Is The Starliner Decision This Week?

Ars Technica opened into the week with this eye-catching headline: "NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation" and followed with the make-you-gotta-read subtitle: "Three Starliner mission managers had key roles on Columbia's ill-fated final flight." To borrow a well-worn phrase, "oh shit, oh dear" or OSOD. 

Three of the managers at the center of the pending decision, Ken Bowersox and Steve Stich from NASA and Boeing's LeRoy Cain, either had key roles in the ill-fated final flight of Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 or felt the consequences of the accident.

At that time, officials misjudged the risk. Seven astronauts died, and the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed as it reentered the atmosphere over Texas. Bowersox, Stich, and Cain weren't the people making the call on the health of Columbia's heat shield in 2003, but they had front-row seats to the consequences.

Bowersox was an astronaut on the Space Station at the time. Of course, they were scheduled to come back on another Shuttle later in the year, but Columbia's destruction halted the program, causing them to return on a Russian Soyuz. It was, after all, the only alternative. After retiring from the astronaut corps, Bowersox worked at SpaceX and is now the head of NASA's spaceflight operations directorate.

Stich and Cain were NASA flight directors in 2003. I've mentioned Steve Stich after pretty much every meeting about Starliner. LeRoy Cain moved from NASA to Boeing and is now their Starliner mission director. 

All three joined NASA in the late 1980s, soon after the Challenger accident. They have seen NASA attempt to reshape its safety culture after both of NASA's fatal Space Shuttle tragedies. After Challenger, NASA's astronaut office had a more central role in safety decisions, and the agency made efforts to listen to dissent from engineers. Still, human flaws are inescapable, and NASA's culture was unable to alleviate them during Columbia's last flight in 2003.

NASA knew launching a Space Shuttle in cold weather reduced the safety margin on its solid rocket boosters, which led to the Challenger accident. And shuttle managers knew foam routinely fell off the external fuel tank. In a near-miss, one of these foam fragments hit a shuttle booster but didn't damage it, just two flights prior to Columbia's STS-107 mission.

At some point reading about both of these missions, I remember thinking that they got lucky a couple of times on each type of failure before the disaster, but acted like it wasn't luck. They acted like the concerns about the problem were overblown. It struck me that they were acting like they'd played Russian Roulette a few times and were still alive so the odds of getting shot were wrong. Granted that both Shuttle failure cases were less obvious risks than actual Russian Roulette. Pulling the trigger on a revolver at your head giving a 1 in 6 chance of dying, is different odds than what happened on either Challenger or Columbia. The idea seemed not to be, "we've just been lucky;" it seemed they thought the odds must be wrong. Or that "nothing bad will happen to us because we have all these smart people studying the problem." 

There are many quotes surrounding both Challenger and Columbia that essentially say, "we've seen this on other missions so it's not that bad." Completely without any mention of the idea that it really was dangerous, maybe even more dangerous than they thought, they just got some lucky breaks.

Their problem here is what it has always been. Should the Starliner crew return to Earth from the ISS in Boeing's Starliner, with its history of thruster failures and helium leaks, or should they come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule? Also simply, the first choice is what everyone involved would prefer - if they knew it would be safe.  

The alternative has lots of impacts to other people, other companies, the ISS program itself and more; that alternative is using the Crew 9 mission's Dragon Capsule to bring only two people up to the ISS at the end of September, so that Butch and Suni become the other half of Crew 9 instead of Starliner's crew. It turns their 8 day mission to an eight month mission, keeps them on the ISS until February and other rough aspects, but is clearly far, far better than the worst case of being incinerated in a capsule the can't be steered due to malfunctioning thrusters.

LeRoy Cain, now at Boeing, was the flight director on console in mission control at NASA's Johnson Space Center during Columbia's reentry on February 1, 2003. In real-time, over the course of about 10 minutes, Cain received updates from his team suggesting a cascading series of sensor failures on the shuttle, all clustered in Columbia's left wing. Then, mission control lost contact with the shuttle and its crew.

In an interview with Ars earlier this year, before the launch of the Starliner spacecraft, Cain said he would not hesitate to voice concerns about Starliner's safety. He is the top Boeing official in charge of day-to-day Starliner mission operations. "I would stand up and say we're not ready, and here's why," Cain said.

I wonder. 

Ken Bowersox, head of NASA's spaceflight operations directorate, chairs a flight-readiness review before a SpaceX crew launch to the International Space Station in August 2023. Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett.