On August 29th, NASA made a significant decision to bring its astronauts back to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft rather than Boeing’s Starliner. This follows a rocky start to Boeing’s first Crew Flight Test (CFT) spaceflight mission, which launched on June 5th with two NASA astronauts bound for the ISS on an 8-day mission. However, things haven’t gone as planned. Starliner will now return to Earth uncrewed on September 6th, marking a substantial commercial and reputational setback for Boeing. Should a catastrophic failure occur during reentry or landing, it could spell the end of Boeing’s Starliner program altogether.
Boeing has provided abundant assurance that Starliner is safe for a crewed return. After all, they have already returned Starliner from LEO to a safe, soft landing in New Mexico twice, once in 2019 and again in 2022. Why does NASA not feel assured?
There are four critical contributory factors. Perhaps the most visceral is NASA’s 2003 experience with the loss of a crew of seven during the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia’s return to Earth. If there are fatalities, it will be seen as NASA’s failure, not Boeing’s. Secondly, this NASA-Boeing commercial contract is a fixed-price one. Boeing, not NASA, will have to pick up the additional cost necessary to certify Starliner as operational. Thirdly, NASA has an alternative option, something that was not available in 2003: SpaceX. Why should NASA take the risk if it doesn’t have to? Lastly, with a comprehensive understanding of all the intricate and interconnected technical details, NASA knows more than we do and feels it has no other choice.
Multiple Failures
NASA and Boeing have acknowledged “multiple failures,” which is not unusual in a test flight. The previous Starliner flights (in 2019 and 2022) were not without failures. The two main problems with Starliner in this CFT have made it to the public domain: five helium leaks and thruster malfunctions. The helium leaks, known about before launch, were not deemed significant. Starliner arrived and docked successfully with the ISS on June 6th. Boeing engineers assessed the leak rates and concluded that the remaining helium could support 70 hours of free flight, but only seven were required. Starliner had sufficient margin for a safe return trip from the ISS.
Helium pressures the 20 Reaction Control Systems (RCS) for fine attitude control and 28 more powerful Orbital Manoeuvring and Attitude Control (OMAC) thrusters. All 48 are located in 4 units (each with 5 RCS and 7 OMAC) known as doghouses on the Service Module. The thruster malfunctions, specifically understanding their root causes, are the primary concern. When the OMAC thrusters are activated, they generate much more heat than expected. In the confined space of the doghouses, that heat is absorbed by the Teflon seals in the RCS, causing the seals to bulge and potentially disintegrate. The resulting debris can block the oxidizer supply to the RCS, resulting in lower thrust. Boeing engineers have replicated some of these symptoms in their ground tests. The uncertainty associated with repeated bulging of the seals during reentry appears to have motivated NASA to throw in the towel with Starliner. Starliner will return uncrewed on September 6th, and NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams will return with SpaceX in February 2025.
This is perhaps NASA’s most consequential decision. NASA wanted two independent routes for crewed flights to LEO from the outset. Since the Space Shuttle was retired, NASA has spent about $11 billion on its replacement—the Commercial Crew Development Contracts. The lion’s share is almost equally split (SpaceX $5.5 billion and Boeing $5.1 billion). This includes 6 Boeing missions to the ISS and 14 SpaceX crewed missions to the ISS. SpaceX has completed 13 crewed return missions to the ISS, and Boeing has yet to complete its first.
Corporate Decline?
Following NASA’s decision, SpaceX will exploit Boeing’s uncomfortable reputational and commercial predicament. NASA did not take it lightly, and it was probably not informed solely by the quality of Boeing’s work on Starliner but by a broader recognition of Boeing’s performance over decades.
The first stage of the mighty Saturn V, which powered eight crewed Apollo missions to the Moon, was developed by Boeing engineers. From the same decade, the 1960s, Boeing has been a byword for safe aviation. The Boeing 737 and the 747 Jumbo have impressive safety records, not just in the US but globally. Perhaps the 1997 merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas shifted the company culture from safety and quality to profit and dividends. Confidence in the integrity of Boeing’s engineering declined further, with two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 of its new 737 Max aircraft, resulting in the loss of 346 lives.
Boeing’s difficulties are not restricted to aviation or Starliner. In early August, NASA’s Office of Inspector General published a report on the status of the Space Launch System (SLS) Block 1B. Boeing is the prime contractor for the SLS Exploration Upper Stage (EUS), where the cost has grown from $962 million to over $2 billion. The report found that Boeing’s quality assurance program is not compliant with NASA’s Quality Management System standard AS9100. Between September 2021 and September 2023, Boeing received 71 Corrective Action Requests and is now facing the prospect of financial penalties for non-compliance with quality control standards.
