Jared Isaacman Clears First Hearing

Over the course of a three hour interview in the Russell Senate Office building next to the US Capitol, President Trump's nominee for NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman faced some tough questions and asked some of his own.  He also spoke to the honor of the position and his admiration of NASA.  

His basic message to members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation was that NASA is an exceptional agency that does the impossible, but that it also faces some challenges. NASA, he said, receives an “extraordinary” budget, and he vowed to put taxpayer dollars to efficient use in exploring the universe and retaining the nation’s lead on geopolitical competitors in space.

“I have lived the American dream, and I owe this nation a great debt,” said Isaacman, who founded his first business at 16 in his parents' basement and would go on to found an online payments company, Shift4, that would make him a billionaire. Isaacman is also an avid pilot who self-funded and led two private missions to orbit on Crew Dragon. Leading NASA would be “the privilege of a lifetime,” he said.

The large table where Isaacman sat featured company of the four astronauts who will fly on the Artemis II mission, and the six private citizens who flew with Isaacman on his two Dragon missions; Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn were also present. 

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, left, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen watch as Jared Isaacman testifies on Wednesday. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

The meeting started with Senator Ted Cruz stating his priorities for NASA clearly and explicitly: He is most focused on ensuring the United States does not cede any of its preeminence to China in space, and this starts with low-Earth orbit and the Moon. 

“Make no mistake, the Chinese Communist Party has been explicit in its desire to dominate space, putting a fully functional space station in low-Earth orbit and robotic rovers on the far side of the Moon,” he said. “We are not headed for the next space race; it is already here.”

Cruz wanted Isaacman to commit to getting Americans back to the moon ASAP as well as to creating a  sustained presence on the moon or in cislunar space.  Isaacman said he would commit to completing the Artemis II lunar flyby next year and Artemis III lunar landing as currently planned.  Cruz then pushed on Isaacman about keeping the ISS flying through 2030; my guess is because Elon Musk had recently said that it should be deorbited in two years.  Isaacman agreed to that, but when questioned about the Lunar Gateway currently in the Artemis mission plans, Isaacman only said he would work with Congress and space agency officials to determine which programs are working and which ones are not.

Ted Cruz is a big supporter of the Lunar Gateway (a Lunar space station) because it represents jobs for the Johnson Space Flight Center in his state.  Many observers from different backgrounds have questioned the whole concept of the Lunar Gateway in its Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, and concluded it was a bad design compromise.

When questioned about the Space Launch System, Isaacman was more reserved, questioning its history of every piece costing far more than budgeted and delivered many years late.  

He noted, correctly, that presidential administrations dating back to 1989 have been releasing plans for sending humans to the Moon or Mars, and that significantly more than $100 billion has been spent on various projects over nearly four decades. For all of that, Isaacman and his private Polaris Dawn crewmates remain the humans to have flown the farthest from Earth since the Apollo Program. They did so last year.

“Why is it taking us so long, and why is it costing us so much to go to the Moon?” he asked.

In one notable exchange, Isaacman said NASA’s current architecture for the Artemis lunar plans, based on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, is probably not the ideal “long-term” solution to NASA’s deep space transportation plans. The smart reading of this is that Isaacman may be willing to fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions as conceived, given that much of the hardware is already built. But everything that comes after this, including SLS rocket upgrades and the Lunar Gateway, could be on the chopping block.

Naturally there were questions about his relationship with Elon Musk.  Isaacman had been an investor in SpaceX, as well as paying for two Dragon missions.  These are what I think of as “de rigueur” - "required by fashion, etiquette, or custom".  They're just expected to ask these things.  To borrow a line from Shakespeare, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Earlier in the meeting, Isaacman had tried to derail those questions by saying he's not beholden to Musk in any way.

“My loyalty is to this nation, the space agency, and its world-changing mission,” Isaacman said. Yes, he acknowledged he would talk to contractors for the space agency. It is important to draw on a broad range of perspectives, Isaacman said. But he wanted to make this clear: NASA works for the nation, and the contractors, he added, “work for us.”

