Boeing Starliner: Crisis or Routine Glitch?

 

Since 2020, the SpaceX Dragon has been the primary spacecraft in which U. S. astronauts have traveled to and from the International Space Station (ISS).  But for at least a decade, it has always been NASA's plan to get Boeing to develop a second spacecraft for the same purpose, called the Starliner.  After two unmanned flights, the first only partially successful, last June the Starliner carried Barry Wilmore, 61, and Sunita Williams, 58, to the ISS.  But during the flight, five of the 28 thrusters used to orient the spacecraft failed.  Although the Starliner was successfully docked to the ISS, Boeing engineers have been puzzling ever since over why the thrusters failed and whether the Starliner is safe enough to return Wilmore and Williams, who otherwise will have to wait as long as eight months before returning to earth after what was supposed to be an eight-day visit to space.

 

Putting aside all questions of whether having people live in space is useful or beneficial, the fact that we have two independent companies providing transportation to the ISS is a big step forward from the early stages of manned space exploration, which were basically state-sponsored stunts put on for quasi-military reasons, to something resembling commercial operations, in which competition and a certain routine emerge.  Think of the contrast between the hype surrounding Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic, and the milder publicity accompanying the first commercial flight from New York to Marseilles a dozen years later.  The same firm (Boeing) provided the B-314 flying boat that Pan American Airways used in 1939, and passengers paid $375 for a one-way ticket, which in terms of today's dollars is north of $8200.  Not exactly busfare, but it was one of the first steps in making international air travel routine.

 

As for the Boeing Starliner, thrusters are vital to preserving the orientation of a spacecraft on re-entry, when the vehicle has to face a certain way in order for the heat shield to absorb the punishing friction of air as it slows the craft down.  Entering the atmosphere pointing the wrong way is a guarantee of disaster, so Boeing is wise in delaying the return flight until they can get to the bottom of the thruster failures.

 

So far, Wilmore and Williams have not made any public comments about their unexpected delay.  It's a little more extreme than the delays experienced by thousands of commercial air travelers in the last few weeks when a computer glitch upset the schedule applecarts of dozens of airlines.  Spending an extra day or two in an airport is not much compared to eight months in space, but the two astronauts concerned are seasoned veterans, and presumably their families and whatever other commitments they had back on Earth have been dealt with satisfactorily.  I don't know how I would feel if I watched my ride home take off without me and achieve a successful landing, but I suppose it depends on how much I was enjoying myself in the ISS.  Space flight is not for everybody, and the selection process probably yields personalities who can handle nearly anything unexpected except maybe death.  And in this case, erring on the side of caution at the price of inconveniencing a couple of astronauts is probably the best thing to do.

 

We will know that space flight has finally achieved routine status when occurrences such as the one about the failed thrusters don't make news at all.  After all, we don't hear much about Amereican Airlines flight XYZ that was cancelled because of a problem with their battery backup system, because such things happen every day and the airlines have found ways to deal with them without inconveniencing their customers—well, not much, anyway. 

 

Space flight is still far from a purely commercial endeavor, however, and it's not clear whether it ever will be.  The ISS itself is a creature of international agreements of fiendish complexity, and is perhaps the best example of an institution that self-perpetuates because you can't simply shut it down and send messages up to tell everybody they're fired.  But given the obvious need to swap people in and out of the ISS, it's good that NASA persisted in getting two contractors to develop different vehicles for the same purpose.  And if history is any guide, Boeing will straighten out the thruster problem, if not on this flight, then the next one.  And the astronauts will have the luxury of knowing that their ride back to Earth isn't built by a company with a lock on the business. 

 

When the current ISS reaches the end of its planned lifespan in 2030 after being up there for about three decades, what comes next for manned space flight?  It's hard to imagine how a space station would be profitable on its own.  We already do the most commercially valuable things in space without having people up there to do them:  satellite communications and remote sensing.  And as robotics advances, the argument that having people in space allows us to do things that no robot could do may become weaker and weaker.  Because of the life-support and safety systems needed to keep people alive in space, any manned flight is going to be orders of magnitude more costly than an unmanned flight to do the same thing, unless the thing happens to be simply putting people in a new place such as Mars. 