Critical Reentry
Despite media reports, NASA’s astronauts are not stuck, stranded, or abandoned. As the mission designation, Crew Flight Test, indicates, this is a test flight. Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams are space shuttle veterans. They are in no immediate danger and probably welcome their extended stay in space. It is very rare for a spacecraft that took people to space to return empty. In March 2023, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft returned to Earth uncrewed following safety concerns with an external cooling radiator on its service module.
The Service Module does not survive reentry, so Boeing engineers will not be able to investigate it further after it has returned to Earth. Firing all 28 thrusters during the uncrewed return will be essential for Boeing to collect additional data to inform the necessary modifications. That step may also result in unpredictable and potentially catastrophic failure. That unlikely event could vindicate NASA’s decision and mark the demise of the Starliner program.
I think Boeing engineers will succeed in returning the CFT safely to Earth. On the current schedule, on September 6th, Starliner will undock from the ISS at 6:04 and land on the 7th at 12:03 EDT. Space is hard for Boeing right now, but it will have moved on in a few years. These profound difficulties will be interesting footnotes in Boeing’s developmental history.
Episode 113 – Rocket Pioneer Hermann Oberth
The idea of using rockets for transport had been well-established before the first flights of heavier-than-air aeroplanes in 1903. When it comes to turning that idea into reality, three names are considered as fathers of rocketry: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth.
For this episode, I visited the Hermann Oberth Space Travel Museum in the German Town of Feucht, near Nurnberg and spoke with its director Karl-Heinz Rohrwild. A summary of the interview is below along with some pictures from the museum.
The museum is run entirely by volunteers in the interest of science. The exhibits on display are a tiny amount of the exhibits that exist. Museum expansion planned the for 100th of the publication of his second book in 1929. With plans to make lots of the documents available online.I found Karl-Heinz very helpful, opening the museum for my visit during a public holiday. He and his colleagues extend that welcome to anyone wishing to visit. Contact details here.
Summary
- His father had been a surgeon. He wanted Hermann to have a career in Medicine.
- Brilliant at maths but likely he was autistic at some level.
- Lost his brother Adolf in WW1 and became anit-war.
- Considered using a massive bomb delivered by rocket to destroy the senior people who decided to start and maintain the war.
- Wrote two key books in rocketry in the 1920s
- Fritz Lang director of the early sci-fi Metropolis followed by Frau im Mond. Oberth worked on that film as an advisor.
- 1929: Winner of the International Award for Astronautics (Robert Esnault-Pelterie-Hirsch-Award)
- Envisaged the use of solar energy in orbit and designed the first gyroscopes.
- Also envisaged a huge space-based mirror that would beam power down to Earth for terrestrial use.
- 1927 A member of the first and most successful space/rocketry society – Verien for Rsumshifffhart (Society of Space Travel)
- Oberth championed the use of rocket staging, liquid engine propulsion and the use of rocket engines in the near vicinity of space (not in the atmosphere)
- The RAF bombing raid on August 26, 1943, nearly killed both Oberth and Wernher von Oberth were working there.
- Post WW2 interrogated by Theodore von Karman and it was decided Oberth was not taken to the USA. In part, Oberth did not want to go.
- 1951 lived through tough times. He was making his living in part as a farmer.
The day the Cosmonaut came to Manchester
This piece was first published in Manchester Histories blog on 12 April 2023
On Wednesday, 12th April 1961, a bright and sunny spring morning, an air force pilot of the USSR launched into space using a modified intercontinental ballistic missile. On his first trip outside the USSR, Yuri Gagarin, aged 27 went -around the world in just 90 minutes. He broke the world altitude and speed records. He was the first to experience the realm and sensation of being in space. Exactly three months later, he came to Manchester.
He arrived at Ringway airport at around 10am on Wednesday, 12th July and travelled first to the Headquarters of his hosts, the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers (AUFW) in Old Trafford. It was a sunny day but peppered with occasional sharp showers typical in July. Thousands lined his route from Ringway to Old Trafford. Travelling in an open-top Bently, he received a true Mancunian welcome. He was soaked. In the small union HQ, he was made an honorary member of the AUFW and President Fred Hollingsworth presented him with a medal engraved with the words “Together, moulding a better future”.
