Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
If you feel a bit nervous boarding a Boeing jetliner these days because of continuing quality issues and high-profile accidents with the company’s aircraft, think about how Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams feel.
They’re the astronauts aboard NASA’s problem-plagued Boeing Starliner spaceship, who have had their return to Earth from a one-week voyage delayed three times because of mechanical problems aboard the ship designed for commercial space travel. They aren’t scheduled to come home now until at least July 20, 45 days after they lifted off, but chronic problems in the ship’s helium system and a faulty thruster may delay their return even longer.
The Starliner problems are not simply another opportunity to beat up on Boeing. That’s too easy these days, in a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel way. But it’s well-deserved.
This is about how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s head-in-the-sand mindset that got the agency in trouble with the space shuttle program is, regrettably, alive and well and may threaten this program as well.
Many of us have seen this movie before. We watched in horror as the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lift-off in January, 1986. We gasped again in February, 2003, when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Then we learned that the probable causes of both disasters – the cracked O-rings on Challenger and the faulty heat-reflecting tiles on Columbia – were known problems. But the missions went ahead anyway, and with civilians aboard.
The question now is this: What was NASA thinking when it green-lighted Starliner? The issues the spaceship is experiencing now were problems before the Starliner finally left the launch pad on June 5 after a number of delays. They had contributed to cost overruns of more than 30 per cent, or about US$1.5-billion, during the manufacturing process. That may be an acceptable contingency for government work, but it hints that something is not right.
Until quality issues are identified and sorted at Boeing, should any experimental and high-risk project like the Starliner move forward, no matter how eager the agency is to keep its fledgling commercial space program going? Can it risk another high-profile disaster like Challenger or Columbia, which together turned public opinion sour on the shuttles and made it hard for even the most influential advocates to defend taxpayer funding for the program?
Now, as any rocket scientist will tell you, experimentation is part of the process, and every failure is a learning experience. Professional astronauts accept the risks of an inherently dangerous career, especially when it comes to being guinea pigs for a brand-new piece of equipment such as the Starliner.
To a layman, however, the decision by trained astronauts to get aboard a spaceship built by a company in the middle of a serious quality crisis is a curious application of the right stuff. It’s like driving a Ford Pinto knowing its design and engineering are so flawed it is prone to exploding in a rear-end collision. It’s a case of crossing your fingers and making sure your life-insurance premiums are paid.
To be fair, any problem with Boeing aircraft these days, no matter how high it flies, is magnified. While it may seem like beating a dead horse, there is solid grounding for concerns about flaws in the company’s design, engineering and production processes that caused two of their 737 Max planes to crash, killing hundreds of people in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, and near-disasters such as the now-infamous incident when a door blew out of an Alaska Airlines Boeing mid-flight earlier this year.
But in a high-stakes mission like Starliner, which should be an encouraging harbinger of viable commercial space travel, someone at NASA should have put up their hand and said let’s wait until our partner gets its act together. This should be a case of belt and suspenders, not a roll of the dice.
That may seem naive but remember, these are not simply cargo voyages. We’re talking about eventually sending civilian human life into space aboard Starliners. Ultimately, the acceptable and predictable risk of travel in a Boeing spaceship and a Boeing commercial aircraft must be the same.
There is some good news here. The Starliner astronauts are in no immediate danger. They are cooling their heels in the most exotic waiting room ever – the International Space Station in orbit 400 kilometres above us – until repairs are made to their ship. And, somewhat ironically, there is chatter that a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft – a competitor of Starliner – could be modified to accommodate them if they are really strapped for a ride home.
The stranded astronauts might leave the SpaceX option open, especially considering the Boeing engineers who built the leaky Starliner are also in charge of fixing it.