Imagine that you’re traveling for work this summer, somewhere far from home. The flight over is a little turbulent, but you’re excited to be away for a week or so. Then your return journey gets delayed. The airline puts you up in a nice hotel but can’t decide on a new departure date. Your employer booked the tickets, so you can’t do much about the situation. You start running out of clean clothes, and everyone back home starts wondering when you’re coming back.
After two months, your bosses share new travel information. They think they can send you home soon, and on the same airline. Or they might have to book another carrier, and if that’s the case, then hang in there: That flight is scheduled for next year. You’ll land eight months—months!—after you left.
This is an absurd scenario, but it is playing out right now 250 miles above Earth, with two NASA astronauts on the International Space Station. Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams took off in Starliner, a Boeing-built spacecraft, in early June. NASA had assigned them to test-drive the new spacecraft before the agency cleared Boeing to conduct regular missions shuttling crews to ISS. The astronauts were prepared to encounter some surprises, which are par for the course in a new vehicle. But Boeing’s first crewed mission has now unraveled so badly that NASA is seriously considering whether Starliner is capable of bringing Wilmore and Williams home at all—and trying to decide if the astronauts should return on SpaceX’s Dragon instead.
NASA officials said yesterday that they’ll make a final decision later this month, after weighing Starliner’s chances of safely delivering the spacefarers back to Earth. The effort to get Starliner to and from the ISS was rife with technical issues before Wilmore and Williams even launched; now Boeing’s already tenuous reputation as a capable aerospace company hangs in the balance. The company is supposed to be a competitor to SpaceX, which has been flying NASA astronauts to and from the space station without incident for several years. But if Boeing can’t recover from this saga, Elon Musk’s company may have a monopoly on astronaut-transportation services. NASA has invested billions of dollars in the two companies so they can serve as backup to each other. The agency likely never expected to face that scenario so soon, or the possibility that one private company could end up dominating American spaceflight in the post-space-shuttle era.
Of all the places to be stuck waiting for a flight home, the space station is not the worst—gorgeous views, endless weightlessness, no crowds. Wilmore and Williams are helping the other crew members on board with science research and station maintenance. And they said they’re loving the extra time in orbit. After all, they’re both close enough to retirement that this may be their last NASA voyage. The real drama is unfolding on the ground, where NASA and Boeing appear to be in disagreement over the best path forward. The teams have spent several weeks trying to figure out whether some of Starliner’s thrusters, which malfunctioned when the spacecraft approached the ISS for docking, would work properly on a return journey. Some test results have been “a bit of a surprise to us,” Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s commercial-crew program, told reporters yesterday, and “upped the level of discomfort”—not exactly what anyone would hope to hear. Neither is what Stich said next, which is that engineers lack a “total understanding of the physics of what’s happening” in the thrusters when their Teflon seals expand, blocking the flow of propellant.
The Boeing team feels confident that Starliner can complete its mission, even with uncertainty surrounding the propulsion system, but some at NASA aren’t so sure, Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said at the press conference. During a meeting of NASA officials this week, “we heard from a lot of folks that had concerns, and the decision was not clear,” Bowersox said. NASA will make the final call, not Boeing; a committee from the commercial-crew program will recommend a course of action to Bowersox, and the decision could go all the way up to the space agency’s administrator.
If NASA decides to tap in SpaceX, the next Dragon mission would launch in late September with two astronauts instead of the initially planned four. Those astronauts would remain on the ISS for a regular six-month stay, and then Wilmore and Williams would come home with them in February 2025. Starliner would come home in early September, on its own.
That scenario would amount to major embarrassment for Boeing, and cast doubt on the future of the Starliner program. Boeing stretched to make it to the launchpad this year, let alone into orbit. The program has been plagued by poor oversight, technical issues, and schedule delays, including a required do-over when Boeing’s uncrewed test failed to reach the ISS in 2019. NASA’s second-in-command, Pam Melroy, once described the successful completion of Starliner objectives as “existential” for Boeing. Assuming the spacecraft makes it back, it is scheduled to undergo NASA reviews to approve it for regular service, but how that process will shake out if the vehicle comes back empty is unclear. Perhaps Boeing could address the issues this mission revealed and meaningfully contribute to astronaut commutes before 2030, when space agencies plan to decommission and deorbit the ISS. Or perhaps SpaceX alone will ferry spacefarers around. If anything breaks, and it can—SpaceX rockets were recently grounded for a couple of weeks after an in-flight mishap—NASA astronauts won’t be able to go anywhere.
For weeks after Starliner’s launch, officials at both NASA and Boeing downplayed issues. Boeing in particular kept hyping the spacecraft even as engineers struggled to understand the root of the propulsion problems. “The vehicle has really performed extremely well,” Mark Nappi, the manager of Boeing’s commercial-spaceflight program, told reporters late last month. (Nappi was noticeably absent from yesterday’s press conference, a departure from the usual format.) The agency and the company have both bristled at growing public perception that Wilmore and Williams are stranded or stuck. I still think that stranded is an exaggeration, as I wrote last month. Stuck, however, is becoming painfully more accurate with each passing day.
The astronauts are making the best of the situation, as any other travelers waiting for their flight might. But space travel is far more dangerous than air travel, and it will be for decades to come. “Even the best designed, flight proven vehicles, under the best considerations, have analytical probability of failure that is eyewatering in comparison to everyday life,” Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director and manager of the space-shuttle program, wrote in his blog this week. NASA has an extremely important decision to make now. Better stuck, for now, than sorry.
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