What went wrong with the Boeing Starliner launch

The inaugural flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner went awry Friday morning when the spacecraft failed to achieve its correct orbit, cancelling its planned trip to the International Space Station.

Not only was this the first test flight of Boeing’s ship, but it was a major step in NASA’s plan to let private companies take over manned space flights to the ISS. 

Things started off promising enough with the Starliner’s liftoff, a picture-perfect launch into the early morning Florida sky. 

Both Boeing and NASA chief Jim Bridenstine indicated the first sign of trouble via Twitter about 50 minutes after the 6:36 a.m. ET launch.

At a press conference following the launch, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine explained exactly what went wrong. 

“We did not get the insertion burn we were hoping for,” he said. But following a successful liftoff, the Starliner’s Missions Elapsed Timing system “had an error in it,” according to Bridenstine. Boeing’s Jim Chilton later said they don’t yet know what caused the error.

Essentially, the Starliner thought the time that had elapsed “was different than it actually was,” said Bridenstine. As a result, the craft burned more fuel than it should have, trying to “maintain a very precise control that it normally wouldn’t have tried to maintain.” 

By the time signals were sent to the craft to make its orbital insertion burn, it was too late. With that fuel spent, the rendezvous with the ISS wasn’t possible, Bridenstine said.

Bridenstine took great pains, however, to make things look less dire than the failed orbit implied, saying, “Today, a lot of things went right… This is why we test.”

While the Starliner is a passenger spacecraft, designed to shuttle people to and from space, Friday’s flight was an unmanned mission to the ISS. But Bridenstine emphasized that had this flight been manned, the crew would have been safe and could have possibly been able to fix the issue to rendezvous with the ISS.

In fact, because engineers were able to get the craft into a stable orbit, even if it wasn’t the planned one, Boeing and NASA are still looking at running tests while the Starliner is in space, and landing the craft at a facility at White Sands, New Mexico. 

The earliest landing would occur early Sunday morning but that time could change.