And Furthermore (About the Space Force Contract)

While the timing and subject matter make it seem like a footnote to yesterday's piece on Space Force announcing another round of launch contracts, it really has nothing to do with those contracts, it's the existing contracts, split between ULA and SpaceX.  

Since ULA's Vulcan still isn't ready to launch national security payloads, Space Force is moving a payload from ULA over to SpaceX.  

Space Systems Command, which oversees the military's launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA's Vulcan rocket to SpaceX's Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force's fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world. 

The back story is a bit mind boggling but the biggest part of that is how common this sort of thing is in even as routine a mission as launching another GPS satellite.  Space Force booked the GPS III SV-08  launch in 2023, when ULA was planning to begin flying military satellites on Vulcan by the middle of last year; 2024.  So when Space Force booked this mission, they expected it to have launched a year ago.  ULA and Vulcan were probably on schedule to launch about a year from now.  With luck.

Enter a little phrase in these launch contracts that gives Space Force the option of "launch vehicle trade" between qualified launch services.  GPS III SV-08 looks to launch before the end of May, 7-1/2 weeks from now.  (NextSpaceflight shows "NET May")  Bear in mind that this launch vehicle trade is just that.  In exchange for launching this GPS satellite assigned to ULA, SpaceX has to trade a launch they were assigned over to ULA.  This is not the first time they've done a trade like this.  Last year, Space Force performed a trailblazing SpaceX GPS mission (second story here) and reallocated another future GPS launch to Vulcan.

While ULA has made public statements of 25 launches per year or twice a month, that depends on being a very smoothly operating, "well-oiled machine," in how well they cycle between vehicles.  Not to mention a Vulcan production rate that they've never demonstrated.  So far, there have been two Vulcan launches.  ULA has their work cut out for them.  With the 19 missions added in last week's announcement, the Vulcan backlog now stands at 89 missions.  At 25/year, that's over three years worth of launches. How soon could they make it to 25/year?  Two or three years from now? More?

Last year, the Pentagon's chief acquisition official for space wrote a letter to ULA's owners—Boeing and Lockheed Martin—expressing concern about ULA's ability to scale the manufacturing of the Vulcan rocket.

"Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays," Frank Calvelli, the Pentagon's chief of space acquisition, wrote in the letter.

The GPS III SV-08 satellite shipped to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, last week in preparation for launch at the end of May. Credit: Lockheed Martin

GPS is so well-integrated into our lives now, mostly by way of our phones instead of the dedicated receivers we used decades ago (I still have two sitting around the house) that I don't need to dwell on how important it is.  

This satellite, No. 8 of 10 in the GPS III series, will replace an aging navigation satellite in the constellation. The GPS network has 31 operational satellites (it needs 24 for global coverage), but some of them are quite old. The longest-lived member of the GPS constellation launched in 1997 and was built for a design life of seven-and-a-half years.

The GPS III satellites broadcast more accurate navigation signals, and they're more difficult for an adversary to jam. This generation of GPS satellites also has a new channel compatible with Europe's Galileo navigation network, allowing users to merge signals from both constellations to derive even better position estimates.

So, there's a hunger to launch these modernized GPS III satellites. There are two more satellites in this series after GPS III SV-08. They're both finished and in storage, waiting for launch on Vulcan. An upgraded GPS design, known as GPS IIIF, will begin launching in 2027.

Space Force Announces Another Round of Launch Contracts

On Friday, April 4, the US Space Force announced a new $13.7 billion round of launch contracts to put their “most critical” payloads into orbit into the 2030s.  

Unsurprisingly, the contract breakdown is like this:

• SpaceX will get 28 missions worth approximately $5.9 billion
• ULA will get 19 missions worth approximately $5.4 billion
• Blue Origin will get seven missions worth approximately $2.3 billion

As usual, a little more detail adds some clarity. 

