Troubled Boeing Starliner Returning to Earth Empty
Boeing employees “humiliated” that crew will be returning aboard SpaceX Dragon in February. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s company launches historic mission, Polaris Dawn.
The last time I reported on the Boeing Starliner mission to the International Space Station (ISS), the crew’s 8-day trip could morph into an 8-month stay because the return trip might be on another spacecraft.
That possibility has turned out to be a reality. The Starliner is returning to Earth empty, and the crew is coming home on a SpaceX Dragon in February.
Boeing will return its Starliner capsule from the International Space Station without the NASA astronauts that it delivered to orbit in early June, the agency announced on Saturday.
With Starliner coming back to Earth empty, NASA will now have astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams return via SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which is expected to launch its ninth regular mission to the ISS for the agency on Sept. 24.
Ultimately, Wilmore and Williams will stay at the ISS for about six more months before flying home in February on SpaceX’s Crew-9 vehicle. The test flight was originally intended to last about nine days.
The decision to bring Starliner back from the ISS empty marks a dramatic about-face for NASA and Boeing, as the organizations were previously adamant that the capsule was the primary choice for returning the crew.
NASA concluded that the Starliner thrusters were unreliable enough to ensure the crew’s safety.
While the pair integrated with the “Expedition 71” crew aboard the ISS, assisting them with research and other responsibilities, NASA officials have said Wilmore and Williams are using up more supplies meant for the ISS crew.
Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said that NASA teams spent all summer looking over the data on Starliner and felt there was too much risk with regard to the vehicle’s thrusters.
“There was too much risk for the crew,” he said.
A Boeing spokesperson said in a statement that the company “continues to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft.”
Boeing employees are embarrassed that its rival is bailing them out of serious trouble.
The Florida-based staffer with Boeing’s space program said the decision was the latest blow to the aerospace giant, which is already suffering backlash from a slew of commercial flight incidents earlier this year.
“We have had so many embarrassments lately, we’re under a microscope. This just made it, like, 100 times worse,” said one worker, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
“We hate SpaceX,” he added. “We talk s–t about them all the time, and now they’re bailing us out.”
“It’s shameful. I’m embarrassed, I’m horrified,” the employee said.With morale “in the toilet,” the worker claimed that many in Boeing are blaming NASA for the humiliation.
Perhaps more merit and less diversity are needed at Boeing.
🚨BREAKING: Elon Musk says that Merit should be the only reason for hiring.
Do you agree? pic.twitter.com/AvF0vTQmNv
— Ian Jaeger (@IanJaeger29) January 11, 2024
Meanwhile, SpaceX is on track to make some history over the next few weeks.
SpaceX is about to launch four private astronauts farther than any human has flown since the end of the Apollo era. The crew will be on a mission to perform history’s first commercial spacewalk.
The mission, Polaris Dawn, will liftoff early Tuesday (Aug. 27), from SpaceX’s Launch Complex-39A, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center — the same pad that supported all the crewed Apollo missions to the moon.
Though it’s true each of SpaceX’s astronaut launches to date has flown out of LC-39A, it’s particularly fitting that the members of Polaris Dawn will also launch from there, as this mission will take them further than any crewed flight has gone since Apollo 17, in 1972.
Competition breeds innovation and excellence. Perhaps instead of whining about its competitor, Boeing management and employees up their game.
MEI. Merit. Excellence. Innovation.
I like this idea https://t.co/sd3zZXQUfi
— Stella Garrett (@watching_skies) July 1, 2024
Hopefully, Team Boeing will learn some valuable lessons. It has a lot of catching up to do if it’s going to race ahead of Team SpaceX.
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The calculation isn’t astronauts’ safety but danger to regulators and officials from Monday morning quarterbacks if something happens. It means job loss.
Astronauts are a little less fearful.
It’s one thing to get into a machine that might fail, it’s another to get into a machine that’s already broken down.
Even the first option is a non-starter, a the folks on the Titan found out.
.
NASA is talking about a space capsule, not a 1974 Plymouth Satellite. It’s not like the astro’s can step out of the ISS and kick the tires and squeegee the windscreen. Anyhow, burning up on re-entry is a bad thing for a crewed capsule mission- and no one at Boeing wants to scrape fried astronaut guts off control panels.
It will probably be difficult for Boeing to reverse course because they were riding that grift for so long. People need to be fired, starting at the top.
Very close to several Boeing employees
You have no idea how bad it is. Whatever you think it is, multiply it by 100.
