Time By Jeffrey Kluger 9/9/2024
The spacecraft’s faulty thrusters were located in a portion of the ship known as the service module—a section that is jettisoned and burns up in the atmosphere before reentry. That makes it impossible for engineers to do any kind of forensic testing on the spacecraft to determine the cause of the thruster malfunctions. Telemetry from the spacecraft when it was still docked to the station suggested that the problem might be connected to overheating of the thrusters, causing seals to swell and jam—but what the data suggested and what actually went wrong could be two different things.
The big problem for Boeing is both the ticking clock and the rising costs. The company has not only burned through the $4.2 billion NASA handed over in 2014, but has taken an additional $1.6 billion in charges over the life of the program, including over $250 million in the second quarter of 2023 alone. At the same time, Boeing has faced serious—indeed, deadly—problems on its commercial aviation side, after two crashes of its 737 line—one in 2018 and one in 2019—claimed 346 lives, and a door blew off a 737 Max jet during flight in January, 2024. On Sept. 3, Boeing’s stock tumbled 7.3% following Wells Fargo’s decision to downgrade the company to an underweight rating. All by itself, the move slashed 84 points from the Dow Jones Industrial Average for that trading session.
It will cost an untold amount of additional money to fix the Starliner’s thruster problems—even assuming engineers can pinpoint the cause of the breakdown without the service module to examine. That could take the same three years it took Boeing to fix the problem that occurred in the 2019 flight—eating up half of the remaining years the station has to live. With SpaceX having launched 13 successful crewed missions since 2020—nine for NASA and four for private customers—the space agency may well decide that dissimilar redundancy is just not achievable, at least not with Starliner as one of the two ships. The Challenger and Columbia disasters left NASA much more risk-averse than it was in the past—which played a role in the decision to fly the latest Starliner home empty.
“I think we've worked a lot harder these days in synthesizing everyone to make sure that we have the right environment for people with different positions [on safety] to bring them forward,” said Russ DeLoach, chief of NASA safety and mission assurance, in August. “I recognize that that may mean at times, we don't move very fast because we're getting everything out.”
For now, Boeing is putting the best face it can on the Starliner failure. “A good landing. Pretty awesome,” said the company’s mission control commentator after the Friday touch down. But NASA is being candid that nothing is guaranteed for the glitchy ship. “All of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there’s a piece of us that we wish it would have been the way we planned it [with crew aboard],” said Stich. “What we really need to do is look at the things that didn’t perform the way we expected.”
More:
https://time.com/7019344/is-there-a-future-for-boeing-starliner/