Rounded to the nearest million, the contract with SpaceX averages out to $212 million per launch. For ULA, it's $282 million, and Blue Origin's price is $341 million per launch. But take these numbers with caution. The contracts include a lot of bells and whistles, pricing them higher than what a commercial customer might pay. 

Ranking by percentage of missions awarded, SpaceX is the clear winner at 52% of the contract and they're also the lowest cost launch provider.  When you consider that ULA's Vulcan rocket just got certified to fly those missions and Space Force has said a couple of times that ULA's pace is too slow for them, their getting 35% of the launches seems a bit optimistic.  Blue Origin at seven launches might be even more so.

After racking up a series of successful launches with its Falcon 9 rocket more than a decade ago, SpaceX sued the Air Force for the right to compete with ULA for the military's most lucrative launch contracts. The Air Force relented in 2015 and allowed SpaceX to bid. Since then, SpaceX has won more than 40 percent of missions the Pentagon has ordered through the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, creating a relatively stable duopoly for the military's launch needs.

The Space Force took over the responsibility for launch procurement from the Air Force after its creation in 2019. The next year, the Space Force signed another set of contracts with ULA and SpaceX for missions the military would order from 2020 through 2024. ULA's new Vulcan rocket initially won 60 percent of these missions—known as NSSL Phase 2—but the Space Force reallocated a handful of launches to SpaceX after ULA encountered delays with Vulcan.

Regular readers might remember a few posts about Space Force launch contracts talking about phases and lanes and that whole thing is still too arcane for me to be comfortable with.  About all I feel comfortable saying is that "Lane 1" is higher risk and tends to go to newer launch vehicles for lower orbits and easier paths to get there. 

Friday's announcement covers Lane 2 for traditional military satellites that operate thousands of miles above the Earth. This bucket includes things like GPS navigation satellites, NRO surveillance and eavesdropping platforms, and strategic communications satellites built to survive a nuclear war. The Space Force has a low tolerance for failure with these missions. Therefore, the military requires rockets to be certified before they can launch big-ticket satellites, each of which often costs hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars.

The Space Force required all Lane 2 bidders to show their rockets could reach nine "reference orbits" with payloads of a specified mass. Some of the orbits are difficult to reach, requiring technology that only SpaceX and ULA have demonstrated in the United States. Blue Origin plans to do so on a future flight.

The military expects to order 54 launches in Lane 2 from this year through 2029, with announcements each October of exactly which missions will go to each launch provider.  This year, it will be just SpaceX and ULA. The Space Force said Blue Origin won't be eligible for firm orders until next year. 

This image shows what the Space Force's fleet of missile warning and missile tracking satellites might look like in 2030, with a mix of platforms in geosynchronous orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and low-Earth orbit. The higher orbits will require launches by "Lane 2" providers. Credit: Space Systems Command

"A robust and resilient space launch architecture is the foundation of both our economic prosperity and our national security," said US Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. "National Security Space Launch isn't just a program; it's a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win."

The Sun's Other Cycle

The 11 year sunspot cycle has been something I've posted about many times here, and have done six month progress reports on the current cycle (25) regularly - the most recent was at the end of last December, the 28th.  Let me start by refreshing the end of the year solar cycle plot:

My frequent comment is that cycle 25 is doing well, but is still weaker than cycle 23 (red).  Yes, it's stronger than cycle 24 (pink) but that one was the weakest solar cycle in a hundred years.  In this plot cycle 24 is the one on the bottom, and at least as of this plot in December, the grayish plot of cycle 25 hadn't shown itself to be stronger than 23 in even one month's smoothed sunspot number.  

The (roughly) 11 year sunspot cycle, referred to as the Schwabe cycle, has been tracked longer than other measures because it's something that can be done by photographing the sun and applying the rules of counting the spots.  When researchers looked for more subtle signs that required more instrumentation, they found another cycle superimposed on this one that lasted on the order of 100 years or 9 Schwabe cycles, and called the Gleissberg cycle.  Plotted together, they look like this:

Looking at this plot, cycle 24 (last peak on the right) doesn't look particularly weak, especially compared to the cycle at the last null in about 1913, barely above the minima of the Gleissberg cycle.  

