it to you another way.
When when I'm working Starliner right Ed and I, we actually have
a charge code right and that that that is you know funded by
Boeing. I mean ultimately it's part of a
NASA contract but but but it's it's being managed by Boeing and
we're providing them service, right.
And then that goes into even how the mission is run.
When I report to the mission management team, the mission
management team is chaired by Leroy Cain who's a Boeing
employee. Boeing runs the mission until we
get to the joint OPS with with with Vincent as he as he
described then you know NASA has got an oversight role like they
do for all of the of the vehicles.
But but once if we're outside of this area around ISS, it's it's
a Boeing run mission that is done in partnership with their
customer who is NASA. As far as the launch commit
criteria, you know there's kind of two sets there's the ones
that ULA has United Launch Alliance on the Atlas Five.
I'm not as familiar with those except to say that they do their
own set of checks that's identical to all the commercial
and government missions that that they do for the rocket, for
the spacecraft. In general, all the systems have
to be up and running. I think I could probably get
into some details where there's there's some small things that
we can fly without. I was just, you know, talking
yesterday about about 1 criteria is how many.
You know the crew uses tablets for their procedures, right.
And we fly with four of them. Well if something happened to
one of them, we can fly with three.
So there's there's there's a few places where there's sufficient
redundant systems that can go ahead and launch but but in
general all the flight computers, all the Imus have to
be running to to to launch and we, I mean we're evaluating
those right down to lift off. Thank you, Mike.
We're going to switch to a question on our phone bridge,
Jeff Faust with Space News. Like one, is there anything like
the dry dress rehearsal that SpaceX does for true Dragon
missions for Starliner? And then you mentioned the
timeline for undocking the landing is a little bit longer
on CFT versus an operational mission.
What would be the the time from undocking to landing for an
operational mission? Thanks.
Let's see for the the dry dress, the answer is yes, there is an
activity and I forget the exact date right now, but it's about
8:00. It's it's eight days before
launch, seven or eight days before launch and it's called
the crew training activity. It's really a full up run where
the crew we we have the whole team there.
The crew suits up in the suit room.
They get get in the suits we take them down to the
spacecraft. The one difference is is the the
spacecraft and the rocket aren't at the pad, they're in the VIF,
the the integration building. But we we have them practice out
in the pad in the white room on some other activities.
But the crew will get into the spacecraft.
The spacecraft is going to be powered.
In fact, we're commanding it from Houston just as we would on
launch day and we go through the entire launch count including
things like having the crew do suit checks, working with the
pad team. We'll do all of that and get a
chance to to practice it. So that is being done and is
similar. It is a dry dress.
Let's see. The second question was the
amount of time for a post certification mission as we call
it, when when Starliners coming down it would be the shortest
possible time to get from undocked to landing would be
about four hours. There's a little bit of a
dependency on whether or not there's a fly around done so
Starliners got the capability to do a full fly around of the
entire space station to to do photography of space station.
We're not doing that on this mission.
Potential to do it on the next mission if NASA requested, and
if they do it be, I think closer to the six hours.
Thank you. Got a question right here in
the. Front sincere ABC News for Matt
what are the weather and lighting constraints for landing
was that so the question was weather and lighting
constraints. The the weather constraints for
landing are we essentially want the lowest wind that we can to
to undock and and that's just to give it a gentle the gentler not
not have a a large lateral component.
When we hit the ground also we do things like we account for if
a parachute fails or an airbag fails and so you tend to be a
little bit more conservative right now.
I think we we want limits that are less than 10 knots for that
and that kind of ties into the second part of your question
which was lighting. There are no requirements for
lighting. In fact we tend to like to land
at night and that's because two reasons.
One is the wind is lower at night in the places that we're
landing. Also you got to think about the
safety of the of the people that go out and meet the spacecraft
after it lands. Some of them are in things
called scape suits which are to protect them if there's a leak
of of fuel or oxidizer from the vehicle.
They're actually pretty hot and you know we land in the desert
and so we it's a lot easier on the landing team to land at
night. And it turns out we found in
previous missions, it's actually I when I started working this
program years ago. We're a little bit worried about
operating at night, but they've actually come up with a really
nice setup with the lights and of course if you see the the
video we've got the infrared tracking both from the ground
and the and the aircraft it's it's it's it's kind of funny.
We've gotten to the point where we almost prefer the night so.
