IThis should have been a welcome public relations triumph for Boeing, an opportunity to show that even though panels fell from his planecan it still fly people into space and return them safely to earth.
And for a while, at least, it seemed to be successful. The majestic June launch of the much-delayed and over-budget Starliner capsule from Florida, which carried two Nasa astronauts to the International Space Station, has offered a glimpse of a bright new future in the skies for the troubled aerospace giant.
However, the euphoria was as fleeting as a shooting star. Technical problems with the Pioneer spacecraft, that means it’s still tethered to the orbiting outpost, 59 days into a first manned test mission that was originally expected to take up to 10. And worrying – yet inaccurate – news that the astronauts are somehow stranded in space indefinitelylike Matt Damon in The Mars, is spreading.
The saga represents more a crisis in communications management than any failure of Starliner, which is, after all, an experimental vehicle facing similar teething problems as any previous generation of spacecraft, from the mighty Apollo moon rockets of the 1960s to the space shuttle, and last year’s “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of Elon Musk’s futuristic Starship.
Announcements in recent days from Nasa and Boeing, partners in the Starliner project as part of the US space agency’s commercial crew program, indicate a return date for the capsule, and astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, is finally imminent. Shiny thrusters that shut down unexpectedly early in the mission perform well in testsand several small but persistent helium leaks are no longer considered a limitation for dedocking.
“The vehicle is in good condition. I want to make it very clear that Butch and Suni are not stranded in space,” said Steve Stich, manager of Nasa’s commercial crew program, at a press conference last week.
Still, a sense of unease remains. Media briefings were initially at least rare, leading some reporters to suspect that Boeing and Nasa downplayed the extent of the technical problems, or the likely length of the astronauts’ stay, given their initial eight-to-10-day mission estimate.
The most recent press conference got funny in places like Stich and Mark Nappi, Boeing’s commercial crew program manager, pushed back. The delays, they insisted, were a routine part of spaceflight, engineers identified and resolved the problems, and all the while the crew and capsule were never in danger.
Additionally, Stich said, Starliner was cleared to leave the space station at any time in the event of an emergency.
However, Nappi admitted that he accidentally fueled the “lost in space” narrative.
Asked how he would have handled things differently, he said: “We wouldn’t have been so emphatic about it [it being] an eight day mission. I regret that we didn’t just say we were going to stay up there until we did everything we wanted to do.”
Experts say there is nothing unexpected or unusual about an experimental spaceflight developing problems, or mission managers taking the time to diagnose and fix them. Along with Starliner, teams of ground engineers at NASA’s White Sands facility in New Mexico spent weeks recreating and working through the thruster problems, and Williams and Wilmore boarded the tethered capsule last weekend for a hot burn test in the orbiting its propulsion systems.
“It’s defined as a test mission, it’s called a manned test flight, and one of the things is dealing with unplanned issues,” said Jerry Stone, senior associate of the Space Study institute and author of One Small Step.
“But the thing to do in a situation like this is to not, I won’t say anything to hide anything, because they don’t, but to be much more open, especially with the media, because the media it’s going to aim to be as dramatic as possible.”
Stone said it was probably a mistake for Boeing and Nasa to have announced an expected end date for Starliner’s first human mission instead of taking a “it takes as long as it takes” approach.
“The expected reaction, especially from the public, is something has gone wrong and they can’t come back. And yes, something went wrong. But the statement that they cannot get back is definitely wrong.”
Mike Massimino, a retired NASA astronaut who flew two long-duration space shuttles in 2002 and 2009 to fix the Hubble Space Telescope, agreed that messaging and perception are more of a problem than solving the technical problems.
“From my perspective as an astronaut engineer, it was a successful test flight. You want to turn it out and see what’s going on. There is no reason to bring the crew back early if they have the supplies, which they do, and the spacecraft is stable. I think that’s a good thing, a chance to really work out the kinks.
“[But] because they said it was going to be between so many days, and so many days, people try to put one and one together. It’s like, okay, so this thing is longer now, and they have problems, so they stay longer because they have problems. And that is not the case.”
Massimino said that Boeing’s fledgling spaceflight problems would eventually pass quietly into history.
“The first SpaceX launch of the Dragon capsule has also been delayed by many years,” he said. “My experience is that we don’t remember the delays, but you will certainly remember an accident, Challenger, Columbia.
“When things flourish and people are killed, we remember that the whole country will mourn and so on, and that’s what you want to avoid. It certainly isn’t An Apollo 13. I’m not saying people won’t remember it, but it would be an interesting lesson to look back on, maybe more how the communication went.
“They seem to understand the problems they have. I have confidence that they are going to understand what those things were, fix them for next time, and get Starliner and the crew back safely.”
