Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Why this company’s biggest fans turned against it

These ISIS news anchors are AI fakes. Their propaganda is real.

Even remote and hybrid work can burn you out. Here’s how to avoid it.

Puppy abandoned with heart-rending note is adopted, named Minerva

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

Elections 2024 live updates: Biden continues outreach to Black voters; Trump heading to Minnesota

At campus protests, ‘DO NOT TALK TO THE MEDIA’!

CNN gets a presidential debate — and a much-needed win

In photos: The scene in Houston after severe storms killed at least 4 people

Rep. AOC's 'people-first' approach

Rep. Delia Ramirez on organizing power and money

Miss Manners: Longtime friends lose minds over canceled dinner plans

Carolyn Hax: After holiday meals, guests rush the kitchen to claim the leftovers

Ask Amy: Retired couple misses social activities since the pandemic

The world’s coolest hotels want to tell you a story

6 Airbnb red flags to spot before you make a booking mistake

Some cruise prices are about to get a little more clear

Tariffs against China hamstring the transition to a clean energy future

The Post’s choices in Northern Virginia’s U.S. House primaries

States see legalized sports betting as a tax windfall — but at what cost?

Bryce Harper, Joey Gallo and a bond forged by baseball since they were kids

Walter Johnson’s jersey from 1920 showdown with Babe Ruth is up for auction

A taco will always be a taco — no matter what we call it

No one is rocking in the ‘free world’

Kenyan president aims to attract green investment during U.S. visit

On Gaza, Biden is right and Netanyahu is wrong

Look to the cloud to protect the life documents saved on your computer

Can you spot bad financial advice on TikTok? Take our quiz.

5 myths about Social Security as the program faces a funding crisis

Did Trump’s lawyers catch Michael Cohen in a ‘lie’? Let’s take a look.

Now playing off-Broadway: Trump’s synchronized sycophants

Trump’s courtroom enablers

Trump

Big Tech news and how to take control of your data and devices

See more coverage in your recommendations

Technology

Tips delivered to your inbox twice weekly

The Tech Friend newsletter

Business and Tech alerts

Jonathan Newton

Before a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/01/08/boeing-737-alaska-airlines-plane-door-plug/" target="_blank">door-size panel blew out of a Boeing 737 Max</a>, leaving a gaping hole in the side of an Alaska Airlines aircraft shortly after takeoff; before <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2024/04/17/boeing-whistleblower-787-dreamliner/" target="_blank">whistleblowers came forward to say they were threatened</a> for bringing up safety issues at the company; and before the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2024/03/09/justice-department-investigation-boeing-max-accident/" target="_blank">Justice Department opened a criminal investigation</a> into the blowout incident, Boeing was struggling with another set of issues, on another high-profile vehicle.

Its Starliner spacecraft, designed to fly astronauts to orbit under a $4.2 billion contract from NASA, had suffered a series of problems that put its launch with astronauts years behind schedule. Its <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/20/boeing-starliner-launch/" target="_blank">onboard computer had failed </a>during its first test flight. A second test flight was scrubbed after <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/09/boeing-starliner-launch-delay-valves/" target="_blank">valves in the vehicle’s service module stuck</a> and wouldn’t operate. Then, after the craft finally <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/19/starliner-boeing-space-station/" target="_blank">flew a test mission successfully</a> without anyone on board, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/01/commerical-crew-boeing-spacex/" target="_blank">Boeing discovered that tape used as insulation on wiring</a> inside the capsule was flammable and would need to be removed. The parachute system also had problems, which forced the company to redesign and strengthen a link between the parachutes and the spacecraft.

Now, a decade after NASA awarded Boeing a contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, Boeing will finally attempt to fly its Starliner spacecraft with people onboard. If all goes to plan, at 10:34 p.m. on Monday, the company is set to fly a pair of veteran astronauts, Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, on a mission that will be one of the most significant tests for Boeing’s space division — and for NASA — in years.

The flight is intended to see how the spacecraft performs in space with a crew onboard. If all goes well, the spacecraft will catch up with the space station — which travels at 17,500 mph — about a day after lifting off. Along the way, the crew members will test manually flying the spacecraft before it docks autonomously with the station. NASA and Boeing will also be eager to see how the spacecraft’s heat shield and parachutes work as it brings Williams and Wilmore back to Earth after about eight days.

NASA officials express confidence in Boeing and say the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the mission will be successful. They are eager to have another spacecraft, in addition to the one SpaceX flies, that can ferry astronauts to the station. “I can say with confidence that the teams have absolutely done their due diligence,” James Free, NASA’s associate administrator, said at a briefing last week.

“I see a total focus on this mission and making it successful from the way that we always have done human spaceflight in my time at NASA,” said Steve Stich, who oversees NASA’s commercial crew program. “It’s really just taking it step by step, methodically getting to flight.”

Still, launching humans to orbit is extremely difficult and dangerous, especially on a new vehicle that has a history of trouble and has never flown people before.

“The first crewed flight of a new spacecraft is an absolutely critical milestone‚” Free said. “The lives of our crew members, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are at stake. We don’t take that lightly at all. The most important thing we can do is protect those two people, as well as our crew currently on board the space station.”

Safety, he said, “has and always will be our primary core value at NASA.”