Cape Got another question right here.
Or with CVS. Well, we prefer the daytime but
that's yeah, OK. It is prettier.
I I will give you that two quick ones for me and I know this
isn't about a this isn't a Dragon briefing obviously it's
it's it's Starliner. But are there any things in your
minds that are clear advantages that Starliner brings to the
table. Things that you particularly
appreciate in terms of how it flies and how you control the
spacecraft, how the crew does that.
And secondly, can do any of you have any idea what what sort of
TV we can expect from the mission between launch and
docking? I know what we get on once it's
at station, but is there any live downlinks during the
mission that you're aware of or do they have the capability to
do that? Thanks.
I haven't talked lately the the the for the second question
there is with the the current Starlight for CFT there is not
the capability to do live video downlink.
We do have the camera system that you saw on the last flight
that'll provide streaming video when we're docked to the space
station. And that camera system is
running during the free flight phases as well.
And the crew will actually be conducting some public affair
affair events during the free flight on both the 1st and 2nd
day of the mission. But they'll be recorded on the
video system and then played back after we've docked.
So they might be some some audio of that that comes down live,
but there's for this flight, there's no live TV capability in
the free flight phase. Comparing capabilities between
Dragon and Starliner, again I have to plead a little bit of of
Dragon lack of knowledge just because I haven't really worked
in depth on those vehicles to really give a good comparison.
But I can tell you that they are different and some obvious
differences are the fact that Starliner lands on the land
versus in the ocean. Starliner has tactile hand
controllers for manual flying, whereas Dragon doesn't, and
those are those are kind of some of the more obvious aspects and
they're just differences. They're not.
One's not really better than the other, one's not necessarily
more capable than the other, but they are different capabilities.
The rendezvous sensor suite is different between the two
vehicles. Just the way that the two
companies have approached how they want to approach and depart
from space station are also differences.
And that that then factors into how you train the crews, what
you focus on with the crew training and that really rolls
into exactly what NASA of course wanted with the commercial crew
program is you didn't you didn't want just one spacecraft or one
provider that you know all your eggs are in that basket.
You provide a couple of different capability from access
to space perspective, but you also provide a couple of
different venues for industry to design solutions in their own
way using their own ideas that are different from each other.
And you you start to have this low Earth or low Earth orbit
economy that NASA has been talking a lot about where now
you have different options if you want to get a ride into
space. So we we are definitely going to
be exercising those that Starliner has as much as we can.
And then maybe the best way to answer your question is going to
be after the mission when the the services are looking to
provide access to the Earth orbit.
Can then compare between the two and and see which of the two
menu options, if you will for accessing space are are to their
liking and meet their mission needs.
Thank you, Ed. We do look forward to seeing
those live down links once they get to the space station.
We have a question here in the room in the back.
Thank you. Stephen Clark, Ars Technika.
Just a follow up on Bill's question, what is the vehicle
lacking on this particular flight that doesn't allow you to
do the live video downlink and will that come online like with
Starliner One? And secondly, my main question,
Mike, can you talk about the abort modes during ascent?
Can you walk me through different abort phases,
different types of aborts you would conduct if you have to,
hopefully not at different stages?
Thanks. I can answer the first part and
then I'll let Mike do your part. Really the only thing that the
system is lacking is just connection from the the data,
the video recorder to a transmission system.
So the transmission antennas and the ground stations to receive
those transmission transmissions are just not online yet.
So the the capability within the capsule, the infrastructure for
it is all there. They just we just haven't
progressed enough into getting the the operational post
certification piece to where we have that capability yet to.
Answer the second part of the question, the aborts.
So we spent a lot of time working on aborts.
Boeing and United Launch Alliance have spent a great deal
of effort making a safe system. The the way aborts work is it's
kind of joint between the spacecraft and the launch
vehicle. The launch vehicle is monitoring
itself and if it needs to abort, it will tell the Starliner to
abort. Additionally, we've got, you
know, I've got a team of United Launch Alliance flight
controllers are actually in Denver and they're reporting to
me in real time and they will tell me if they see an abort
approaching. We can do some things like
perhaps abort early if we need to, just to put the crew in
better weather over the ocean. It's a very large swath of the
world we're flying over. But what you'll hear is that
lift off, as I mentioned earlier, the abort system goes
active 75 seconds before launch. And then as we lift off and you
gain more energy, you land at different places, right?
