Hotel Mars with Doug Messier on Starliner.

0:00I'm John Bachelors, Hotel Mars, Episode End, David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show joins as my colleague in Copilot, and we're seeking space engineering and the saga of the Boeing Starliner. I read from a headline in these last hours, Bloomberg, Boeing sticks with Starliner after brutal NASA reports subhead. The company says it's fixing the spacecraft that left two astronauts marooned in orbit. Explanation. After two box test flights, writes Bloomberg, numerous investigations and plenty of embarrassing findings about the company's engineering abilities, Boeing maintains a Starliner capsule has a future. Doug, a very good even to you, Doug Messier keeps a subset page that I highly recommend.

1:00He writes frequently about space matters when it comes to spending too much money and getting very little in return. Let's get to the fundamentals, Doug. What was Starliner conceived to be? Why is it, why does it exist at all? Could even to you. Okay, good evening. Starliner was a project of the commercial crew program of NASA that was designed to take astronauts up to the space station and back. It was kind of a backup to the SpaceX crew dragon. NASA wanted to have two crew options and so far it really hasn't achieved that. NASA has spent about 4.2 billion gave that to Boeing to develop this vehicle. It actually had three flight tests that have been deeply troubled. They spent about 4.2 billion on it, or billion on it, and Boeing has absorbed about two billion dollars in losses due to delays and watch test flights.

2:01What happened in this case was on June 5th, 2024, and the third flight test of this had sunny Williams, which will more flew up to the station. They ended up stuck kind of outside the station in a holding pattern because they had thruster failures. They managed to overcome those on orbit and dock, but NASA subsequently decided the vehicle was not safe enough for them to return. So what happened, they were supposed to be up there for eight to 14 days. They ended up there for 93 days, and basically this Starliner returned back to Earth in September of 2024 and automated and landed safely, and they ended up flying back on A.L. Through drag-ins by SpaceX and they were up there for nine months. David, do you have a question for Doug? Yeah, I do. What do people think went wrong inside internally with Boeing that they've been, I guess the

3:05word is so incompetent with Starliner in its repairs and everything. Everybody sort of shocked and surprised that Boeing could have such a mess up on their hands. Well, Boeing sent a lot of trouble with its aircraft division, and they've had failures with 737-maxes, and their engineering is not very good. The NASA press conference last week spotted a lot of the problems with NASA's own review. There's a tendency to allow for variances outside of mission requirements. There was port oversight of the contract, there was a tendency of NASA to want this program that continued without stopping to kind of fix the problems. I think Boeing was supposed to be at the press conference last week, but they weren't there, and Boeing says they were fixing the problems and so on.

4:08In terms of the actual problems, they're still trying to get to the root causes of what caused the thruster and reaction control system to malfunction, and they're still working on that. It's been almost two years, it'll be two years in China, and they're still working on trying to fix that and determine exactly what went wrong and how to fix it. I'd rather one understand this idea that SpaceX needs competition. Does it now have a plan B because Starliner is not happening, and if they think that a second is necessary, is there a second, I don't read it anywhere, is NASA decided that all SpaceX all the time and we won't talk about it? They want to fix the problems with Starliner and to be able to use that ship for crew and cargo. It's just a matter of whether they can get that all figured out, but ISS's space station

5:13is supposed to retire in 2030, which is four years away, so Boeing is up against kind of a deadline there to prove itself is useful and that Starliner can do what it's supposed to do. There's also some commercial stations coming online, a number of companies working on those that will be separate from ISS, and the EFF Boeing is available, and Starliner is working and they could service those, but I think Boeing has a lot of problems with the cost of that would probably be a lot higher than what SpaceX will be offering, so how commercially viable that is, I don't know. To your knowledge, Doug, do they talk about other space crafts? For example, the Indian Space Program is bringing on Gagganyan, their man mission. Would that be acceptable in the NASA, do they have to own it? No, NASA doesn't have to own that, that was the whole point behind commercial crew.

6:17I don't see any other options at this point domestically with the US for an alternate vehicle other than the two that NASA's funded, which is Starliner and Prairie Dragon. Okay, David, you have a question. Seems like the cost to make Starliner viable in Operation Home, assuming it can be turned into that, it's going to be pretty high, but if the station has maybe three, three and a half years left of life, what is the use for Starliner after the station has retired? And is it economical to put this money into Starliner if there's no market for it after the station de-warpits? Probably isn't, and NASA's Boeing's costs will be a lot higher probably than SpaceX's. So it's probably not very economical, as I said, they probably lost two billion or more

7:21from in-gen cost overruns, and this was a firm fixed contract, so they're not getting any more money or much more money from NASA out of it, so it's become a major loss to them. And Boeing says it's sticking with the program, it's going to continue to fly this thing, they're going to fix the problems, but you know, we've heard that before. Let me go back a moment. The first two flights had problems as well. The first flight ended up in a wrong orbit, the first test of Starliner couldn't dock with the station, and it had Starster failures, the second flight, and also without a crew it managed to dock with station, but they had problems on that flight with the RCS and Starster, so it's been a consistent problem with Boeing in terms of the quality of their work. Now, if I was a big company, it absorbed companies that had made crude vehicles during the

8:2560s and 70s, but in the intervening time it had lost that expertise and engineering, so it was kind of starting kind of from scratch, even though they talked about their legacy programs. And SpaceX was able to do a cargo version of the Dragon and work out all those problems before it went to a crew, so that was a good learning experience. The descent craft that they held back the last mission, sending the astronauts down separately, when they brought it back, is the NASA pinion that that was a danger to the lives of the astronauts that they'd used it? Yes, yes, that's why they didn't put them on Starliner return, and they also mentioned that when they got kind of stuck in a holding, going to stuck on the way up, that could

9:27have had a very bad result if they were not able to dock, and they had problems during reentry that could have been lost at crew. So NASA's own report is that Starliner is unsafe at any speed? It's unsafe, the way they've been building it, they could fix those problems and get it flying again. I think what they're talking about is a cargo mission at some point, when they're comfortable with how this thing is, how these problems have been resolved. Doug Messier keeps a sub-SAC phage I recommend routine reporting on successes and the failure of Starliner. So far, David Livingstone, Dr. Space, the Space Show, this is Hotel Mars episode, and I'm John Bachelors.