 

It may ultimately come down to a question of international politics.  If a new space race develops between China and the U. S., or China and Europe if the U. S. loses its will to keep up, then companies like SpaceX will be able to provide the hardware and software needed.  But if a plague of space indifference spreads worldwide, as it seems to have in the U. S., I'm not sure that even a dozen Elon Musks could afford to put people into space simply for the glory of the thing, or to make enough money to recoup their astronomical investments. 

 

I hope Wilmore and Williams enjoy their extended stay, and that Boeing gets their thrusters working right the next time.  As for whether we'll ever be able to afford pleasure trips to a space station, I reserve my judgment. 

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP article on the Boeing Starliner thruster problems at https://apnews.com/article/nasa-spacex-boeing-starliner-astronauts-922b43fa8d0e1f9622022a52f8c8e2ed.  Information on the first commercial transatlantic flight was from https://www.centennialofflight.net/essay/Commercial_Aviation/atlantic_route/Tran4.htm, and I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the Boeing Starliner and the SpaceX Dragon.

SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts At Last

On Saturday, May 30, American astronauts flew into orbit on an American-made space vehicle for the first time since 2011.  SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carried Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, both veterans of the old Space Shuttle program, inside the Dragon capsule, and once the capsule separated safely, the first stage returned automatically to earth and landed intact on a barge to be reused.  Meanwhile, the Dragon capsule has been catching up to the International Space Station (ISS) where, assuming the docking goes smoothly this morning (I'm writing this Sunday), the astronauts will stay for the next several months.  The return flight in the Dragon capsule is planned to end in the ocean, a mode of re-entry that hasn't been done for over forty years. 

Many news reports remarked on the contrast between the good news of a successful launch and the general tone of recent U. S. news events:  the COVID-19 virus and all its consequences, riots over police brutality, and so on.  But this is nothing new. 

The space race between the U. S. and the USSR over who would get to the moon first was conducted during what was probably the most tumultuous decade in the last half of the twentieth century.  The 1960s were not exactly peaceful:  the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, race riots, and the sexual revolution are just a few items of turmoil that come to mind.  But amid all the strife, America found the will and the capability to land men on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Engineers are not much into symbolism.  But space exploration carries a heavy load of symbolism, and it's worthwhile considering what that means in light of the huge effort and expense that sending people into space entails.

In retrospect, the Apollo program was mainly a way to carry on the Cold War by peaceful means.  Its extraordinary expense was justified not for scientific reasons, although there was some useful science done.  But being the first nation to put men on the moon would show our technological superiority to the world, and in an age dominated by technology, that achievement had implications that everyone understood.  It took a couple more decades for the USSR to crumble away, but it did.  Nevertheless, in their rough-and-ready way, the Russians maintained their ability to travel into space despite all kinds of political reverses, and once the Space Shuttle program outlived its usefulness, America turned inward with regard to space and paid taxi fare to the Russians to put people on the International Space Station.

When one asks about the ultimate motivations of the younger generation of space cadets—Elon Musk being their spiritual leader—the answer isn't as clear-cut as it was for my generation.  Nationalism pure and simple doesn't seem to be a big factor, although Musk is enough of an American to take pride in the fact that the rocket was made here and launched from here.

To be sure, profit is a motive as well.  That's why the fact that SpaceX and not NASA was the builder of the rocket is so significant.  It may be the case that SpaceX is a long way from turning a profit with direct commercial space activities, as opposed to government-subsidized projects such as the ISS launches.  But with ideas such as asteroid mining around, it may be that some of the next great fortunes may be made in space. 

