While we’ve been busy contemplating the implosion of the Democrat Party, Supreme Court decisions, and rising antisemitism, two American astronauts have a little something else on their mind. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams went into space on June 5, 2024 with the Starliner craft. This is a space capsule designed to ferry astronauts to a space station. Once they arrive at the space station, they dock or plug into the bigger craft, then after their mission, they fly back home.
Boeing builds the Starliner, and Boeing lately has been plagued by numerous mechanical issue.
Just yesterday (July 2, 2024) an Air Europa plane (built by Boeing) hit turbulence and 30 passengers were allegedly injured as they bounced off the ceiling. While Boeing cannot be faulted for causing turbulence, most airplanes can withstand considerable turbulence without tossing passengers around like popcorn in a Jiffy Pop pan.
There is a developing story about whether the Department of Justice will file criminal charges against Boeing for two earlier 737 crashes when investigations turned up errors on the part of Boeing in terms of quality assurance and safety precautions.
On January 5, 2024, there was a much-reported Boeing disaster when a rear door of a 737 plane operated by Alaska Airlines blew off. The door landed in the backyard of some guy in Portland (fortunately, no one was harmed). The plane managed to land with a big hole where the door was.
On January 8, 2024 Alaska Airlines and United Airlines (which also flies a lot of Boeing jets) double-checked their doors and found “loose parts.”
By February, 2024, the investigation in the door blow-out reported that certain crucial bolts needed to secure the door were missing.
Whistleblowers have come forward, crucial Boeing documents went missing, and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said that Boeing has been less than forthcoming about its mistakes. (This is similar to saying Phoenix is hot in the summer.)
Meanwhile, John Barnett, a Boeing quality control manager who blew one of the many whistles on Boeing, turned up dead—ruled suicide. Let’s just say that Barnett reportedly was looking forward to giving scheduled testimony before his life ended.
Boeing is the world’s largest manufacturer of airplanes. They also make space capsules like the one Wilmore and Williams rode into space to connect with the International Space Station (ISS). The duo of seasoned astronauts managed to arrive safely at the ISS on June 6, about 26 hours after their Cape Canaveral launch. They were supposed to stay at the ISS for about eight days, but they have overstayed this projection. In fact, their Boeing-built Starliner has had such problems, they have already been at ISS three weeks longer than anticipated and there is no projected return date.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is quick to say the astronauts are “not stranded.” They could come back any time they wanted. The cooperative mainstream media has done little to cover this story. NASA has adopted the Alfred E. Neuman posture of “What, me worry?”
Remember, Starliner is built by Boeing which doesn’t bolt doors onto aircraft.
NASA has a spokesperson for the commercial crew program named Steve Stich. Stich has announced—in surprising calm—that they do not know when Wilmore and Williams will return.
Now normally in the news, people go apoplectic when the Supreme Court makes an anticipated decision or Joe Biden is revealed to have dementia. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez jumped around in the Bronx like a meth addict, shouting and stomping to Cardi B music, screaming that Democrats had to be re-elected or the sky would fall. I’m not sure that’s what she said. To paraphrase Donald Trump, I’m not sure she knows what she said, either. All I know is that two people in a damaged space craft are being left indefinitely in space and nobody is jumping around flailing their arms.
NASA insists the two astronauts are not stranded. NASA tells us they could return anytime they want to, but spokesperson Steve Stich said that there is no date set yet for their overdue return. If you go to the NASA website, news of the tardy Starlink isn’t even in the top 10 stories.
I guess this isn’t important. But when the door blew off the Alaska Airlines flight in January, everyone returned to earth safely but it was at least newsworthy. This story is not generating any pixels.
The reports of what’s going on have to be pieced together. Apparently, Starliner experienced mechanical problems en route to the ISS. The problems involve the thrusters (which propel the craft forward) and helium. The helium problem was noticed before launch and allegedly corrected. When asked to explain the helium problem in May, NASA spokesperson, Ken Bowersox, explained the problem by saying, “It’s so complicated. There are so many things going on.”
