AAstronaut Butch Wilmore can’t forget the time he landed in permafrost. It was 2015 and Wilmore was returning to Earth on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft after spending 167 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The landing took place on solid ground in Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, but the braking rockets on the bottom of the Soyuz – which was descending by parachute – should have cushioned the impact in the instant before it hit the ground. There was, however, the additional issue of ice covering the ground in the cold Kazakh November.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced on landing,” says Wilmore. “I didn’t lose my breath, but I was still shocked.”
Wilmore is hoping for a calmer situation next week when he and his crewmate, astronaut Suni Williams, return to Earth after flying the inaugural mission of Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft. The Starliner took off this morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 10:53 a.m. EDT, carrying Wilmore, the commander, and Williams, the pilot, for an eight-day visit to the ISS. It is only the sixth time in NASA’s history that it has launched a new manned spacecraft – after Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, space shuttles and Dragon. It is also the first time that an American spacecraft descending by parachute will land on land instead of in the ocean, eliminating the need for recovery vessels to reach the crash site. To cushion the impact, the Starliner is equipped with inflatable airbags that Wilmore and Williams call “marshmallows.”
“We descend at a speed of 21 to 27 feet per second, and the airbags reduce that to about 9 to 15 feet per second,” says Wilmore. “So we’ll let you know how it goes.”
A new ship with a long history
There are many unknowns surrounding the Starliner. The troubled spacecraft has been in development for a decade — even longer than the space shuttle, which was announced in January 1972 and didn’t fly until April 1981. NASA first tasked SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 with the work of building commercial crew vehicles that could transport astronauts to and from the ISS, freeing the US from its dependence on the Russians, who charged more than US$90 million per seat for rides aboard his Soyuz. NASA awarded Boeing US$4.2 billion for the work and SpaceX US$2.6 billion, targeting 2017 as the year the ships would begin flying. Neither company came close.
SpaceX did not launch crew to the ISS until 2020, and as for Boeing, well, until this week the clock was still ticking. Only partially successful unscrewing test flight in 2019 saw the ship reach space, but was unable to dock with the ISS. It wasn’t until 2022 that the company launched a successful uncrewed test mission. The current, long-delayed launch comes as Boeing faces serial problems on the commercial aircraft side following two crashes of its 737 line.one in 2018 and one in 2019— claimed 346 lives; a door exploded a 737 Max jet during flight in January 2024; the 737 failed multiple Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) audits following the incident; and two whistleblowers who spoke out against the company over production and safety issues died suddenly – one on May 2 from a serious infection and the other in March from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. The company is not implicated in the deaths. All of this has NASA and Boeing’s space division working hard to stay focused on the Starliner launch, especially the imperative of getting Wilmore and Williams home safely.
“The first crewed flight of a new spacecraft is an absolutely critical milestone,” said NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free at an April 25 press conference. “The lives of our crew members… are at stake. We don’t take this lightly. The most important thing we can do is protect these two people, as well as our crew currently aboard the space station.”
Asked by a reporter how important it is for Boeing to “get a win” with the Starliner flight, Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, turned to safety.
“We have humans flying this vehicle,” he said. “We’ve always taken this very seriously…we signed up to do this and we’re going to do it and be successful at it.”
The astronauts themselves, who spoke remotely to TIME during pre-flight quarantine on May 1, days before a previous planned launch was scrapped for technical reasons, profess confidence in their spacecraft while acknowledging that it and the Boeing as a whole face challenges.
“We are focused on Starliner,” says Williams. “That’s the only thing we’re really focusing on. I think it’s no secret to say that the spacecraft was a little late. We added some areas that we felt really needed improvement…we wanted to make sure they were completed and the response was good.”
Wilmore adds: “I went to test pilot school in 1992 and [I’ve] been testing for a long time. Boeing is a highly visible company. When you take people and transport them into the atmosphere and then out of the atmosphere, that’s more visible, so you’re going to get more pressure on that kind of thing.”
Whether the spacecraft, now that it’s in the air, will get better press than the company that built it is impossible to know at the moment. But the risks for Boeing – not to mention Wilmore and Williams – could not be greater.