Let me change pace for a little more background that I'm sure some readers will appreciate.  This plot of the two types of cycles comes from a story that gets a bit more into it and leads much deeper.  The article is at the top of Spaceweather.com today.  That article is one paragraph which reads:

THE CENTENNIAL GLEISSBERG CYCLE: You've heard of the 11-year sunspot cycle. But what about the Centennial Gleissberg Cycle? The Gleissberg Cycle is a slow modulation of the solar cycle, which suppresses sunspot numbers every 80 to 100 years. It may have been responsible for the remarkable weakness of Solar Cycle 24 in 2012-2013. New research published in the journal Space Weather suggests that the minimum of the Gleissberg Cycle has just passed. If so, solar cycles for the next 50 years could become increasingly intense. Read the paper here.

It would be "bad form" for me to change the way that second to last sentence is displaying in the excerpted paragraph because it might not be clear that I'm the one who modified it.  So I'll say read that second to last sentence again, and put it right here:  If so, solar cycles for the next 50 years could become increasingly intense.

The first link in that paragraph is to climate.gov, where the graphic of the two cycles just above comes from.  The last link is to a full copy of "Turnover in Gleissberg Cycle Dependence of Inner Zone Proton Flux" at a journal called Space Weather of the AGU, the American Geophysical Union.  Much of the research is done with various satellites in and around the South Atlantic Anomaly, where Earth's magnetic field has several oddities.  

I have a lot of questions about the Gleissberg cycle and both the apparent correlations and non-correlations.  If you look at the right end of that combined Schwabe and Gleissberg cycles plot, you'll see one Schwabe cycle that is far higher than those near it and the highest peak in history (back to 1700).  That's cycle 19 in the late 1950s - the one that older hams and radio hobbyists still talk about.  Note that it's before the Gleissberg Cycle peak and the next sunspot cycle, 20, while apparently exactly at the CGC peak, is much smaller than 19.  There are other places in that plot that also seem like the correlation isn't that good. 

And Now for Something Completely Different

It seems the day got away from me, as it appears the weekend might well also, so a totally unrelated, 3D printer story. 

Precious granddaughter (also known as PGD) officially turned into a teenager last month as the clock ticked over to 13.  One of the things we picked off her Christmas list this most recent Christmas was a Taylor Swift CD.  I have no idea how common that is for 13 year olds, but it was easy to do and she was happy to get it.  

Around the middle of January, I broke a plastic measuring teaspoon and thought "why not just print one?" so I found myself looking for models on a few sites.  That's when I stumbled across this, on the public print library at Prusa:

I asked Dear Daughter-in-Law if she thought PGD would like this, got an enthusiastic yes, downloaded the two files and since this was pretty much two full months before her birthday, promptly put it aside. 

When the calendar started getting into March, I setup the printer and did the large piece on the left and then went on to the more intricate piece on the right.  As the printer started getting closer to the end of the print, I could tell it was messed up in a way I'd never seen.  It looked like this:

Compare it to the view on the right in previous picture.  I have no idea why it turned some solid curves into dashed lines, but it clearly did.  The problem turns out to have been the Slicer software I was using, which is from Prusa, like the cookie cutter itself.  

I pretty quickly switched to another slicer software package I have and that one was much closer to the original.  I've since downloaded updated versions of both Slicers.

The two pieces were Priority Mailed to PGD and the first batch of cookies were had a couple of weeks ago.  To borrow/butcher a line, "a splendid time was guaranteed to all" and received by them.

Small Space News Story Roundup 56

A disjointed couple of stories: they don't really go together, but who says they have to? 

The Highly Improbable Approach to launching satellites is gone

Remember the SpinLaunch, the company that planned on spinning satellites in a ground-based centrifuge on the order of 330 feet in diameter until they reached a velocity that could fling them into orbit?  The last post I have about them is from October of 2022.  As we talked about a few times back then, their big and fundamental problem was their flings are harder on the payloads than a typical rocket launch.  The quote I can't forget is the one that went, “It’s a very gentle 10,000 g.”  That's an oxymoron! 

