Suni Williams and Barry Wilmore, the NASA astronauts whose eight-day trip into space in June is now on day 82 due to problems with their Boeing Starliner spacecraft – and Poohtheir own fussy, self-righteous preference not to be incinerated—will attempt to return to Earth aboard a SpaceX capsule in 2025. I damn well hope someone fed their cats.
Here is a funny excerpt from the New York Times Story of the change of plan:
Norman Knight, NASA’s flight operations manager, said he had spoken to Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore and they supported the extended stay in orbit, which officials declined to describe as a stranding.
“They fully support the agency’s decision and are ready to continue this mission aboard the ISS,” Knight said.
New York Times
It’s incredible to portray the astronauts’ eager agreement to the revised reentry plan as some kind of endorsement of the mission direction, as NASA appears to be doing. Wow, incredible, the astronauts fully support the decision to avert their fiery deaths aboard the shabby, malfunctioning commercial spacecraft they’ve spent the last two months trying to repair. No bullshit.
If it were known that Williams and Wilmore were upset about the plan to make them wait until 2025 to come home, that might at least support the story that NASA leadership was responding to the famously overcautious nature of serious engineers — that the Starliner is, or could be, safe to use, and that the daring space jockeys would love to ride the thing down, but that the responsible professionals at the helm of the mission simply wouldn’t tolerate even the slightest danger to their subordinates. That would be the story that needs to be told.
Instead, NASA must find the worst possible order of these things:
(Two NASA bosses) acknowledged that Boeing engineers and officials disagreed about the risk. Boeing believed it had demonstrated that Starliner was safe enough for Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore to return home.
NYT
The Boeing engineers who built this rickety pile of shit are OK with the astronauts risking their lives aboard the Starliner. The astronauts themselves—the only people who have flown into space on this thing, who have personally tested it for months, and whose safety is at risk because of these decisions—fully support the decision to spend five more unplanned months in orbit waiting to be brought home in an entirely different vehicle. That’s about the most damning picture Boeing can get from this affair, other than the fact that Wilmore and Williams trusted the company’s judgment, crashed the Starliner out of orbit, and screamed into their radios, “You did this to us, Boeing!!!” as they were flambéed to death in the upper atmosphere.
As Just The Starliner is now reportedly scheduled to depart the International Space Station unmanned next month. It will leave orbit and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere unmanned. I suspect no one in the world will be watching this more closely than the astronauts who flew into space on Boeing’s flop in June. The uncertainty preventing Williams and Wilmore from flying home on the Starliner concerns a number of engines that failed during the flight to orbit and whose faults were not adequately addressed to ensure they would function properly on the way down.
During reentry, these thrusters are used to adjust the spacecraft’s attitude along its trajectory. Like all reentry vehicles, the Starliner is designed to find its way out of orbit just like that. As it plunges into the upper atmosphere at supersonic speeds, it compresses the air in front of it, creating a plasma furnace heated to thousands of degrees that would simply incinerate the craft if not for the heat shield that extends into that furnace to protect the more sensitive areas of the spacecraft. Heat aside, the sheer speed of the capsule’s fall is a deadly hazard: even if it were heat-shielded on all sides (which would be impractical for a variety of good reasons), the spacecraft would still need to be positioned just right during the crucial minutes of descent, otherwise atmospheric drag could send it into a spin violent enough to liquefy everyone on board—or simply blow it to pieces.
Here it is instructive to recall what happened to the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. Because some heat shield tiles had been damaged during launch weeks earlier, superheated gases penetrated and melted the aluminum internal structure of the shuttle’s left wing upon entering the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This caused Columbia to lose its trajectory and begin to spin out of control. The sheer inertial forces of supersonic flight ripped the shuttle – and its occupants – apart more than 200,000 feet above the ground.
The Starliner capsule has no wings, but is vulnerable to the same dangers associated with an imprecisely controlled reentry. I mention this only as a suggestion: Imagine sitting in an air-conditioned office on the surface of the Earth, trying to reassure two astronauts in space—via Zoom?—that it probably it’s okay for them to risk all that inside the capsule, the design of which you’ve undoubtedly already botched. Look, we’ve simulated it a thousand times down here (on the same simulators that failed to predict the Starliner’s engine malfunctions at all) and only in one percent of cases do you die screaming 35 miles above the planet!
What percentage of Boeing’s business activity will that be in 2024? Its commercial jets lose body panels and emergency doors like my dog loses his fur. Its spaceships are only suitable for sustained flight. I wouldn’t buy Boeing-branded toilet paper for fear of what it might or might not do.
