It should have been a welcome public relations triumph for Boeing, an opportunity to show that even if panels were falling from its aircraft, it could still fly humans into space and return them safely to Earth.
And for a while at least, it looked like it had been successful. The majestic June launch of the much-delayed and over-budget Starliner capsule from Florida, ferrying 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 issues with the pioneering spacecraft mean it is still docked to the orbiting outpost, 59 days into a maiden crewed test mission that was originally expected to take up to 10. And alarming – yet inaccurate – headlines that the astronauts are somehow stranded indefinitely in space, like Matt Damon in the Martian, are proliferating.
The saga represents more of a crisis in communications management than any failure of Starliner, which after all is an experimental vehicle suffering similar teething troubles to any preceding 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, suggest a return date for the capsule, and the astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, is finally imminent. Glitchy thrusters that unexpectedly shut down early in the mission performed well in tests, and several small but persistent helium leaks are no longer considered a constraint for undocking.
“The vehicle is in good shape. 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, told a press conference last week.
Yet a sense of unease remains. Media briefings, initially at least, were scarce, leading to suspicion from some reporters that Boeing and Nasa were downplaying the extent of the technical problems, or the likely duration of the astronauts’ stay, given their initial eight-to-10-day mission estimate.
The most recent press conference became tetchy in places as Stich and Mark Nappi, Boeing’s commercial crew program manager, pushed back. The delays, they insisted, were a routine part of spaceflight, engineers were identifying and solving the issues, 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.
Nappi, however, did admit he had inadvertently fueled the “lost in space” narrative.
Asked how he would handle things differently, he said: “We would not have been so emphatic about [it being] an eight-day mission. It’s my regret that we didn’t just say we’re going to stay up there until we get everything done that we want to go do.”
Experts say there is nothing unexpected or unusual about an experimental spaceflight developing problems, or mission managers dedicating time to diagnose and fix them. With Starliner, teams of ground engineers at Nasa’s White Sands facility in New Mexico spent weeks recreating and working through the thruster issues, and Williams and Wilmore boarded the docked capsule last weekend to conduct an in-orbit hot fire test of its propulsion systems.
“It’s defined as a test mission, it’s called a crewed test flight, and one of things is to deal with unplanned issues,” said Jerry Stone, senior associate of the Space Studies Institute and author of One Small Step.
“But the thing to do in a situation like this is not to, I won’t say hide anything because they’re not doing that, but to be much more open, especially with the media, because the media is going to make this out 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 adopting an “it takes as long as it takes” approach.
“The expected reaction, particularly from the public, is something has gone wrong and they can’t get back. And yes, something has gone wrong. But the statement that they can’t get back is most definitely incorrect.”
Mike Massimino, a retired Nasa astronaut who flew two longer-duration space shuttle missions in 2002 and 2009 to fix the Hubble space telescope, agreed that messaging and perception was more of an issue 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’s going on. 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, a chance to really work out the kinks.
“[But] because they said it’s going to be between this many days, and this many days, people try to put one and one together. It’s like, all right, so this thing’s longer now, and they have problems, so they’re staying longer because they have problems. And that’s not the case.”
Massimino said Boeing’s fledgling spaceflight troubles would, ultimately, pass quietly into history.
“The first SpaceX launch of the Dragon capsule was delayed by many years too,” he said. “My experience is we don’t remember the delays, but you sure as heck will remember an accident, Challenger, Columbia.
“When things go boom and people are killed, we remember that, the whole country will mourn and so on, and that’s what you want to avoid. This is certainly not an Apollo 13. I’m not saying people won’t remember this, but it’ll be an interesting lesson learned looking back, maybe more so how the communication went.
“They seem to be understanding the problems they have. I have confidence they’re going to understand what those things were, fix them for the next time and get Starliner and the crew back safely.”