It turns out that SpinLaunch sorta went quiet not long after that test.  You could say they disappeared, for all I heard.  This week they've announced a rather complete change in direction.  They're going to go back to regular rockets. 

"The launch market is relatively small compared to the economic potential of satellite communication," [CEO David] Wrenn said. "Launch has generally been more of a cost center than a profit center. Satcom will be a much larger piece of the overall industry."

The source article at Ars Technica goes into a bit of the details.  I have to say I'm not particularly convinced they've set up a good business plan and have a good chance of success.  I didn't think they had much of a chance with their centrifuge-as-launch-vehicle approach, either.  

The SpinLaunch test vehicle at the end of what appears to have been their last flight test.  It's hard to get a good scale from this video, but it appears to be on the order of 6' long - about the height of the men digging it out of the ground. Screen capture from their video (obviously).

A mission to retrieve Vanguard 1 from the orbit it has been in since 1958

That's 67 years ago.  America had just been shocked by the Soviet Union launching Sputnik 1 in October of 1957.  The newborn American space program had been hard at work trying to get to orbit and the frustration from being beaten to orbit by them was palpable.  It hurt more later in the year when the U.S. Navy's Vanguard rocket failed as the booster toppled over and exploded on its first attempt to put a US satellite into orbit. 

Lately, there has been an effort going to design a mission to retrieve the old satellite and bring it back down; there will be examinations of it for various reasons and then it will probably go into a museum.

The space race was just getting started, and the US Army was the first organization to reach orbit with  Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958.  Vanguard 1 reached orbit on March 17, 1958 as the second U.S. satellite.

The US Naval Research Lab is still the owner of the miniature metal ball of Vanguard 1, and while Explorer 1 reentered in 1970, Vanguard 1 is still in orbit. 

Today, the satellite is in an elliptical orbit with its perigee roughly at 410 miles (660 kilometers), swinging out to an apogee of approximately 2,375 miles (3,822 kilometers) from Earth, with a 34.25 degree inclination.

A team that includes aerospace engineers, historians and writers recently proposed "how-to" options for an up-close look and possible retrieval of Vanguard 1.

A mission like this is probably more complicated than it sounds, due to the satellite not having been designed with any thought given to capturing it a later date.  You can be sure there are no features on the little satellite to grab.  Add to that the fact the it's a small satellite at 3 pounds that's a 5.9 inch diameter aluminum sphere with a 36 inch antenna span.  It would be a delicate, 'handle with care' mission.

Vanguard I satellite, a component of the Vanguard Project, is a small aluminum sphere designed to take part in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) — a series of coordinated observations of various geophysical phenomena during solar maximum, spanning July 1957 through December 1958. (Image credit: NASA)

A hearing has been scheduled for the confirmation of Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator

The committee announced late April 2 that it will hold a confirmation hearing for Isaacman on April 9 at 10 a.m. Eastern. 

A Little Starship Flight Test 9 News

While SpaceX has not concluded its investigation of the loss of Flight Test 8's Starship, and hasn't nailed down a date for FT-9, they have announced that FT-9 will feature the first reuse of a previously flown SuperHeavy booster.   

The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship's first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company's Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds.

This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a "flight-proven" Super Heavy booster, and it paves the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. SpaceX confirmed a reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, will happen on next Starship launch With Thursday's static fire test, Booster 14 appears to be closer to flight readiness than any of the boosters in SpaceX's factory, which is a short distance from the launch site.

SpaceX says 29 of the 33 Raptor engines on Booster 14 will be flight proven, so while not exactly their goal of "no-touch reuse" it's a giant leap in that direction.  At liftoff, SuperHeavy is the most powerful rocket ever built with nearly twice the thrust of the Saturn V that got people to the moon -  16.7 million pounds of thrust.  Without the Starship, Booster 14 itself is 232 feet tall.  

