NASA’s Starliner Launch Fails – Burning Issues – Free PDF Download

SPACE IS DIFFICULT

NASA SUFFERED ITS OWN FAILURE RECENTLY

• BOEING’s CST-100 Starliner astronaut capsule has failed to reach the orbit required to continue its mission towards the International Space Station, NASA has confirmed.

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

NASA DEPENDENT ON RUSSIA FOR LAUNCH TO ISS

UNDERSTANDING THE ISSUE

• Russia, for its part, depends on the US segment of the space station for the electricity provided by its solar panels.
• And NASA, for its part, has no way of getting its American astronauts to and from the space station — or anywhere else in space, for that matter. So it pays $70.7 million for each one-way ticket on Russian rockets.

REASON?

• Back in 2004, President Bush announced that NASA’s aging space shuttle program would be retired in 2010 and — eventually — replaced by a plan to return to the moon.
• At the time, NASA realized there would be a four-year gap between the space-shuttle retirement and when the new manned space transport system would be in place.

NASA’S SOLUTION TO THE RUSSIA PROBLEM

• Boeing And SpaceX Win $6.8 Billion In NASA Contracts
• NASA has chosen Boeing and SpaceX to build the vehicles that will transport its astronauts to the International Space Station, putting the two American companies on a course to take over a job that NASA has recently relied upon Russia to perform: carrying out manned space flights.
• Respectively, the vehicles are Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s Dragon. The total potential contract value is $4.2 billion for Boeing and $2.6 billion for SpaceX.

ATLAS V ROCKET

THE FAILURE

• Starliner launched this morning (Dec. 20) on an uncrewed mission called Orbital Flight Test (OFT), which was designed to demonstrate the capsule’s ability to get NASA astronauts to and from the ISS.
• But Starliner encountered problems shortly after lift-off and ended up getting stranded in an orbit that’s incompatible with an ISS rendezvous

THE FAILURE

• The failure is likely to push back further NASA’s already delayed — and repeatedly postponed — attempt at resuming human spaceflight from the United States.
• USA will remain dependent on Russia for space launches even though USA has imposed sanctions on Russia

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