December 20, 2019, was supposed to be a landmark moment for the US space program and the US space industry, Boeing in particular.
Boeing has been a partner of NASA since the agency’s inception in 1958—the company or those it acquired built the capsules that took Apollo astronauts to the moon and later built the space shuttle, and it helps operate the International Space Station. On that day, Boeing was launching its brand-new CST-100 Starliner spacecraft to the ISS on an uncrewed demonstration mission. Along with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, Starliner was set to become NASA’s go-to option for ferrying astronauts to and from Earth’s orbit.
That didn’t happen. Starliner made it to space, but a computer glitch sank the spacecraft’s chances of actually getting to the ISS. Though it came back to Earth in one piece a couple of days later, it was clearly not ready for human missions.
Now, Boeing is going for a high-stakes redo of that mission. On August 3, Orbital Flight Test 2, or OFT-2, will send Starliner to the ISS again. The company cannot afford another failure.
“There is a lot of credibility at stake here,” says Greg Autry, a space policy expert at Arizona State University. “Nothing is more visible than space systems that fly humans.”
The afternoon of July 30 was a stark reminder of that visibility. After Russia’s new 23-ton multipurpose Nauka module docked with the ISS, it began firing its thrusters unexpectedly and without command, shifting the ISS out of its proper and normal position in orbit. NASA and Russia fixed the problem and had things stabilized in under an hour, but we still don’t know what happened, and it’s unnerving to think what could have happened if conditions had been worse. The whole incident is still under investigation and has forced NASA to postpone the Starliner launch from July 31 to August 3.
It’s precisely this kind of near-disaster Boeing wants to avoid, for OFT-2 and any future mission with people onboard.
How Starliner got here
The shutdown of the space shuttle program in 2011 gave NASA a chance to rethink its approach. Instead of building a new spacecraft designed for travel to low Earth orbit, the agency elected to open up opportunities to the private sector as part of a new Commercial Crew Program. It awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to build their own crewed vehicles: Starliner and Crew Dragon, respectively. NASA would buy flights on these vehicles and focus its own efforts on building new technologies for missions to the moon, Mars, and elsewhere.
Both companies hit development delays, and for nine years NASA’s only way of getting to space was by handing over millions of dollars to Russia for seats on Soyuz missions. SpaceX finally sent astronauts to space in May 2020 (followed by two more crewed missions since), but Boeing is still lagging behind. Its December 2019 flight was supposed to prove that all its systems worked, and that it was capable of docking with the ISS and returning to Earth safely. But a glitch with its internal clock caused it to execute a critical burn prematurely, making it impossible to dock with the ISS.
A subsequent investigation revealed that a second glitch would have caused Starliner to fire its thrusters at the wrong time when making its descent back to Earth, which could have destroyed the spacecraft. That glitch was fixed mere hours before Starliner was set to come back home. Software issues aren’t unexpected in spacecraft development, but they’re things Boeing could have resolved ahead of time with better quality control or better oversight from NASA.
Boeing has had 21 months to fix these problems. NASA never demanded another Starliner flight test; Boeing elected to redo it and foot the $410 million bill on its own.
“I fully expect the test to go perfectly,” says Autry. “These problems involved software systems, and those should be easily resolvable.”
What’s at stake
If things go wrong, the repercussions will depend on what those things are. Should the spacecraft experience another set of software problems, there’ll likely be hell to pay, and it’s very har