Reuse has come to be accepted as the way things should be, and that shouldn't be a surprise.  Nobody would seriously talk about flying a commercial airliner once and throwing it away.  Spacecraft may fly with smaller safety margins than a car or commercial airliner; that is, the difference between forces the rocket is calculated to be able to survive, and those that it will be exposed to during a real flight, but that's because of the brutality of the mission.  In the car or the Airbus, the extra weight of stronger designs is much less of a burden to live with than with a rocket.  

The first time SpaceX reused a Falcon 9 for a paying customer, it was practically a year after the initial flight and many inspections and tests to ensure everything still behaved as it should.  That mission was in 2017.  They now have over 425 flights of reused boosters.  Reusing B14 is the best way to verify that they knew what they're looking for as they inspected and retested it.  

SpaceX hasn't released a date for the next flight of B14 with its new Starship, but it's still early in the buildup to FT-9 and more likely to be in May than April.  The ship assigned to FT-9 is still in its factory at Starbase.  There have been no test firings of the ship, so it will need to roll out to a test stand for its own static firing tests.  Once that's accomplished, they typically move the ship back to the factory for more work, inspections and finishing touches, before returning it to the pad.  

Booster 14 during Flight Test 7, January 16, 2025. Image credit: SpaceX

I hadn't thought of Fram2 this way

Stephen Greene, "Vodkapundit" at PJ Media, surprised me with an observation about the Fram2 polar orbiting mission that never occurred to me.  It's so obvious when you read that it really resonates.  

"...To boldly go where no man has gone before" launched every episode of Star Trek that I watched in reruns as a kid, but Monday night I watched as two men and two women did it for real aboard a Crew Dragon spaceship that put human beings into a polar orbit for the first time ever.

Son of a biscuit, he's right and we've just been calling it an orbital mission, just like all the other privately-run manned missions to orbit that we've seen.  Except it really isn't.  Nobody has ever done a mission that orbited over one of the poles every half orbit. 

He then goes on to say a few words about the crew members and each of their backgrounds before adding another poignant note:

None are former fighter pilots, NASA astronauts, or government employees of any kind. All show the kind of daring that would make Captain James T. Kirk proud.

Even dedicated space buffs were a bit taken aback when news of Fram2 reminded us that human beings had never flown a polar orbit before. You might wonder why, but Fram2's five-day mission has a stellar rationale. 

What's the rationale?  Nobody has made big deal about it, but while they're bringing a lot equipment for various scientific experiments, perhaps the most important experiment is that they're going to be exposed to the Van Allen belts - through holes over the magnetic north and south poles.  Nobody has been exposed to these belts since the Apollo program, and even the Apollo astronauts avoided the worst doses by transiting quickly through the Belts.  

Fram2 won't fly through the most dangerous parts of the Van Allen Belts but they'll fly through them every orbit, enough to gather data. 

For those of us who grew up in the start of the "space age," watched Mercury, Gemini and Apollo as they happened, this is turning into the space age we always expected to see, just delayed until later.  Still, while we don't know how much they're spending on this mission and the things they're doing, we know that it's all being funded by one man, Chun Wang.  I know he has been called a billionaire, and haven't seen an estimate of his net worth, but between Wang and Jared Isaacman with his Polaris program missions, it's clear that someone who can spread around a few hundred million dollars doesn't have much trouble getting into space if they want to.  Those with less to spread around now can take suborbital spaceflights, like Blue Origin's New Shepard flights. 

To let Stephen Greene have the last words:

It won't be long before millionaires will enjoy short stays aboard luxury space stations in low Earth orbit, just like the ISS but much more comfy. After that, maybe a brief "spacation" won't cost much more than a trip to Disney World. 

The complete whiteness of Antarctica is seen from SpaceX's Dragon during the first-ever human polar orbit during the Fram2 mission. (image credit Fram2/Chun Wang via News13 in Central Florida)

How Bad Was Starliner's Flight? I Had No Idea

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.