Stumbling out of the gate
The error that doomed the Starliner mission in 2019 was embarrassing for both NASA and Boeing. The spacecraft had problems with its mission clock upon arriving in space, meaning it didn’t know its altitude and burned a lot of fuel trying to orient itself, preventing it from climbing to the station’s 250-mile orbit. In a press release, NASA called the orbit “off-nominal” — space-speak for “not good.” The Starliner landed safely two days later in New Mexico, but a NASA investigation enumerated 80 “corrective actions”– for software, hardware, testing protocols, peer reviews and more – this would have to be done for the Starliner to be determined fit for flight.
In May 2022, a Unscrewed Starliner completed a mission to the station. After two more years of crew training and spacecraft certification, not to mention the delays caused by the simple task of trying to schedule multiple spacecraft competing for the station’s limited docking ports – the manned Russian Soyuz, the manned SpaceX Dragon, and spacecraft unmanned cargo from Russia, SpaceX and Northrop Grumman—Starliner finally got its spot on the track.
But Boeing has a lot of catching up to do before it can come close to what SpaceX has accomplished in the decade since the two companies won their commercial crew contracts. Between transporting cargo and astronauts, SpaceX made 42 visits to the ISS. Although Boeing has never been contracted for unmanned cargo trips to the station, SpaceX’s demonstrated ability to fly up and down reliably has made it a national and global leader in commercial launch services. At the April 25 press conference, Nappi didn’t even guarantee that Boeing would stay in the commercial crew game after the company’s six contracted flights to the station were completed by the end of the decade.
“We have a lot of time to think about what comes after this,” he said. “And we will.”
Williams and Wilmore aren’t even remotely thinking about the future. Their nominal mission will last eight days aboard the station, most of the time they will spend checking the Starliner and ensuring it will be fit to transport future crews for much longer stays. The simple fact of arriving and docking with the station will serve to prove that the spacecraft’s guidance and navigation systems work. But approving a new spacecraft involves much more than just determining whether it can get where it’s going.
The two astronauts will perform tests on the Starliner’s solar panels, communications, onboard computers, power systems and more. They will also check the simple question of how airtight the ship is once docked at the station. This is important not only to prevent air leaks, but to establish that the spacecraft can serve as a shelter-in-place in the event of an emergency, such as a sudden depressurization of the station, a fire, or a leak of toxic ammonia from the refrigerant. system used in the American modules of the ISS.
“In the case of any of these classic emergencies,” says Williams, “our lifeboat is our spacecraft.”
Some of the station’s other seven crew members will also help, climbing into the Starliner with Williams and Wilmore and determining whether the ship can comfortably accommodate the four-person crews who will fly it on future missions. In return, Williams and Wilmore are prepared to help with space station experiments and maintenance tasks – especially if its mission is extended. Technical anomalies aboard the spacecraft or high winds at the various landing sites in the Southwest desert where the spacecraft could crash could delay the crew’s return by a month or more. Williams and Wilmore, who have served long-term station rotations, expect this one to be short. The Starliner is a reusable spacecraft, and if the one they’re flying holds up well, it will be used on future missions.
“We want to get back as quickly as possible so they can turn our spacecraft around and also take all the lessons learned and incorporate them into the next Starliner,” says Williams.
What comes next
Assuming this mission is successful, at least some of the next Starliners will certainly fly. Beyond 2030, NASA, for example, expects the Starliner to remain in service. It’s no surprise that the space agency chose two companies, rather than just one, to build its spacecraft in low Earth orbit. This provides what NASA calls “different redundancy,” something that will prevent the country from being grounded if one of the launch providers suffers an accident or is out of service for any period of time — much in the same way that the U.S. was stranded on Earth after of the space shuttle Columbia and Challenger disasters and in the nine years after the space shuttle’s retirement in 2011.
As for the bruised Boeing brand, the current mission will establish whether at least some recovery is possible. Both the company and NASA emphasize that Boeing was the main contractor at the station itself and, together with the construction of the Starliner, this is no small feat. The ISS, NASA chief flight director Emily Nelson said at the press conference, “is the longest continuously operating spacecraft in human history. So we’re excited to bring the two together.”
Meanwhile, Wilmore and Williams are excited about making a different kind of story. As the first crew to pilot a new spacecraft, they earn a place in the NASA firmament alongside such giants as Alan Shepard, the first man to pilot a Mercury spacecraft; Gus Grissom, the first commander of a Gemini spacecraft; Wally Schirra, who piloted the inaugural Apollo; and John Young, commander of the first space shuttle.
“It’s very humbling,” says Wilmore. “You pinch yourself because we never dreamed we would be here. We are very grateful for the opportunity and that is why we are focused on mission, mission, mission.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
