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Monday, August 12, 2024

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.



16 comments:

  1. Yeah, NASA knew there were cold related issues for the shuttle, which was supposed to launch from two locations that normally got below 40 degrees for long periods of time, even down to below freezing for hours. But yet they still chose to fly using systems known to fail under bad conditions.

    The foam? NASA was lucky they didn't lose a shuttle way earlier. Foam and ice strikes damaging tiles is part of the reason why the shuttles basically had to be rebuilt and retiled after every mission. Lots of times tiles were damaged almost to the point of catastrophic failure. Almost being the critical word. Almost. Yet no foam and ice mitigation system was in place, nor was a portable repair system. And NASA knew the bird was dead within hours of launch, but just kept hoping?

    And we're to trust NASA with Starliner? Failure of Starliner with crew death will postpone all manned flight in the US, maybe even kill it. Death by Starliner may shut manned flight through SpaceX. Damned sure it will slow it down.

    And... NASA knew they shouldn't have launched Starliner. Too many issues, too many unanswered questions, too many 'Eh, just roll the dice' and 'Eh, it should work' statements and fingers crossed.

    But any stop of Starliner and SLS will cost some congresscritters too much money from graft and corruption so people will again die due to the fecklessness of NASA and the congresscritters.

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  2. I stopped reading the Ars Technica article when it tried to make the very specious connection of the three managers to Stayliner. The article conflates 'key roles' with '... felt the consequences ...'.
    What is that supposed to mean other than they were at NASA or Boeing at the time?

    There is enough wrong flying around without having to read like a tabloid.

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  3. The third paragraph in Bean's comment is what I meant when I previously mentioned that the fallout from Stayliner may be so severe that Space X and others will not be unscathed.

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  4. From Florida Today.
    https://www.floridatoday.com/

    August 11, 2024

    Boeing was the frontrunner when NASA awarded the contract in 2014," said Laura Forczyk, head of Astralytical, a space industry consultation business.

    "I do believe that because people assumed that Boeing had that long history in spaceflight that they didn't need that much oversight. And I think the problem's not only with Boeing, but with NASA just not giving that oversight needed − holding Boeing accountable. Unfortunately, we're seeing the results here"

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    1. It has been reported that if Boeing hadn't bid on the Commercial Crew Program, the whole program wouldn't have happened and nobody would have gotten the job. Since SpaceX has been flying people since May of '20, I suppose NASA would be joined at the hip to Russia and Roscosmos if there were astronauts flying at all.

      It's safe to say that probably only a few people in NASA thought the brash startup would succeed, because "Boeing had that long history in spaceflight." They might produce something flyable but Boeing would be running the system.

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  5. There is a simple solution to this:

    Have Space-X fly Cain, Bowersox, and Stitch up to the ISS, and have them return with the astronauts in the Deathliner.

    If they demur, they should be fired on the spot, banned forma any future employment in space travel, and retire quietly into oblivion. Then they should jettison Deathliner and boost it towards the Sun, fire all the program managers, and revoke the contract for cause.

    In Rome of the Caesars, a builder had to stand underneath any arch he erected for a full day after its completion. Or face execution.

    Spaceflight should be similarly proof-tested, and that's the best way to do it.

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  6. Simple solution.....you build it, you fly it. Astronauts are supposed to be smart; why didn't the maroonites say "no way!" when considering the previous deadly failure of their bosses, who should be pushing brooms in the carpark, under competent and close supervision.

    How is the SGB Tower of Radiopower holding up, btw?

    Stefan v.

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    1. No problems whatsoever. I didn't need to crank it over and pop off the antennas for Debby, and it sure doesn't look like I'll need to for this next one (Ernesto) but the season is young and the peak chances are still around a month away.

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  7. I just thought of something.
    If Suni and Butch leave ISS on anything but Stuckliner, who will be qualified to fly it off the ISS?
    Obviously, this is a separate concern from the missing software removed by Boeink.
    Will then the condition be that a separate team be flown to ISS, along with the software, who are qualified for Sunkliner?
    How long will NASA, ESA, et al allow Boeing to squat on ISS?

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    1. I got the impression that if they come down on Crew Dragon in February they're going to get software uploaded to put the autonomous flight stuff back into this one, and have it try to come back that way.

      I'll note they didn't specify February of which year. ;-)

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    2. It's been a week since a return date in February was reported. What with the updates on the updated reports and the scheduling delays, and internal memos furiously flying, I reckon after an entire week, the Feb date (specifically Feb 25th) will be changed eh maybe twice before the end of August.

      Do hams drop in on FM to, say listen to ISS comms?

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    3. It has been a while since I even thought about this, so I may have obsolete information filed away, but ISS to ground "official" radio moved to satellites long ago. Like when TDRSS first went up. There are places on the net where those can be heard, but I don't think they have VHF or UHF downlinks anymore.

      There is an amateur radio station on the ISS and hams regularly work them. I think it's done with a few watts and while there are some special requirements, nothing really exotic, like monitoring TDRSS would.

      https://www.ariss.org/contact-the-iss.html

      Simply searching on YouTube using "contacting space station" turns up a bunch of videos.

      If my memory isn't playing tricks on me, I listened for hams on the ISS back in the days before there was an organized space station, and Owen Garriott (W5LFL - now "silent key" (passed away)) started hams bringing up rigs for use when they were "off the clock". I remember hearing someone but not trying for the two way contact because it was 2m up/440 down and I didn't have a radio and antenna that would do that.

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  8. Starliner is done. Fill it with garbage and jettison.

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  9. The webcast "What About It" on yousetubs reported that it is possible to put the two Starliner astronauts on pads on the internal 'cargo' floor underneath the 4 regular chairs on the Dragon capsule. Since it was originally designed to carry 7, it might work.

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    1. It will work, but because that will spend the doom of Starliner, it won't be done.
      They've gamed the scenario, it's the safe way to go. Just my 4 cents worth.

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    2. I'm fairly sure that I've seen an "engineering-like" drawing of the Dragon with more seats. I mean like a black-lines on white background, looking like it came out of a drafting department. Probably back before "Bob and Doug's" first flight. I thought it was six seats.

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