So the one of the you'll hear them call the abort boundaries
one of them is CM forward and that's just has to do with how
how the the service modules jettisoned after an abort but
that's still in the in the pad area around Florida as you get
more energy right when the first stage goes at 4 1/2 minutes
you'll hear ECAL that's East Coast aboard landing the it's a
heritage term you actually end up in the ocean generally east
of Cape Cod and then as you gain more energy you will hear a call
for St. John's and that is in the area
of the ocean near St. John's NL.
You'll do a guided landing there and then once you have enough
energy to get up over the North Atlantic, which is by design
vehicles designed to avoid that, you'll hear Shannon and that's
your Shannon, Ireland. And then once you obtain enough
energy to make orbit, we've actually got a mode called Ato
or abort to orbit and that'll get the the Starliner.
If if there's a low performance case, the Starliner can burn its
own engines and get into into a low orbit that's 200 kilometers
high. And actually in a lot of cases
we can give it a little bit of time.
We can actually figure out how to get a rendezvous out of that
if we need to. But those those are the kind of
the top level how abort modes work.
So I want to go to our phone bridge because I know we don't
have all that much time left. We'll go to Robert Pearlman with
Collect Space. Great.
Thank you. Two questions, Given the flight
rate, is there just one NASA team assigned to Boeing for all
of the Starliner flights in terms of Mission Control or are
there different assignments of different people assigned as you
progress from CFT to Starliner one?
And second quick second question, in terms of referring
to the vehicle on orbit, since there is a name of this
spacecraft Calypso, once you see me referring to it as Calypso or
as Starliner, as you call back and forth from space to ground,
I'll get the first one. So I'll get them both.
Hey the first question as far as the NASA team we that that
supports Starliner, this is a really good question actually
because you talk about the flight rate and Starliner is
kind of interesting in that you know Boeing flies this crude
mission and the the team that we use we have a very small core
group of people that work this full time.
But actually most of the team that flies this vehicle does
other things right. Both Ed and I do space station
shifts and we do, we've done Artemis shifts and it actually
really helps with this flight rate because as I'm a guy that
does operations, one of the things that's really important
for people that does kind of work that we do is you got to
fly things right and it and it's all about how often you get to
fly things that really builds a team that knows how to manage a
spacecraft and space and do it safely.
And the way this works out is that we can almost ebb and flow
on this program as we're needed, right.
So right now we're coming up to a flight and we surge.
When you get into some of the time in between these, in
between these year long missions, we can allocate people
to do other things And that ultimately, you know, saves
resources as far as having a team that otherwise you'd need
that have completely stood up to cover you know 24/7 OPS of a
spacecraft that that is free flying only a very short short
period of time. As far as the naming, what we've
been using in all of our simulations is, is Starliner.
That's kind of what we're used to and what we've been training.
So I'm sure the the the name that Sunny used will come up.
But in general, in our training we've been using Starliner and I
think I expect that's generally what you'll hear.
Great. So we only have a couple of
minutes left, but I do want to get one more question in the
room if it could be a quick one. Yeah, hopefully this will be
brief. Will Robinson Smith for Space
Flight. Now for Mike, assuming that the
airbags deploy as nominally. Can you describe what the the
impact the Butch and Sunny will feel like, what that sensation
will be? And if one of them only
partially inflates or doesn't fully inflate what the
difference for that might be? Thanks.
That'd be an excellent question for Butch and Sunny this
afternoon because they have both landed in well Butch has landed
in a Soyuz which has got an interesting way of landing as as
as we've we've seen you know they land on land too and but
they're using rockets instead of airbags.
But I believe the descent rate is about 25 feet per second.
I would say that it's likely a firm landing but but you know
the requirements for these vehicles that the both the NASA
crude vehicles as far as the conditions that the crew see it
impact is fairly gentle. It's it's not going to be I
think something that is puts the crew at risk in any way and that
includes with an airbag out, right.
All those requirements there, we call them the Health and Human
performance requirements but they were all there and the
vehicle is certified to do all these things even with an airbag
out and that was part of the requirements to to build it.
So I I suspect it's going to be pretty gentle.
Great. Thank you so much.
That is all of the time that we have today.
Thank you to our awesome briefers for talking about an
overview of NASA's Boeing crew flight test mission.
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