Starliner stranding reminds Nasa of the ghosts of disasters past

In a quiet section of the Kennedy Space Centre sits a display filled with glimpses of the 14 lives lost to humanity’s push beyond the final frontier.
There are cowboy boots belonging to Rick Husband, commander of space shuttle Columbia’s doomed STS-107 mission in 2003; his crewmate Michael Anderson’s Star Trek lunch box and a charred page from colleague Ilan Ramon’s notebook.
There are pages of sheet music played by Judith Resnik, one of seven killed when the space shuttle Challenger blew apart on flight STS-51-L in 1986; a leather helmet worn by her commander Dick Scobee; toy aircraft, family photographs, books, childhood trophies.
The mementos are a physical reminder of the human cost of Nasa’s past failures of decision-making and a safety culture once warped by budgetary constraints, schedule pressures and managerial arrogance. Such were the criticisms levelled by investigators of the Challenger disaster, and the Columbia 17 years later.
Now, as Nasa deliberates over whether Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft is capable of bringing two astronauts safely back to Earth, the legacies of past tragedies loom large.
Butch Wilmore, 61, and Suni Williams, 58, lifted off on Starliner’s first crewed flight in June for an eight-day stay at the International Space Station (ISS).
Ten weeks on, frustration is brewing at Boeing over Nasa’s continued insistence on more testing before it will make a decision on whether Starliner will bring home Wilmore and Williams later this month. The leading alternative would be to send Starliner back uncrewed, with Wilmore and Williams returning on a flight flown by Boeing’s rival SpaceX in February.
Among Nasa and Boeing’s Starliner programme team are managers and engineers who served on the Columbia space shuttle’s ill-fated STS-107 mission, on which seven crew died in a catastrophic break-up during re-entry to Earth. Engineers’ warnings had been pushed aside by higher management, flying in the face of lessons from the Challenger, investigators found.
The space agency’s governance has been reformed dramatically since the Columbia disaster to facilitate a healthier sharing of input and perspectives, said Russ DeLoach, Nasa’s chief of safety and mission assurance.
“We’ve looked a lot harder these days in sensitising everyone to making sure that we have the right environment, so people with different positions can bring them forward. That may mean at times we don’t move very fast … and you can see that at play here, where I think some people are like ‘Hey, let’s get on with this’, but it really is part of that lesson that we learnt,” he said.
Engineering opinion is divided over Starliner’s ability to return manned, and there has been “healthy” but “painful” dissent, according to Nasa’s commercial crew programme manager.
To make a final decision, Nasa wants a firmer handle on why five of the capsule’s 28 reaction control system thrusters overheated and shut down as Starliner prepared to dock with the orbiting laboratory 250 miles above Earth on June 6, along with small helium leaks in the propulsion system. The thrusters were reset and all but one are functional again.
Nasa’s extra layers of caution are based in part on a requirement to lay down “flight rationale” — a calculated description of whether the vehicle can operate within acceptable safety parameters.
“Remember this constant in space flight: it is not safe by any ordinary consideration of safety … even the best designed, flight-proven vehicles, under the best considerations, have analytical probability of failure that is eye-watering in comparison to everyday life,” Wayne Hale, a former space shuttle director, said in a blog commentary.
Nasa’s “acceptable failure rate” for commercial crew spacecraft is about one in 500. “No sane parent would put their child on a school bus where the probability of a fatal crash is one in 500,” added Hale.Boeing’s confidence that Starliner is within acceptable safety parameters is based on extensive testing of the propulsion system spanning the last two months at Nasa’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.
Bringing Wilmore and Williams home safely on Starliner is a required step in the vehicle certification process. Leaving them to ride back on a SpaceX Crew Dragon would heap further humiliation on Boeing over its aviation and aerospace failures, along with questions over Starliner’s survival as a whole. But Nasa needs more than just SpaceX to provide its commercial taxi services to space, it needs to provide an alternative “for exactly the reasons we’re seeing now. Anything can go wrong,” said Terry Virts, a former commander of the ISS.
Wilmore and Williams — US Navy test pilots and seasoned astronauts each with three missions under their belts — are two of nine astronauts in total on the ISS. Despite their stay potentially being extended, Starliner’s crew are neither “stuck” nor “stranded”, Virts insists.
He added: “Now, if you go to Mars and you’re waiting for a year for the planets to align so you can come home again, I guess then you’re stuck.”