If I had to guess, though, I'd say that the new space explorers see themselves taking part in a long-term project that will end up putting significant numbers of people out in space, in places that will be just as habitable as Earth, if not more so.  Every so often I come across a student who wants to get involved in the space program somehow, and there's often a kind of glitter in their eye when they talk about it.  The phrase "manifest destiny" has fallen under a cloud in recent years, as its original meaning that the United States was destined to conquer the whole midsection of the North American continent has been taken to be insensitive to the people (and animals) who were already here.  But presumably, displacing natives is not a big problem in the solar system, at least.  And believing that humanity is fated to found colonies on other planets, and perhaps beyond the solar system, seems to be close to an article of faith for many space enthusiasts.

It's interesting that the word "fate" came up in a quote from Musk himself as he commented on the successful launch yesterday.  Remarking on the contrast between Saturday's successful launch and the earlier attempts that were scrubbed by weather conditions, he said, "Today, I don't know, it felt like just the fates were aligned." 

Without putting undue weight on what may have been just an offhand remark, I think it's interesting that the leader of the company that launched Americans into space for the first time in nearly a decade attributes success to the fates being aligned. 

Musk mixed his metaphors, for one thing.  The usual phrase is to say that the stars are aligned, which harks back to the time when astrology—forecasting auspicious times and events by observing stars and planets—was every bit as respectable as forecasting the progress of pandemics is today.  And the Fates were mythological goddesses who presumably determined one's lifespan and, well, fate in life.  Either way, he was saying that despite all the highly technical and cross-checked planning involved, there is an element in the venture that wasn't under human control.  But we don't believe in Fates or astrology any more, do we? 

It depends on what you think life and the world are about.  If the most one has to look forward to is playing a brief role on a stage where your only hope of immortality is to make a big splash that will be remembered by future generations, then living a Musk-like life makes some sense, especially if humanity is fated to live among the stars.  Then you will be viewed by future generations as a Columbus (if that name isn't too offensive any more), or someone equally famous for venturing out to discover and eventually populate new worlds. 

But if everything we do and are is owing to a supernatural Ground of existence, namely a God who is intensely interested in what we puny humans do, then one has a different perspective on things.  It still may be worth while to explore space, and even for some people to live there.  But other priorities and other goals may intervene.

Sources:  I viewed the pre-launch clip and read the accompanying news copy about the SpaceX launch at https://apnews.com/da66485df4d82c055ce9d6b84a20e450.

The Soyuz Failure and Emergency Return

Proponents of manned space flight have looked forward to the day when space travel will be as routine as getting on a bus in Toledo to go to Chicago.  You don’t normally see national headlines when a bus breaks down, but when the Russian Soyuz rocket taking an American and a Russian astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) last week suddenly failed and the astronauts had to be rescued by an automatic emergency system, it made the New York Times and other media outlets around the world.  So we aren’t quite there yet, and it will be some time before we can even get anyone else up into orbit.

First, the failure.  On Thursday, Oct. 11, astronauts Aleksei Ovchinin and Nick Hague took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Russian Soyuz rocket.  The first stage consists of four detachable engines on four sides of the central second-stage rocket.  Two minutes into the launch, the four first-state engines normally eject themselves and the second stage lights up to continue the flight into the orbital range of the ISS.  But according to the website www.extremetech.com which quoted Russian head of human spaceflight Sergei Krikalev, experts suspect that something went wrong with one of the first-stage engine ejection systems.  One of them may have incompletely separated and collided with the second stage.  At any rate, enough damage was detected that an automatic abort system went into action, separating the capsule containing the two astronauts from the second stage and sending it in an earthbound trajectory that produced up to 6 Gs on the pair, twice what they experience during launch.  A parachute automatically deployed, and instead of spending six months in space in the ISS, Hague and Ovchinin ended their flight only a few minutes after launch in the desert-like steppes of Kazakhstan, where they were rescued by ground crews without further incident.

