Eric Berger at Ars Technica has put up a summary of an interview he had with Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams yesterday at Johnson Space Center in Houston. It's the deepest, most informative thing I've come across about the Starliner Crewed Flight Test mission; the story is both riveting and a high pucker factor. While the two spent most of the day giving five to ten minute interviews. Berger has a closer relationship with Butch Wilmore and they ended up talking for a half hour. Berger writes:
I have known Wilmore a bit for more than a decade. I was privileged to see his launch on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan in 2014, alongside his family. We both are about to become empty nesters, with daughters who are seniors in high school, soon to go off to college. Perhaps because of this, Wilmore felt comfortable sharing his experiences and anxieties from the flight.
The story is definitely worth your time to read, and as I usually do, I'll pass on some excerpts to try to whet your appetite for the story.
The story starts after launch and their first night in orbit in an unexpectedly cold Starliner capsule. As they're approaching the Space Station, you'll probably recall they lost some thrusters and the ability to control Starliner. They knew they should dock with the ISS and felt that they'd be safer there, but they didn't know that their Starliner would hold together or if more failures would come. As Starliner's thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.
He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.
But what if it wasn't safe to come home, either?
"I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point," Wilmore said in an interview. "I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't."
In the lead-up to this moment, Butch remembered talks he had with Boeing leaders before the mission.
"Before the flight we had a meeting with a lot of the senior Boeing executives, including the chief engineer. [This was Naveed Hussain, chief engineer for Boeing's Defense, Space, and Security division.] Naveed asked me what is my biggest concern? And I said the thrusters and the valves because we'd had failures on the OFT [uncrewed flight test] missions. You don't get the hardware back. (Starliner's service module is jettisoned before the crew capsule returns from orbit). So you're just looking at data and engineering judgment to say, 'OK, it must've been FOD,' (foreign object debris) or whatever the various issues they had. And I said that's what concerns me the most. Because in my mind, I'm thinking, 'If we lost thrusters, we could be in a situation where we're in space and can't control it.' That's what I was thinking. And oh my, what happened? We lost the first thruster."
The story gets worse from there. Wilmore adds: "And this is the part I'm sure you haven't heard. We lost the fourth thruster. Now we've lost 6DOF (6 Degrees of Freedom) control. We can't maneuver forward. I still have control, supposedly, on all the other axes."
Now they simply could not control the Starliner to the degree they needed to. The two of them realized they were in a very precarious situation, and it literally was just barely good enough to only probably not get them both killed. There was no need to talk about that with each other; they're both experienced enough as astronauts to know what the situation meant. That's when the mission control in Houston came up with the scariest solution.
Turn the entire system of thrusters off and back on again. Really.
And some of them started working again.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams at the docking port entry to the ISS, soon after their June 6th arrival at the ISS. Image credit: NASA
I'll leave it there as it's fairly close to the actual docking with the ISS
and the rest of the story.