'We're confident in it': Boeing Starliner's parachute team readies for Crew Flight Test landing without astronauts on Sept. 7
- by Space.com
- Sep 06, 2024
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CFT will land without astronauts.
Comments Related: See SpaceX's Crew Dragon parachutes in action in this epic video compilation
SpaceX's first Crew Dragon capsule splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean on March 8, 2019, ending its uncrewed first test flight to the International Space Station.
(Image credit: NASA TV)
Space.com: So if I can roll back about a year, to when you discovered the parachutes needed some more adjustments, I might call that Parachute 1.0. So today, is it a completely different parachute? Or is it sort of an adjusted parachute?
McMichael: The issue that we found last summer was called the" soft links." They're what attach the suspension lines. They are a primary link, and they carry the main load. When we found out those are an issue, we had already completed all of our qualification testing, if you will. So the trick there was we wanted to we needed to upgrade those, make them stronger and make a change to make the soft links better.
But we did not want to invalidate all of that testing that we had done up to that point. You get your data by testing the same system over and over again. So we didn't want to start over because we didn't want to throw away all that qualification test history.
A Boeing Starliner test article descends over White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico during a landing system reliability test designed to simulate dynamic abort conditions and a main parachute failure.
(Image credit: Boeing)
McMichael: To be clear, the soft links that were in the system — those still had a positive margin. [In other words], they would not be expected to fail. It's just that the margin was not as high as we wanted it to be because they are such a critical element. We actually carry a slightly higher margin on those because because we've got people on board. The soft links are the main load path; if you lost soft links, you lose the capability to carry load. On other pieces of the parachute […] You could blow out a panel, you could blow out a handful of panels, wouldn't bother the parachute at all. Wouldn't change its performance.
So, that was a change we made. Then while we were at it — the four most expensive words in the English language — there was also a new design change on the table to change the suspension line at the skirt to the parachute. But again, the trick there was, we wanted to make sure we didn't invalidate all the expensive, hard, long testing that we've done in the past with these changes.
So, these were small changes. We then did a lot of ground testing to verify their strength. Then, we have subsequently done airdrop testing as well ... It's the law of unintended consequences that can bite you sometimes. We wanted to make sure there weren't any unintended consequences of making these small changes.
Boeing's Starliner at the International Space Station during its first uncrewed docking operations in 2022.
(Image credit: Samantha Cristoforetti/European Space Agency)
Space.com: How are you starting to think ahead for Starliner-1, the first operational crewed mission expected in 2025?
McMichael: Parachutes take a lot of time to fabricate. They're a long, long lead item, if you will, and then they get installed on the spacecraft pretty early — so, Starliner-1 parachutes are the same as what we're flying today. Having said that, there's a tiny delta of work that we have to do between CFT and Starliner-1.
The suspension lines themselves — the material as we buy it — you buy it in manufacturing lots. The manufacturing lot of suspension line material for Starliner-1 is a different lot than for CFT, so we need to check to make sure that that suspension line material is at least as strong and verify our margins again with the new suspension line material.
Spoiler alert: We have the data [from pull testing]. We've seen that the new suspension lines for Starliner-1 are actually slightly stronger. So we know we're going to be fine. We just haven't dotted the I's and crossed the T's on the paperwork yet.
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