It could be a metaphor for the whole program, as Boeing stares down the barrel of more money being poured down the drain to try and fix their Starliner spacecraft (they’ve already lost an estimated $1.4 billion under the fixed contract) and the rapidly diminishing number of years in which to use it before the International Space Station (ISS) is de-orbited into the vast emptiness of the SouthEast Pacific Ocean.

In June 2024 Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft finally got its first manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS) – and it was a failed mission. The vehicle had thruster problems and was eventually deemed too risky to fly its two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, home, although it was eventually returned safely by remote control, in September.

In the meantime those two astronauts were stranded at the ISS – and no that is not a false claim just because there were multiple spaceships docked that could have returned them. The problem was a lack of seats and spacesuits for those craft; all these things being custom-fitted. They couldn’t just pull their seats and suits from the Starliner and throw them into a Progress or Dragon spacecraft. New suits and seats didn’t arrive until late in 2024, by which time it had already been decided to bring them home on a Dragon spacecraft in February 2025, which was duly done.

But since they returned they’ve been interviewed by Ars Technica magazine and what has been revealed is that the situation was far worse than NASA said at the time, or even long afterwards. The reporter has known Wilmore for more than a decade, and this, plus Willmore and Williams age meaning they’re almost certainly never going to fly again, may have been the factors in such open revelations.

Basically, as Wilmore moved to dock with the ISS more and more thrusters failed, until he reached a point where he knew he couldn’t risk docking because of a lack of control. Worse, he knew that they probably couldn’t re-enter for the same reason. In other words, he and Williams might only have a few hours to live.

For the following quote from Wilmore, it pays to understand the following things:

  • Aircraft have three-degrees-of-freedom (3DOF) – yaw (nose swung from side-to-side), pitch (nose up-and-down) and roll (rotating around a central imaginary line running through the nose to the tail).
  • But a spacecraft has three extra ones because it flies a vacuum – forward-back, up-down, left-right – which thus means it has 6DOF.
  • Fault tolerance is measured in many ways and in this case referred to the number of thrusters that can fail before control is lost.

As we get closer … we lose our second thruster. So now we’re single fault tolerance for the loss of 6DOF control…We’re single fault tolerant, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, we’re supposed to leave the space station.’ Because I know the flight rules. I did not know that the flight directors were already in discussions about waiving the flight rule because we’ve lost two thrusters. We didn’t know why. They just dropped.
…
And we lose two of the bottom thrusters. We’ve lost a port thruster. And now we’re zero-fault tolerant. We’re already past the point where we were supposed to leave, and now we’re zero-fault tolerant and I’m manual control. And, oh my, the control is sluggish. Compared to the first day, it is not the same spacecraft. Am I able to maintain control? I am. But it is not the same.
…
And this is the part I’m sure you haven’t heard. We lost the fourth thruster. Now we’ve lost 6DOF control. 

NASA did not reveal to the public that they simply dumped the flight rules and allowed him to proceed to dock. Moreover they then came up with a plan which Wilmore was very reluctant to accept and which he had told them in simulations he might not accept.

They told him to disengage his manual control so they could re-boot the spacecraft’s computer, in the hope that this would re-start all the failed thrusters, or at least enough of them to allow the docking.

No wonder he’d told them in advance that he might accept their advice; you’re sitting just a couple of hundred feet away from a fragile, 450 tonne space station in a vehicle that is effectively not controllable even as it slowly flies towards it – could he even keep the nose pointed at the docking station? But if you stop the approach, orbital mechanics means you slowly drift away from the ISS. Also what happens if they lose radio contact with Mission Control? Also what happens if it gets stuck in auto-mode and he can’t regain manual control?

That was not easy to do. I have lived rendezvous orbital dynamics going back decades.

At this point you might wonder if an astronaut from the ISS could just come out, attach a line and have them come in that way in their spacesuits. Nope! Those are only pressure suits for use inside the vehicle if it depressurises: they’re not EVA suits.

All in all it was a much shittier situation than NASA has let on. In the end, having thought all this through, Wilmore decided to wait until things seemed still and stable, let go and let them re-boot the system – and it worked. Two thrusters came back online – but then another failed so they had to repeat the process. This time they got all but one thruster back and since that was enough (barely) to allow an auto-docking Wilmore let it proceed and it worked.

Read the whole interview and you’ll understand why long-time NASA watcher, Robert Zimmerman, said the following on his blog, which I agree with after I had earlier praised NASA’s decision to not bring them back on the Starliner, having learned from the Challenger and Columbia disasters:

All in all, the story here is that NASA last year took a very nonchalant attitude towards the lives of these two astronauts. Once Starliner docked to ISS, they really had no lifeboat in case a catastrophe occurred on ISS. The proper action at that point would have been to get a new manned Dragon docked to ISS as quickly as possible. Doing that however would have disturbed the complex planned schedule of dockings at ISS….NASA management decided to instead take for them the easiest route, bringing Freedom to ISS in September as scheduled, even though it left these two humans without a lifeboat for a period of about four months.

Flying a quickly put together rescue mission also risked a lot of bad press, both for Boeing and for the Biden administration during the election campaign. (Biden’s fear was really unfounded. The press would have correctly lauded NASA and Biden for acting diligently and with speed.)
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In this case, I foolishly took NASA at its word last summer when it claimed Starliner was a safe lifeboat. They were lying however. And as much as I am always skeptical of government officials, I allowed myself in this case to be fooled. And as they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. If I can at all help it, I won’t let this happen again.