Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time.
Shortly after shepherding the first Boeing Starliner to a space port, NASA astronaut Bob Hines got a special assignment.Crew-4, returned to Earth from half a year in space that October, to learn that NASA wanted him to help see Starliner through its first crewed mission.
NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Bob Hines in the International Space Station cupola, shortly before assisting with the historic first docking of Boeing Starliner to the orbiting complex on May 20, 2022.Hines is a member of the joint test team, a team within the commercial crew program that manages the test and verification of commercial crew vehicles.
"Sometimes maybe it's not about solving it technically, but procedurally, and getting the teams together and building that kind of cohesion so that we can have those conversations and make those trades," he explained."Everything's a compromise. So it really is all about getting those different points of view together, getting them all laid out on the table, and then figuring out what the best path forward is.
That design process continues even after Starliner returns, as future missions are put in process. Starliner-1, the first operational crewed mission with astronauts, has most of its hardware ready to go for a launch no earlier than early 2025. Assuming all goes to plan on CFT, that spacecraft will fly mostly as-is, with future missions gaining deeper design"lessons learned" from the pioneering astronaut mission.
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