“If it’s a Boeing, then I ain’t going … “
Part of me hopes it comes down perfectly fine, so we can all say “See? You’re a bunch of Safetyist ninnies!”
Another part of me hopes this thing burns up spectacularly where everyone can see it. (And go “Oooh. Aaaaah.”) And it will simply break the back of Boeing. (So we can start something new in its place.)
The problem here is that they would be betting two peoples lives on the outcome. It is not “safetyism” to say no to the risk. From chatter on engineering boards, They are having thruster failures that they cannot identify the root cause of. If you don’t know how it happened, how can you put a fix in place. The way up they had to do a “reboot” to get the system working again, and even then, some thrusters did not come back on line. If that happens on the way down it burns up and likely with no time for that famous reboot we do when Microsoft screws us. Imagine having your life on the line for that.
I think NASA had safetyism forcibly tattooed on their nutsacks after Challenger.
Despite what Nelcon said, you can be certain that politics was a factor in the decision. Imagine losing two astronauts a few weeks before the election, especially since the VPOTUS chairs the National Space Council. (Of course they only deal with policy rather than operations, but that is not how the game of politics is played.) Now, back to this week’s episode of Gilligan’s Space Station.
Wouldn’t it be great if Musk named the rescue DragonX capsule for whatever vessel it was that saved the folks on GI?
Or the Carpathia….
Do a side by side of VPOTUS and the Boeing CIO talking word salads and lying as easily as she opens her mouth. That will tell you what you need to know.
But she’d have a super view of the fireball from her home at the Naval Observatory.
Could the gender and racial diversity of the station’s crew be the smiling face of ground-based DEI incompetence?
2 extra people for 8 months is bound to stretch ISS’s critical supplies of air, water and food; will there be a resupply mission? Will everyone just have to go on a diet and breathe a little less?
NASA (and the other ISS partners) have a number of unmanned commercial options available to them to resupply the ISS. In fact, SpaceX sent a resupply freighter just last month, I believe. They have the capability to send a unmanned resupply freight every couple of months, or more. So, they wouldn’t have any problem extending the extra two people for a long time, maybe even indefinitely. IOW, the wear & tear on their bodies would likely be an issue long before food, water or air would be (the air is actually produced by electrolysis that uses the onboard water).
And we know where that water comes from. Ahem.
All water comes from there ultimately. The question is whether it gets filtered by the earth, or by high-tech synthetic filters.
The science of large numbers says “roughly one particle of air exhaled not only by Caesar, but also Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, and George Washington, will make it into your next breath.” Water’s no different.
What about aggregate radiation exposure?
Boeing is having a rough go at it. I’m skeptical the US government would allow our only US passenger jet maker and critical defense contractor to go belly-up (or be sold). But, absent that backstopping, they’re behaving in a way many companies do before they enter the death-spiral phase. It will be interesting to see if Boeing can right the ship.
I wonder if the truth will ever come about regarding the root cause of their fall from grace. It used to be such a respected company, known for their superb quality and safety record. Then the debacles with the 737 Max and the apparent cover-ups. Now this. Has a woke mind virus infection had anything to do with this?
Everything woke turns to shit.
Back in the good-ol-days, I was a Principal Engineer for McDonnell-Douglas at Kennedy Space Center. Then Boeing took over, absorbed M-D, and got rid of a lot of senior management. Over the next 2-4 years, they managed to lose over 90% of the knowlege-base within the organization. That was at KSC, who knows what happened to the rest of the M-D experts?
Most of the M-D folks they kept were the financial MBAs who ran M-D into the ground.
The Boeing people they got rid of were all the engineers running the company.
Funny how it worked that way.
Boeing goes “boing!”
What right to Boeing employees have to “talk s–t” about SpaceX? They should get their own woke house in order first. Boeing used to be the holy grail of aerospace and air engineering.
I guess this is a tangible product of the damage that “DIE” can do to a company.
The unmanned Starliner better be recovered, without damage. If not, Boeing is in a worse position, perhaps unrecoverable.
“Boeing employees “humiliated”
And that’s a crucial failure of management, right there.
(Ironically, only the competent ones are humiliated… the others? Meh.)
The question is – will the capsule return at all?
And in how many pieces.
Subotai Bahadur
All things considered, I’m glad Boeing is wearing the flack and putting the safety of the crew first.
Yes, I know they’d get more flack if they burned up on re-entry, however ….
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cf4e9efa05a694dc44d13fffe21b9fdb0686170762d79cf327199306349e8d5d.jpg
“Humanity has about six months to purchase 8 billion ape costumes for the ultimate prank”