Boeing starliner: part 1

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

The Internet Age, and the 24-hour news cycle that comes with it, has given us a peek into history and science in ways our predecessors could never even dream of. The good, the bad and usually the ugly are all readily available with the swipe of your thumb — with everything from tragedies to embarrassing snafus being transformed into smarmy memes, sustaining us like a mother bird vomiting pre-digested food lovingly into her eager hatchlings’ mouths.

Among this pre-digested bird vomit is Boeing, a mammoth aerospace company that, for reasons I can’t fully articulate here, has certainly seen better days.

You have undoubtedly scrolled past a number of videos of pieces of passenger planes simply falling off during takeoff. We were assured that this was just a fluke and a series of coincidences, and that we’d all enjoy a tasty serving of humble pie once Boeing’s Starliner craft delivered astronauts to and from the International Space Station this year.

Boeing Starliner Spacecraft 2 approaching the ISS in May 2022, during Orbital Flight Test 2. Photo courtesy of NASA.

The pie came out of the oven, but it turned out to be only half-baked. The craft successfully delivered the astronauts to the ISS, but it was deemed too unsafe to ferry them on a return journey.

So what the heck happened?

To get a bigger picture of how we ended up here, we’ll have to go back to 2011. The space shuttles were being retired, having been in operation since 1972 as an all-purpose, reliable form of transportation to low-Earth orbit. The reliability of the shuttle came into question throughout its service, particularly after the Challenger disaster on Jan. 28, 1986, and again in the wake of the Columbia explosion on Feb. 1, 2003.

Boeing took over the maintenance and Earth-side operation of the space shuttle program after acquiring Rockwell International in 1996. Rockwell had also been pivotal in the design, construction and testing of the Apollo craft. This is to say: Starliner wasn’t Boeing’s first foray into space.

As the space shuttle program retired in 2011, there was no clear successor for the United States. NASA was paying upward of $56 million per astronaut to hitch a ride on Russian Soyuz rockets to reach the ISS — a prospect that did very little to foster a love of spaceflight with the American public. To combat this and help spur innovation in the cutting-edge field, then-President Barack Obama proposed working alongside a number of U.S. companies to create a partnership between the government and private sector, with the intention of fostering innovation and not paying potential foreign adversaries huge sums of money to reach the space station.

All things considered, this was a resounding success that bolstered a huge number of trades from numerous specialties, meanwhile putting a spotlight on STEM careers. New companies like SpaceX arose from this initiative to deliver the internet to hard-to-reach places, while creating jobs for IT professionals, construction workers, HVAC technicians, engineers, designers and a whole slate of other careers tied to communications, science and engineering.

Yet again, what in the heck happened to Boeing’s Starliner?

Starliner’s development began a year before the retirement of the space shuttles. It is a semi-reusable craft that effectively comes in two pieces: the crew module and the service module. The service module is what provides the craft with propulsion and energy generation. Equipped with 52 thrusters, it was designed to be remarkably maneuverable and had the option to be completely automated or controlled manually by the crew. 

Say what you will about not trusting computers, but trying to safely dock a space module onto a craft moving 4.26 miles per second while traveling in a circular path is a task that’s probably well suited to a machine.

That being said, Starliner’s first test flight — which occurred on Dec. 20, 2019 — ended in incredible failure almost exclusively because of software bugs. The internal clock was improperly set to 11 hours ahead of launch, so the computer didn’t know to fire thrusters when it was supposed to because it didn’t know what time it was. By the time the mistake was corrected, it had burned too much fuel to safely dock at the ISS. A second bug was discovered at that time. The thrusters to separate the service module from the crew module were set to fire in the opposite direction than intended. Instead of separating safely, this would have caused the two halves to slam into each other in a catastrophic self-destructing failure.

Luckily, the craft managed to return to Earth safely, though it’s likely that some very angry words were exchanged between NASA and Boeing.

Next week, we’ll dive headlong into how two astronauts got stuck on the ISS. Until then, are you interested in rocketry or any number of the other fields linked to the space industry? You can get a great taste of this at the library on Sat., Sept. 28, when Spacepoint will be hosting its second Intro To Rocketry event at the Sandpoint branch of the East Bonner County Library.

You’ll have an opportunity to build and launch your very own rocket. The number of kits is extremely limited, so if you want to get in on this, you need to register at ebonnerlibrary.org/rockets. Once we’ve run out of reservations, we’ve run out of kits, so jump on this fast. 

Spacepoint first offered this program at the library two years ago, and watching these rockets soar hundreds of feet into the air was a spectacle to behold. 

Even if you’re not interested in building a rocket yourself, there will be a phenomenal rocketry presentation from Dr. Marty Weiser, the former department head of mechanical engineering for Eastern Washington University. Dr. Weiser is a very enthusiastic professor who makes his show-and-tell style presentation a real blast for the whole family.

Stay curious, 7B.