It should have been a welcome public relations victory for Boeing: a chance to show that even if panels fell off its planes, the company could still fly people into space and return them safely to Earth.
And for a moment, it looked like it might have been a success. The majestic launch in June of the long-delayed and overbudget Starliner capsule from Florida, carrying two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, offered a glimpse of a bright new future in the heavens for the troubled aerospace giant.
The euphoria, however, was as fleeting as a shooting star. Technical problems with the pioneering craft mean it remains docked at the orbiting outpost, 59 days into a first manned test mission that was originally supposed to last up to 10 days. And alarmist – but false – headlines are mounting that the astronauts are somehow stranded in space indefinitely, like Matt Damon in The Martian.
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The saga represents more of a crisis in communications management than a failure for Starliner, which is, after all, an experimental vehicle plagued by the same teething problems as all previous generations of spacecraft, from the mighty Apollo moon rockets of the 1960s to the space shuttle and the “rapid, unplanned disassembly” of Elon Musk’s futuristic Starship last year.
Announcements in recent days from NASA and Boeing, partners in the Starliner project as part of the U.S. space agency’s Commercial Crew Program, suggest that a return date for the capsule and astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore may finally be imminent. The misfiring thrusters that unexpectedly failed early in the mission performed well in tests, and several small but persistent helium leaks are no longer considered a limitation to undocking.
“The vehicle is in good condition. I want to make it very clear that Butch and Suni are not stranded in space,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said at a news conference last week.
Still, a sense of unease remains. Media briefings were, at least initially, sparse, leading some reporters to suspect that Boeing and NASA were downplaying the extent of the technical problems or the likely length of the astronauts’ stay, given their initial mission estimate of eight to 10 days.
The most recent news conference turned testy in places when Stich and Mark Nappi, Boeing’s commercial crew program manager, backed out. The delays, they insisted, were a routine part of spaceflight, engineers identified and fixed the problems, and the entire time the crew and capsule were never in danger.
Additionally, Stich said, Starliner had permission to leave the space station at any time in the event of an emergency.
Nappi did admit, however, that he had inadvertently fueled the “lost in space” story.
When asked how he would do things differently, he said: “We wouldn’t have been so emphatic about [it being] an eight-day mission. I regret that we didn’t just say we’re going to stay up there until we’ve done everything we want to do.”
Experts say there’s nothing unexpected or unusual about an experimental spaceflight developing problems, or about mission managers spending time diagnosing and fixing them. With Starliner, teams of ground engineers at NASA’s White Sands facility in New Mexico spent weeks simulating and troubleshooting the booster’s problems, and Williams and Wilmore boarded the docked capsule last weekend to conduct an in-orbit hot fire test of the propulsion systems.
“It’s defined as a test mission, a manned test flight, and one of the things is dealing with unforeseen problems,” said Jerry Stone, a senior associate at the Space Studies Institute and author of One Small Step.
“But what you have to do in a situation like this is not, I won’t say, hide anything, because they don’t, but be much more open, especially to the media, because the media will make this as dramatic as possible.”
Stone said it was likely a mistake by Boeing and NASA to announce an expected completion date for Starliner’s first crewed mission instead of taking a “take as long as it takes” approach.
“The expected reaction, especially from the public, is that something has gone wrong and they can’t go back. And yes, something has gone wrong. But the claim that they can’t go back is absolutely false.”
Mike Massimino, a retired NASA astronaut who flew two extended space shuttle missions in 2002 and 2009 to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, agreed that the message and perception were more important than solving the technical problems.
“From my perspective as an astronaut engineer, it’s been a successful test flight. You want to wring it out and see what happens. There’s no reason to bring the crew back early if they have the supplies, which they do, and the spacecraft is stable. I think this is a good thing, an opportunity to really solve the problems.
“[But] because they said it would be between so many days and so many days, people are trying to put one and one together. It’s like, okay, so this thing is longer now, and they’re having problems, so they’re staying longer because they’re having problems. And that’s not the case.”
Massimino said Boeing’s early space problems would eventually quietly become a thing of the past.
“SpaceX’s first launch of the Dragon capsule was also delayed by years,” he said. “My experience is we don’t remember delays, but you probably remember an accident, Challenger, Columbia.
“When things blow up and people get killed, we remember that, the whole country will mourn and so on, and that’s what you want to avoid. This is certainly not Apollo 13. I’m not saying people won’t remember this, but it will be an interesting lesson to look back on, maybe even more so how the communications went.
“They seem to understand the issues they have. I’m confident they’ll figure out what those things were, fix them for next time, and get Starliner and crew back safely.”