The planned launch of Starliner was slated for May 6 but was scrubbed just two hours before take-off due to an oxygen valve problem. It was when fixing this valve that the complicated helium problem was noticed. The alleged complexity of the helium problem caused a near-blackout in terms of news. It was just too confusing to talk about, or perhaps it was something best left undescribed. Helium is used in these craft for pressurization and maneuvering by helping the craft balance itself. The helium leak was dangerous enough to scrub the mission, but Stich was quick to downplay the severity. “Helium is a tiny molecule, it tends to leak,” Stich said. But when trying to patch the helium leak, they found another but not described “design vulnerability.” Anyway, they patched the Starliner as best they could. So this mission began with nearly a month-long delay just to get the craft into orbit. Nevertheless, the craft experienced problems during the flight, but according to NASA these problems are not serious enough to jeopardize a return flight.
When is that return flight? No one knows.
Right now, Wilmore and Williams are trying to figure out what went wrong. If they used the craft to return home (NASA says this would work), much of the capsule is jettisoned on re-entry so they might not be able to figure out what went wrong.
Of course, some of this testing could be done on earth. Terrestial thruster testing was supposed to start this week. The idea is that this ground work will help analyze what went wrong so that the astronauts can inspect the thrusters on the Starline. By the wya, Starliner has 28 thrusters in total and five are not working properly.
Again, according to NASA, in the event of an “emergency,” they could get the astronauts home. Being stuck in space 3 weeks longer than expected seems to qualify as a bit of an emergency, does it not? But everyone seems preternaturally calm about this. Meanwhile, airline passengers on earth are refusing to get on board Boeing-built aircraft, but we’re acting like these mechanical problems on a space capsule are nothing to worry about.
This is not the first time a Starliner went into space. Two earlier launches were conducted, but these were “un-crewed,” NASA lingo for flights with no human passengers. The first launch of an un-crewed Starliner in December 2019 was fraught with such computer glitches that the craft was abandoned and never returned. In May 2022, the second un-crewed Starliner lifted off and likewise had some problems, including bad thrusters, but the craft was able to return home.
This first crewed Starliner launch used two veteran astronauts and former U.S. Navy pilots as the crew. Why experienced astronauts chose to get aboard the Starlink after bad experiences with the un-crewed capsules is not known. But both Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are highly trained, experienced astronauts. Butch Wilmore, who is also a church pastor based in Pasadena, Texas, has been to space only twice but has logged 178 days in space due to his prolonged missions. Suni Williams has been in space 322 days and has done seven space walks so far in her career. She’s also a marathon runner and triathlete.
Now docked at the ISS, this mission has been “extended indefinitely.” Indefinitely does not seem to be a comforting word to use when you’re talking about space stations. The Starliner cannot stay indefinitely docked into the ISS since there are fuel limits to the parent craft. NASA and Boeing officials say the Starliner could return home today, but the capsule would be destroyed during re-entry and we might not be able to figure out the cause of the these various mechanical problems.
The Boeing craft needs to be inspected to figure out what is wrong and NASA says this can only be done as long as the Starliner is docked to the ISS. In some cases, a ground crew in White Sands, New Mexico performs land-based repairs and tests as Wilmore and Williams do the same tests in space. NASA and Boeing officials say they just want to conduct the rest of the tests in the air. They keep repeating that the Starliner can return to earth whenever it wants to—it just doesn’t want to.
The mainstream media is surprisingly quiet about this.
You would think we might find a better supplier of space capsules than Boeing, which is having trouble bolting doors into place on ordinary airplanes. Well, Boeing has a major competitor in the form of SpaceX, a company run by Elon Musk. In fact, SpaceX makes a similar product with a much cooler name. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is a similar capsule meant to dock with the ISS space station. It enters orbit faster than the Starliner and it has already logged 11 crewed flights for NASA. In fact, SpaceX is the first private business to send a human being into space. They have successfully docked with ISS.
Building these capsules is important and lucrative business. The Russians operate a Soyuz capsule which also docks with the ISS. Over the past years, NASA spent about $200B to pay for passage for American astronauts to hitch a ride on the Soyuz. That’s why it’s a big deal for the United States to operate its own shuttle to the ISS. Thus, SpaceX has found a lucrative market and it’s competing against Boeing, which is busy shooting itself in the foot.
