Boeing's top Starliner astronaut pulls out of space mission role
Send a link to a friend
[October 12, 2020]
By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The chief astronaut
for Boeing Co's long-delayed debut crewed flight to the International
Space Station stepped down from the job on Wednesday, citing family
priorities.
Chris Ferguson, a 59-year-old retired NASA astronaut who joined Boeing
in 2011 and became a Starliner test pilot in 2018, will remain on the
Starliner team in a mission operations role, he said. The launch remains
scheduled for next summer.
"I have made obligations that I just do not want to break to my family,"
Ferguson said in an interview with Reuters.
The personnel shakeup comes as the U.S. aerospace giant is trying to
overcome software and hardware problems that have put the Starliner
missions more than a year behind rival spacecraft from Elon Musk's
SpaceX.
NASA in 2014 contracted Boeing and SpaceX to build their own capsules
that can fly American astronauts to the space station, an effort to wean
the U.S. off its nearly decade-long dependence on Russia's Soyuz
vehicles for rides to space.
Software and hardware failures prevented Starliner from docking to the
space station during its first unpiloted test flight in 2019.
SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, which sent its first pair of NASA
astronauts to the space station earlier this year, is scheduled to carry
three more and a Japanese astronaut later this month.
[to top of second column]
|
Boeing astronaut Chris Ferguson poses for a portrait at the Johnson
Space Center in Houston, Texas, U.S., July 3, 2019. REUTERS/Mike
Blake/File Photo
Boeing is aiming to re-do its unpiloted Starliner test mission in
December as engineering teams complete the last of more than 80
recommendations and fixes that turned up from independent and
internal reviews of the 2019 Starliner test failure.
NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore will fill in for Ferguson, the space
agency announced on Wednesday.
"I'm not going anywhere, I'm just not going to space next year,"
Ferguson said.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Eric M.
Johnson and Aurora Ellis)
[© 2020 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2020 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content. |