On August 24, NASA announced that astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams would remain aboard the International Space Station until next year after deeming it unsafe to return on the spacecraft they arrived on, Boeing’s Starliner.
The Starliner will return to Earth uncrewed in September, and Wilmore and Williams will return to Earth in a SpaceX Dragon capsule that will arrive with the Crew-9 mission in September and depart the ISS next February or March.
Williams and Wilmore arrived at the ISS on June 6, 27 hours after their launch from Cape Canaveral the previous day. They were originally scheduled to stay there for eight days and return to Earth on June 14. Before the spacecraft docked with the station, however, three more helium leaks were discovered in its propulsion system, in addition to one that had already been discovered before launch.
And just hours before docking, it was discovered that five of the 28 engines in the Starliner’s reaction control system, used for fine maneuvers when docking with the ISS, were experiencing temporary failures.
Thanks to the skill and training of the astronauts piloting the capsule, supported by engineers on the ground, they were ultimately able to ensure a safe docking of the Starliner with the ISS. However, questions were immediately raised about the safety of the spacecraft for re-entry, two in particular:
First, can Starliner safely leave the ISS environment without causing potentially catastrophic damage? And what are the chances that current or future problems will cause the ship to burn up upon crashing into the Earth’s atmosphere, killing those on board?
Even as of August 2, Boeing claimed it was “confident” that the Starliner could “return safely with crew” and continued to insist that Wilmore and Williams would be able to board the Starliner and fly.
In reality, Boeing was trying to protect its bottom line, as it did in the massive safety scandal surrounding the company’s 737 MAX airplanes. The company has suffered numerous setbacks in 2024, starting with a door bursting on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 flight in January and continuing with a series of accidents, some of them near-fatal, on virtually every type of Boeing airplane in service.
In addition, numerous whistleblowers have revealed that Boeing has a corporate culture that puts profit ahead of quality and safety. They have cited numerous examples of how management forced workers to build planes faster and ignored inevitable quality problems – all at the expense of passenger safety.
Among them were John “Mitch” Barnett and Joshua Dean, both of whom made damning statements against Boeing but died mysteriously before they could fully disclose their knowledge.
The company no doubt hoped that a successful launch of the Starliner would at least allay some of the concerns that had built up about its ability to build complex flying machines. It would also help bolster its share price, which has fallen more than 31 percent since the beginning of the year.
Instead, Starliner has shown even more clearly that Boeing is putting safety before profit in both commercial flights and the far more dangerous endeavors of space travel.
Boeing first unveiled its design for the Starliner, also known as CST-100, in 2010. The basic design consists of a reusable capsule and an expendable service module modeled after the Apollo-era command and service modules. Over the next four years, Boeing received an estimated $586.9 million for continued development and production. In 2014, Boeing was awarded a $4.2 billion contract to complete the Starliner.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX received $2.6 billion under the same program to develop its Dragon capsule.
Starliner has struggled with design issues almost from the start. After the 2019 uncrewed orbital test flight was deemed a partial failure, NASA officials called for a second test flight, which took place in 2022. Finally, after a decade and a $1.5 billion budget overrun, NASA approved the current mission, the Boeing Crew Flight Test.
There were numerous problems even before the launch. The first launch attempt took place on May 6 and was aborted due to a defective oxygen vent valve on the upper stage of the Atlas V launch vehicle. The first of several helium leaks was then discovered in the Starliner.
The second launch attempt on June 1 was aborted after the power supply to a launch computer failed.
And although the third launch on June 5 was successful, it was conducted without fixing the helium leak discovered in May. The subsequent leaks that occurred while Starliner was in orbit point to a deeper problem with the propulsion system.
It also suggests that the manned launch of the Starliner should have been postponed even further for safety reasons. NASA obviously felt pressured by Boeing to go ahead with the launch.
And Boeing itself is undoubtedly under a lot of pressure to pull off a successful launch. Its direct competitor SpaceX has already completed eight successful launches to the ISS, giving it an advantage over NASA and the US government, which are looking for further ways to reduce their dependence on Russian Soyuz capsules to transport astronauts into space.
Since the US-backed Maidan coup in Ukraine and Russia’s US-NATO-provoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the US government has been feverishly trying to break away from its close ties with the Russian space agency Roscosmos while preparing for war with Russia and, ultimately, China.
Boeing’s Starliner is an integral part of this plan. The more missiles “made in America” there are, the more secure the war plans are.
But as Boeing and US capitalism are discovering, space is a ruthless mistress. The harsh physical realities of orbital mechanics, life support in a vacuum, and the dangers of rocket flight through the Earth’s atmosphere cannot be solved simply by throwing more money at solving the problems. Real and precise physics and engineering are required, and shortcuts lead to death.
It begs the question why NASA continued to trust Boeing to build spacecraft after two of its MAX 8 jets malfunctioned and crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing all 346 men, women and children on board. Passengers don’t trust Boeing to operate aircraft; what else can you expect in the much more hostile arena of space?
Ultimately, the Starliner’s problems are the result of the privatization of the space industry. The reins are being handed over to private companies and the expanses beyond the Earth’s atmosphere are becoming the playground of the super-rich.
For all the acclaim fascist Elon Musk gets for his Starship, which is designed to rescue stranded astronauts and bring them home next year, his own record is far from flawless. Three out of four test launches of SpaceX’s Starship ended in the loss of the vehicle. That’s because Musk and NASA were more interested in launching the rockets to demonstrate “progress” and announce “successes” than in proper design and ground testing.
And despite Boeing and SpaceX’s supposed innovativeness, neither company uses particularly novel technology. They are still based on designs from the 1950s and ’60s, and even the Starship has only 45 percent of the thrust of the Saturn V, the rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon.
The helium pressure technology that was at the heart of the Boeing Starliner crisis dates back even further to the 1950s.
Since the end of the Apollo program in 1972, the development of space technology under capitalism has stagnated. The only real progress is that the price per pound for launching unmanned vehicles has fallen significantly in recent decades.
For now, Williams and Wilmore are safely on the ISS and will not return on the Starliner. The final analysis of that spacecraft will be done after it returns to Earth, or perhaps after it burns up during re-entry.
To make a serious attempt to reach the planets and stars will require a far more enlightened human civilization, based on scientific and rational planning, that has overthrown the regressive shackles of capitalism.
