Space schedule: Boeing prepares for Starliner test, Congress investigates UFOs
The week of 16 May will see two long awaited space-related events — the long delayed second test flight of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft and a US Congressional hearing on the topic of UFOs.
Read below for more on what’s next in space in the coming weeks.
US House Intelligence subcommittee hearing on “UFOs” — 17 May
The US Congress will hold a hearing Tuesday 17 May on the topic of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs — the new Pentagon nomenclature for what were once dubbed “UFOs.”
The US House Intelligence Committee's subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation will host the hearing beginning at 10am EDT, which will feature two witnesses, deputy director of naval intelligence Scott Bray, and undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security Ronald Moultrie.
You can watch the public portion of the hearing live on YouTube.
The hearing will be the first congressional hearing on UFOs/UAPs in more than 50 years, according to Indiana congressman Andre Carson.
Congress hasn't held a public hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UFO's) in over 50 years. That will change next week when I lead a hearing in @HouseIntel on this topic & the national security risk it poses. Americans need to know more about these unexplained occurrences.
— André Carson (@RepAndreCarson) May 10, 2022
The hearing follows a Pentagon report on UAPs released in 2021 that concluded UAPs observed by US military pilots were not US technology, but also found no evidence they were alien spacecraft — US military officials, in other words, don’t know what UAPS are.
Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test 2 – 19 May
Nasa’s Crew-3 and Crew-4 flew to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and atop SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. That’s because since 2020, SpaceX has been the only commercial launch operator approved to fly astronauts as part of Nasa’s Commercial Crew program.
Boeing will take a second shot at a critical flight test of its Starliner spacecraft on Thursday, 19 May, Orbital Flight Test-2, or OFT-2.
The uncrewed spacecraft is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 6.54pm EDT. Nasa will begin carrying live coverage of pre-launch activities on Nasa Television and the space agency’s website at 6pm EDT.
If successful, the Starliner spacecraft will dock with the International Space Station at 7:10 p.m. on Friday, 20 May.
In 2020, Nasa awarded both Boeing and SpaceX contracts to develop spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS as part of the space agency’s Commercial Crew program. But so far, only SpaceX completed the necessary testing, with its Crew Dragon spacecraft, and has been flying Nasa astronauts since 2020.
The Boing Starliner has been held up since a failed first attempt at an orbital flight testin 2019. A computer glitch kept the Starliner from docking with the space station, and though Boeing tried again in August, further technical issues kept the spacecraft on the ground.
If Boeing can successfully complete the OFT-2 mission, it will set the stage for first a crewed test flight and then regular commercial crew flights to the space stations.
Nasa officials, including administrator Bill Nelson, have repeatedly said that hardware redundancy, a second ride to the ISS using different technology than SpaceX has so far, is important to the space agency.
Nasa’s Moon rocket test flight — August, maybe
As recently as early April, Nasa officials were still discussing launch windows in May, June and July for the first test flight of its Space Launch System (SLS) Moon rocket and Orion spacecraft.
But after three aborted attempts to complete a crucial launchpad fueling test known as a wet dress rehearsal since 17 March, Nasa rolled the rolled the 322-foot-tall rocket back into Vehicle Assembly Building on Tuesday 26 April and readjusted expectations. During a media call Tuesday morning, Nasa assistant administrator Bob Cabana suggested making a SLS test flight by sometime August would be a schedule the space agency would have to work hard for at this point.
SLS and Orion together form the core of Nasa’s Artemis Moon program. Artemis I, an uncrewed test flight of both vehicles, must take place before Artemis II, a crewed lunar flyby scheduled for May 2024, and Artemis III, a mission to return humans to the lunar surface scheduled for 2025.
Psyche asteroid mission — launch scheduled for 1 August
On 2 May, Nasa’s Psyche spacecraft was flown from the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory facility in California to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the craft will undergo testing in preparation for a 1 August launch.
Psyche will be the first spacecraft to use solar-electric propulsion to travel beyond the Moon, using 800s square feet of solar panels to power its Hall effect thrusters for the 1.5 billion mile journey to the asteroid Psyche in the main asteroid belt. Thrusters use electric fields to push propellant and generate thrust, and are very efficient, but take a long time to build up speed — Psyche the spacecraft won’t reach Psyche the asteroid until 2026.
