I doubt most people remember, but at one time there was a fierce competition between two companies to be the first to fly astronauts from the U. S. up to the International Space Station. One of those companies – SpaceX – is the toast of the aerospace industry. Their rockets are cheap and re-usable and at this point, they’ve launched 8 NASA crews to the ISS, plus 3 private crews.
I don’t work much with SpaceX, instead, I spend a significant amount of my time working on the Boeing Starliner. We’re The Other Guys.
I was the Chief Training Officer for the first mission of the Starliner in late 2019 (only for the last few months, the long term lead CTO retired). Most people consider that mission – known as OFT (Orbit Flight Test) a failure. However, from my seat, it was a huge success. I watched the Mission Control team – whom I had a hand in training – save the spacecraft with just minutes to spare. There was a combination of failures that almost caused the Starliner to burn up in the atmosphere. The ATLAS rocket drops off spaceships – like Starliner – in a lopsided orbit. This is because you don’t want the second stage of the ATLAS rocket in orbit, crashing into satellites. So the rocket puts the spaceship in a lop-sided orbit and the second stage comes crashing back down – and burning up – over the mid Pacific Ocean. If the spaceship doesn’t do a burn to circularize its orbit, its going to burn up over the Pacific Ocean as well.
Due to a software issue, the Starliner wasn’t going to do its circularization burn. Okay, no big deal, we know how to uplink burn targets from Mission Control. The team built the targets and had them ready for uplink about 5 minutes before the planned burn time. Then the Starliner flew over Europe and we went LOS (Loss of Signal). Cell phone towers in Europe interfered with our uplink capability. They got the burn targets uplink a couple of minutes after the planned burn time, which wasn’t great, but would still save the spacecraft. However, at that point, the Starliner was pointed in the wrong direction to do the burn. The Mission Control team watched as the automation (which wasn’t designed for this much crazy) stop/started the burn a whole bunch of time. Finally, when the orbit was circular enough to be safe for a couple of days, the Mission Control team stopped the burn. Sadly, the crazy-assed burn used up too much fuel, so we couldn’t get to the International Space Station.
The good news is in the spring of 2022, the second Starliner made it to the ISS and proved that Spacecraft worked fine (once a few things were fixed).
And now we’re just a few months from launching astronauts – Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – to the ISS on a Starliner. This’ll be exiting, but hopefully a lot more boring than the first Starliner mission. They plan to launch in late April. They’ll stay at the ISS for a week or two and then head home.
One cool thing about Starliner is that it lands on land. The primary site is near White Sands, New Mexico. There are only two other human spacecraft that landed on land (with crew inside). The Space Shuttle and the Soyuz. For you true space nerds, The Vostok and Voskhod crews ejected prior to landing.