We can thank the Russian engineers who designed and installed the safety systems 35 years ago in what is now a pretty old but well-understood and reliable rocket system.  Russia has had its share of space-related accidents, dating all the way back to 1967 when a parachute on the Soyuz 1 flight failed to open, causing the death of astronaut Vladimir Komarov when his capsule crashed to the ground too fast.  Simplicity and reliability seem to be watchwords with the Russian space program, and while the two astronauts are no doubt disappointed that their flight was cancelled, so to speak, they are at least alive and well to talk about it.

The current residents of the ISS are in no immediate danger, as unmanned resupply rockets are still operational and they have an emergency escape capsule at hand should something require them to leave for Earth in a hurry.  But the failure of the only current means of human access to the ISS has put a big hold on the station’s plans, and on manned spaceflight in general.

In possibly a year or so, both Boeing and SpaceX hope to begin manned flights of their own, ushering in a new era of spacecraft built by private firms dedicated to the purpose, rather than the cumbersome government public-private partnerships that have up to now been responsible for all manned space travel.  But those companies’ rockets are not ready, and if recent history is any guide, they may not be ready for several years yet. 

Unlike the race to the moon, which was basically the Cold War between the old USSR and the U. S. carried out by peaceful means, private space firms are in competition only with other firms.  So it would be better to err on the side of prudence rather than rush into manned spaceflight only to have your latest creation blow up and kill people.  The rewards awaiting companies that make it first into space with humans are by no means certain, other than the glory of the thing.  But glory is hard to take to the bank. 

Tourism is one way to make money with space, but no one believes that will support the whole enterprise by itself.  And tourists have an obstinate prejudice against running a high risk of ending up as space junk or worse, so the safety record of space flight will have to be significantly improved before anything like mass tourism can come about. 

Regarding re-crewing the space station, currently the Soyuz is the only show in town, and if the accident investigation isn’t wrapped up satisfactorily by the end of 2018, we might see a situation in which the ISS crew comes home and the empty station is piloted remotely until Russian engineers are confident in launching more astronauts with the Soyuz.  Published schedules for the ISS through 2020 do not include any plans for using rockets other than Soyuz to transport astronauts to the station, so SpaceX’s manned flights will presumably be orbital demonstrations independent of the space station itself.

If manned space flight were completely routine, it wouldn’t attract the attention and excitement it does.  In my own field of engineering, some of the best students have ambitions to get involved in private space enterprises, and they go with my blessing.  But the period we are in now may be compared to where the aviation industry was in around 1920.  Flying was still regarded as an exotic and dangerous sport, and it was not yet clear how anyone would make any serious money at it. 

We can hope that the cause of the Soyuz failure can be identified and fixed soon enough that we don’t have to depopulate the ISS, and that transportation to the station can go back to its desirable no-headlines mode.  But we can also expect that the upcoming launches of private manned space rockets will get tons of publicity, even if they’re successful.  Because taking a rocket into space is still nowhere near as routine as taking a bus to Chicago.

Sources:  I referred to news reports on the Soyuz accident carried by the New York Times on Oct. 11, 2018 at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/science/soyuz-rocket.html, and also the sources https://www.space.com/42155-soyuz-abort-astronaut-nick-hague-first-interviews.html and https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/278883-russia-blames-soyuz-launch-failure-on-booster-collision.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on a list of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and the International Space Station. 

Thank God for Gravity: Scott Kelly's Endurance and the Future of Space Travel

Scott Kelly is a NASA astronaut, veteran of a year's stay on the International Space Station (ISS), and now a published author of a popular memoir called Endurance.  He is also the twin brother of fellow astronaut Mark Kelly, who is married to former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011.  At the time Giffords was shot, her brother-in-law was in orbit during an earlier ISS stay.

Needless to say, Kelly has led an eventful life, and his memoir is rather unusual in that he doesn't shy away from matters that reflect badly on either him or aspects of the space program.  He is honest about many of his shortcomings, including his first marriage that ended in divorce.  And when in the course of narrating in detail his experiences in space, he is inconvenienced by a NASA policy or action, he lets you know about it.  The part of the book that describes day-to-day life on the ISS has got to be one of the most detailed and vivid descriptions of space flight in print.  And that's the problem.  If he wrote this book to encourage people to think about mass migration to space, it may have backfired.