There is another problem in space that nobody is talking about and it’s a lot more immediate than climate change.
There is a lot of congestion in space. In the past six months, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites had to take evasive maneuvers 25,000 times (!) to avoid colliding with other satellites and stuff floating around in space. (Note: Boeing makes Starliner capsules and SpaceX makes Starlink satellites.) The Starlink satellites by SpaceX have good automated systems to avoid collisions, generally allowing the satellite to quickly swerve off course to avoid a crash and then correct quickly back to the right flight path when the danger is over.
How many satellites are orbiting the earth? According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), it was 8,261 satellites as of January 2022 but only 4,852 of them are active. The rest have been abandoned. However, SpaceX has plans to launch 12,000 satellites in its Starlink program.
On June 30, 2024, SpaceX filed a report with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reporting that “avoidance maneuvers” have more than doubled over the last six-month period. From a mathematical perspective, this is seriously bad news because such a sharp and fast increase suggests exponential growth in the future that could endanger all space efforts. If we continue at this rate, there will be an estimated 1M avoidance maneuvers expected in 2028.
By the way, when it looks like a SpaceX satellite is on path to hit another object, they issue a “conjunction alert.” That’s the term for a crash. Most collisions are avoided through the use of highly responsive autonomous systems, but it is not clear how this will work when we add 12,000 more satellites to the mix.
This hasn’t deterred SpaceX from wanting to put more objects into space, and the United States government supports this work. After all, China is busy launching satellites and so is Russia. Even smaller European nations such as Italty, Germany, and Spain are sending satellites into space. Some of these satellites are for communications and geolocation, but there are also military satellites, which take pictures of military installations around the world and observe troop movements. The United States has the most military satellites of any nation (247), but China has 157, Russia and 110, Israel has 12, and India has nine. Many of these nations share data accummulated by military satellites with their allies. If you feel like maybe somebody is watching you, you’re right.
By 2030, it would not be unreasonable to think there will be 100,000 active satellites orbiting the earth. So how do we manage the traffic?
There is also a very serious similar problem in the form of space garbage, now officially called “space debris.” These are abandoned old space craft, chunks of old satellites, jettisoned rocket stages, and other random trash orbiting our planet. On Monday (July 1, 2024) a weird chunk of metal was found at a camp site in North Carolina about 23 miles from Asheville. No one was harmed and the object was identified as space debris from and old SpaceX Dragon capsule. Earlier this year a small object weighing about 1.5 pounds traveling at highs speed crashed through the roof of a private residence in Naples, Florida. While no one was harmed, this indicates a real problem. Space debris falling to earth arrives without warning and at high velocity—in fact, it often takes a team of experts to even figure out what happened.
Space debris may fall to earth and go unreported. We do have reports of such garbage falling to earth in Australia and Canada. Who knows what falls into the oceans?
Of course, there are ways to manage the human tendency to generate garbage. It has been suggested that we figure out ways to dipose of this space debris rather than just leaving it to float around in space. Right now, it’s just too easy to leave garbage in space, because people on earth do not see what’s going on. In fact, no one knows how much trash is actually orbiting the earth, we only know for sure that there is more of it now than there was last year… and less than we’ll have in 2025. But already, the United States has taken “debris mitigation efforts” to remove certain debris from space. And some space debris will burn up naturally in orbit, particularly satellites in low orbits around the earth.
The jargon for space trash plummeting to earh is an “uncontrolled reentry.” But that’s not the only thing that can happen. Sometimes abandoned craft explode in space due to batteries or fuel, creating more debris.
It has also been suggested that we create “space graveyards” so that retired satellites can be removed from the path of active satellites, but still left to float around in space. A serious problem for regulating space trash is that the work has to be done on an international basis and some of the big players in space may not cooperate.
Meanwhile, when are Wilmore and Williams coming home?
I had heard about the stranded astronauts. I am also concerned for them. I am also concerned about the ever increasing graveyard of debris. Thank you for your article.
Great article. I've wondered about that myself. :)