The mission comes at a crucial time for Boeing. After the panel blew off the Alaska Airlines flight, the company announced it would reshuffle its leadership and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/25/boeing-ceo-stepping-down/" target="_blank">replace CEO David Calhoun</a>. Calhoun took over the company after another disaster — the crashes of two 737 Max airplanes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.

Boeing’s commercial aviation division and its space program are managed separately. But both have faced similar quality-control issues.

After the failure of Starliner’s first test flight, managers at Boeing <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/28/boeing-admits-starliner-testing-flaws/" target="_blank">acknowledged they had cut short a test that would have caught the software problem</a>. That caused NASA to offer an unusually harsh assessment of its partner, saying that “there were numerous instances where the Boeing software quality processes either should have or could have uncovered the defects.”

Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, told reporters the past week that the problems with the company’s airline division had not added to pressures in the mission.

“We signed up to go do this, and we’re going to go do it and be successful at it,” he said. “So I don’t think of it in terms of what’s important for Boeing, as much as I think of it in terms of what’s important for this program, to follow through with the commitments that we made to our customer.”

Boeing’s woes have been amplified by the fact that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/21/spacex-boeing-rivalry-launch/" target="_blank">SpaceX has been flying astronauts on its spacecraft for four years</a>, even though the companies received their contracts at the same time and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/09/16/nasa-awards-space-contract-to-boeing-and-spacex/" target="_blank">SpaceX was paid $2.6 billion, far less than Boeing</a>. Since then, SpaceX has flown multiple missions for NASA, as well as taken private astronauts to the station and to orbit. It also has received an extension on its contract with NASA to fly astronaut missions.

Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich

Not only has Boeing yet to fly people on Starliner but the delays have meant about $1.4 billion in cost overruns. In an interview last year, John Shannon, vice president of Boeing Exploration Systems, said <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/02/boeing-starliner-capsule-commercial-crew/" target="_blank">the future of Starliner was uncertain</a>. “Probably the biggest challenge I have is defining how do I make this into a positive business case, given the market conditions as we see them right now,” he said then.

Asked about the future of Starliner recently, Nappi was noncommittal. He said the company would fulfill its contract with NASA, flying a handful of missions, which would take the company to the end of the decade.

“So we’ve got plenty of time to think about what’s after that,” he said. “And we will do that. But right now, the focus is on CFT”— or the crewed flight test.

In December 2019, Starliner launched successfully to orbit, but the spacecraft ran into problems shortly after it separated from the launch vehicle. Engineers on the ground were able to diagnose the problem — the onboard computer was 11 hours off, so the spacecraft had started executing commands for an entirely different part of the flight.

Engineers also soon discovered a second software problem, which could have caused the service module to crash into the crew capsule during separation. The issues were so severe that NASA officials said the spacecraft could have been lost because of either of them, threatening the lives of astronauts, had any been on board. The flight never reached the space station, and after it returned to Earth, Boeing said it would attempt a second flight test after reviewing 1 million lines of code in the spacecraft.

The second attempt to fly the capsule without anyone onboard came about a year and a half later, during the summer of 2021. By then, Boeing said it had fixed the software issues. But this time several of the valves in the spacecraft’s service module were corroded shut, and Boeing was unable to fix them while the craft was mounted on top of the rocket at the launchpad.

Boeing finally completed the uncrewed test flight in May 2022. But a little over a year later, as it was gearing up to fly astronauts, it announced the problem with the parachute system and the flammable tape.

Part of the purpose of the crewed test flight is to see how the vehicle reacts in the vacuum of space, and NASA officials said they anticipate that the astronauts and ground controllers will have to react to unexpected issues. That, they said, is how they make the vehicle safer and more reliable.

“Let me just remind everybody again: This is a new spacecraft. I’ll also remind you this is a test flight,” Free said. “We certainly have some unknowns in this mission, things we expect to learn. This being a test mission, we may encounter things we don’t expect. But our job now is to remain vigilant and keep looking for issues.”

Williams, who was assigned years ago to the commercial crew program and has been waiting to fly since then, said she’s convinced the teams are ready.

“We do anticipate everything’s going to go as planned,” she said in an interview. “But if it doesn’t, we’ll take a moment and analyze it and talk about it, and we’ll be okay. So our confidence in the mission is high.”

An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect year for when Boeing completed its uncrewed Starliner test flight. It was 2022. This version has been corrected.  

Emmy Award, 2021. Peabody Award, 2010. On teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, 2010 and 2011.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (PublicAffairs, April 2018)

As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard

Colby College, B.A., American Studies

Christian Davenport covers NASA and the space industry for The Washington Post's Financial desk. He joined The Post in 2000 and has served as an editor on the Metro desk and as a reporter covering military affairs. He is the author of "The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos" (PublicAffairs, 2018).

Christian Davenport

washpost

Boeing Starliner to launch first crewed mission May 6 after long delays

the-washington-post

Launch of NASA's Boeing Orbital Flight Test-2 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla

The Washington Post

staff

Help Desk

Artificial Intelligence

Internet Culture

Space

Tech Policy

Tech

prism://prism.query/site,/technology/space&limit=20

prism://prism.query/two-sites,/technology,/politics/powerpost/the-technology-202?limit=20