To a landlubber like me, Kelly's trials and risks he undergoes to be in space are appalling.  Take what sounds like a simple thing:  a space walk.  First off, it takes about five hours to get ready, involving hundreds of separate checklisted steps, many of which if neglected or done in the wrong order could result in your untimely and painful demise. 

Then there is the zero-G environment.  I never really appreciated gravity until I read Kelly's book.  On earth, you put down a pen, or a wrench, or a screw, and it stays there.  Not in space.  Every single last thing you might possibly need has to be either tied down, kept in a bag, stuck to a piece of Velcro (TM), or otherwise secured, or else on the space walk you will inadvertently contribute to the already vast quantity of space junk orbiting Earth, and lose whatever you needed in the bargain.  The most chilling aspect of his space walks is to learn that over the nearly two decades that at least some of the ISS has been up there, meteors or orbiting pieces of derelict satellites have punched holes and taken entire chunks out of handrails on the outside of the structure.  And it's just a matter of chance whether another one of those 17,000-MPH pieces of debris drills a hole through you while you're outside. 

Kelly, along with anyone else who endures the rigors of years of training and competition to go into space, deserves accolades for his monumental achievements.  But at the same time, I can't help but wonder whether the up-close view of what life in space is really like lends more weight to the argument that, like many people say of New York, it's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. 

The question really boils down to this:  is space, and whatever lies beyond in terms of potentially habitable planets, really more like America in 1620, or Antarctica in 1920?  Here's what I mean.

Right now, corporations are being organized to go into space exploration commercially, and large groups of visionaries are planning to spread humanity in some form to other planets.  From what I can tell, these folks believe that space and regions beyond it will eventually harbor lots of people, like the New World (North and South America) does now.  Some even seem to think that we have damaged our planet here beyond repair with global warming and pollution, and we better start making our plans for an exit strategy when Earth becomes uninhabitable.  Either way, these folks (who Kelly, incidentally, does not explicitly identify himself with) have an attitude toward space that says it is our manifest destiny to go there and occupy it with all the trappings of civilization:  cities, nations, the whole bit.  They would say that space now is like America was to Europe in 1620:  a new world beckoning us to explore and settle it.

If Kelly's spare-time reading had been about Columbus or Vasco da Gama, I might agree that he is of that party.  But what book did he take with him on the ISS?  Endurance:  Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, the story of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1914 expedition to cross the Antarctic.  Their ship got stuck in ice and Shackleton and his men ended up floating away on chunks of sea ice and lifeboats.  In his choice of reading matter, I think Kelly has inadvertently answered the question of what space exploration is most similar to in the history of humanity so far.  And it doesn't bode well for any large-scale plans that involve moving lots of ordinary people into space.

There have been manned outposts in the extreme Arctic and Antarctic regions for about a century now, and the population of Antarctica still hovers in the hundreds at most.  The fact is that the environment there is so hostile to human life that living there is extremely expensive, inconvenient, and worth while only if a strong scientific or cultural motive justifies it. 

I think space is the same way.  It's hard to imagine how we could make space travel so safe, convenient, and comfortable that you could get lots of people (I'm talking thousands at least) to attempt it.  And by definition, you have to travel through space to get to anywhere besides Earth. 

So I salute Kelly and his compatriots for the incredible achievements they have made in simply keeping the ISS running and keeping alive up there, no small part of which is due to Kelly's accumulated expertise in repeatedly fixing what has to be the world's most expensive toilet.  But by the same token, I think space travel will remain a hugely expensive and highly specialized endeavor for a narrowly chosen few, for the foreseeable future—and maybe beyond that, too.

Sources:  I thank my wife for giving me Scott Kelly's Endurance:  A Year In Space, A Lifetime of Discovery (Knopf, 2017) for Christmas.