Boeing Orbital Flight Test-2.

NASA’s Boeing Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) staat gepland voor lancering op vrijdag 30 juli om 20.53u onze tijd.

Boeing gaat het weer proberen met de CST-100 capsule. Na een test in december 2019 kwamen tijdens vlucht al de nodige problemen aan het licht en verder onderzoek bracht nog meer aan het licht:

With the completion of the investigation’s third and final focus area, the review team identified a total of 80 recommendations that Boeing, in collaboration with NASA, is addressing, with action plans for each already well under way. Although the full list of recommendations is company sensitive and proprietary, the categories of the corrective and preventative actions are as follows:  

• Testing and Simulation: 21 recommendations including the need for greater hardware and software integration testing; performance of an end-to-end “run for record” test prior to each flight using the maximum amount of flight hardware available; reviewing subsystem behaviors and limitations; and addressing any identified simulation or emulation gaps.
• Requirements: 10 recommendations including an assessment of all software requirements with multiple logic conditions to ensure test coverage.
• Process and Operational Improvements: 35 recommendations including modifications to change board documentation; bolstering required participants in peer reviews and test data reviews; and increasing the involvement of subject matter experts in safety critical areas.
• Software: 7 recommendations including updating the software code and associated artifacts to correct the Mission Elapsed Timer Epoch and Service Module disposal anomalies; and making the antenna selection algorithm more robust.
• Knowledge Capture and Hardware Modification: 7 recommendations such as organizational changes to the safety reporting structure; amending the Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) approach; and the addition of an external Radio Frequency (RF) filter to reject out-of-band interference.