His second stop was Metropolitan Vickers in Trafford Park, a unique place in Machester’s history of the industrial revolution. By now, the rain had stopped but puddles hinted at the recent downpour. Stanely Nelson recalled shaking Gagarin’s hand near the foundry. He recalled the working conditions most foundry workers endured saying, “it was like a vision of hell. Smoke, fire and tiny thin men silhouetted against the foundry fire. No one was fat; they were all thin like Lowry’s match stick men”. Of all his time in Britain, it was this time surrounded by working men and women amongst the dirt and grime of a working foundry that Gagarin would later say he felt most at home.
He arrived at Manchester Town Hall for a formal civic reception hosted by the Lord Mayor. Albert Square and all the surrounding office windows and doorways were crammed with people waiting to see the only man with the experience of Earth orbit. The dignitaries who got to shake his hand included Bernard Lovell from Jodrell Bank and the mathematician Kathleen Ollerenshaw. At the Town Hall, Gagarin, speaking in Russian, expressed his wishes for future space missions saying, ”I would like naturally like to fly to the Moon then perhaps to Mars and Venus and even further if my abilities make it possible”. By 16:30, he was at Ringway on his flight back to London, where he had arrived the day before and would stay until his return flight to Moscow on Saturday, 15th July.
His spaceflight was packed with risk. He had left his wife a letter saying that should he not return, a real possibility, she should not remain alone. He experienced problems at launch and another during re-entry. The service module separation did not go to plan. The mission and his life came close to a catastrophic end. Ejecting from his spacecraft and landing separately by parachute, he returned to Earth as a real-life superhero. It was a supreme technological triumph, fulfilling humanity’s age-old dream of leaving Earth. It was achieved by a nation championing the virtues of communism in the midst of the Cold War. This was his first visit to the heart of the democratic West to demonstrate the prowess of the communist way of life.
To avoid highlighting the USA’s failure (its ally) to “be the first”, the UK government could not offer Gagarin a formal invitation. The remarkable response on his first day in London on 11th July, the public turned out in their thousands lining the streets in London and inundating Earls Court, the venue of the Soviet Trade Fair. Before the day was out, he had received an invitation from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan and the Queen. His initial two-or-three-day UK visit was extended to five.
Following the global coverage of his flight in April, AUFW President Fred Hollingsworth discovered that Gagarin had trained as a Foundry Worker. It was the invitation the AUFW made in May of 1961 that brought Gagarin to Manchester. Gagarin met the Prime Minister at the Admiralty and the Queen in Buckingham Palace, along with other visits to the Air Ministry, Mansion House and the Royal Society at Burlington House. In April 1962, the first anniversary of his flight, Gagarin sent a message to the people of Manchester saying, “And the firm handshakes of my fellow workers in the moulding shop were dearer to me than many awards”. For the many who saw or met Gagarin recalled his charm, good looks and his persistent smile.
Gagarin’s visit coincided with the heightened risk of another world war. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the end of the ban on nuclear weapons testing, the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was probably aware of the rising geopolitical tensions more than most. While in Manchester and London, Gagarin repeated his message of peace. Despite his extraordinary achievement, the people of Manchester saw an ordinary man with humble roots. For most, he was probably the only individual from the USSR they would ever meet.
Pam Reid speaks on BBC Radio Merseyside about her father’s Memoir – My personal History of the British Interplanetary Society
Founded by Phil Cleator on Friday 13 October 1933 , the British Interplanetary Society exists to this day. BIS members include Arthur C Clarke, Carl Sagan, George Bernard Shaw, and Robert Heinlein. In 1933 Leslie Johnson was 19 and Clarke, aged 16, joined in 1934.
The initial aims of the BIS were to convince the public that space travel really was possible and help develop the technology to make it happen. It was an ambitious goal, futuristic, perhaps even reckless. A tough challenge when most people would not have seen an aeroplane up close, let alone ridden in one. Speke airport, now Liverpool John Lennon, was opened in July 1933. Movies were just turning into talkies, the BBC was founded in 1922 large populations geographically separated could share the same experience without having to be in the same place at the same time. Something that was possible for the first time in human history.
Today we are familiar with terms such as satellites, rockets, spacecraft and astronauts but in the 1930s they did not exist. Very few could visualise and understand these concepts and let alone the IDEA of space and space travel.
Like many other leading economies, Britain has a flourishing space programme today. I would suggest it started in Liverpool almost 90 years ago. Yes, despite 13th October 1933 being a Friday, the BIS is still flourishing today as the oldest space advocacy group in the world.
Leslie Johnson’s daughter Pam Reid and I spoke with Tony Snell at BBC Radio Merseyside. Listen below.
More about the book and how to get a copy direct or via Amazon.