Main Engine Cut Off - T+153: Boeing to Refly Starliner Uncrewed Test, While SpaceX Crew Plans Firm Up

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

A flurry of Commercial Crew news hit last week: new crew members were announced for SpaceX Crew-1, Jim Bridenstine shed some light on the DM-2 schedule, and Boeing will refly the Starliner uncrewed test flight. I break down each of those and talk through why those stories are more connected than was hinted at by NASA and others.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 37 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous—and 352 other supporters.TopicsNASA selects astronauts for Crew Dragon mission - SpaceNews.comNASA, SpaceX to launch astronauts in May despite coronavirus pandemicBoeing will refly botched Starliner test flight, setting back its hopes for sending people into space this year - The Washington PostBoeing Statement on Starliner's Next FlightBoeing to Refly Starliner’s Uncrewed Test This Fall, Potentially After SpaceX Crew-1 - Main Engine Cut OffThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

A flurry of commercial crew news today to break down here on Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, as always, and I want to break down these stories because they were all kind of reported over the course of the last week as independent stories. But I really do think they're more connected than you might be told in the reporting of these stories because there does seem to be a through line. And it really spans the gamut of commercial crew from Boeing to SpaceX. So the main stories as they were announced, March 31st, there was an announcement from NASA and JAXA that two new crew members have been assigned to the first operational mission of Dragon 2. So to get you up to speed on the schedule here,

we have the second demonstration mission, the first one with crew aboard coming up. Right now, it's scheduled for mid to late May. We'll see if that schedule holds. You know, there's a lot of uncertainty around the pandemic, whether that will hold or not. But that will go up with Bob and Doug, as they're referred to, Bob Bankin and Doug Hurley. So they'll fly up and we'll talk about the length Thursday in a minute. But then after that, if everything goes well, the first operational mission will happen after that sometime this fall. It's called Crew-1, whereas the other one's called DM-2. And Crew-1 was initially a two-crew member flight with Mike Hopkins and Vic Glover, both from NASA. At the time, NASA said there would be two international partners on that flight as well.

Well, this past week, on March 31st, they announced that Shannon Walker of NASA and Sochi Noguchi from Japan will be on board that mission. So that's three NASA astronauts, one JAXA, one international partner, which is obviously different than the announcement that there would be two NASA astronauts and two international members. More on that in a minute. So that flight will go up as a four-person crew to the space station, and that would happen this fall. All of that announcement was made, and then a couple of days later, this was Friday, April 3rd, there was a story from Michael Sheets in CNBC in which he was talking with Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator,

about the upcoming flight, everything that was surrounding it with the pandemic and whatnot, and he shed a little light on what the schedule would be here for this mission. In the interview, Bridenstine said that Bob and Doug on DM-2 would likely be up at the space station for two to three months, and that schedule is dictated by the schedule for Crew-1, that operational flight. They want DM-2 to stay up at station until about a month before Crew-1 would be ready to launch. They would bring DM-2 back down. They would make sure the vehicle looked good in that intervening month, and then that operational mission would fly. So if DM-2 is delayed, but Crew-1 is still on schedule, if that schedule happens somehow,

DM-2 would be shortened, but that relationship will stay the same. Wherever Crew-1 falls, DM2 would come down a month before that. So that kind of gives us a framework for what SpaceX's schedule is. And what that means if we work through these estimates is if DM2 launches mid-May, they're up there for two to three months. A month in between DM2's return and the launch of Crew-1. That puts Crew-1 somewhere in the September to October, maybe November timeframe, but firmly in the fall of 2020. And then a couple of days later, there was another round of stories. First up, from Christian Davenport of the Washington Post, he broke the story that Boeing was going to be reflying its

Starliner uncrewed test for the commercial crew program. A couple hours, maybe even shorter than that, after he posted that story, Boeing did confirm it with a very short statement that said it was their decision to fly, to refly this orbital flight test with no people aboard. It wasn't something dictated by NASA, etc., etc. You know, trying to play that narrative up that this was Boeing being responsible and deciding to fly this mission again without input from NASA or without pressure from NASA or whatever. They were obviously trying to get out in front of that. Now, I don't believe that for a few reasons. Number one, if that really was the case, I think they should have said this and would have said this a long time ago.

I guess for a little context, in case anyone's memory is foggy in the midst of what is the longest March and April of all time, Starliner flew their orbital flight test and everything went wrong, pretty much. They barely got the thing back, in all honesty. There was a ton of issues. A bunch of issues came out even after the initial issues were reported. And all in all, they never made it to the space station. They shortened the mission by a lot. You know, it was only like a two-day mission. And they said they've achieved a lot of test objectives, but they didn't get to the space station. They didn't dock. They didn't test a lot of different things out. And they had a bunch of

failures along the way. So after they came back from that, there was a lot of speculation whether they would be forced to refly this mission, whether they would kind of get the easy pass from NASA and fly the next mission with crew aboard, obviously with a lengthy amount of delay in there for fixing the issues, getting reviews done, but that they would be allowed to fly, go right to the crew flight test, which would come up after this successful orbital flight test. Obviously, that didn't happen here, but a couple of things here that I think shed some light on what Boeing's situation was. Number one, like I said, if this was really their decision and their decision alone, I think they would have and should have said it a long time ago, not now in April in

the midst of a pandemic. Number two, they probably would have said it before the story was broken by somebody in the Washington Post. You know what I mean? Like, they should probably have gotten out in front of that when it was evident that this was going to be leaking, because that story came from somewhere. And, you know, if it came from the NASA source or came from the Boeing source, whatever the case is, if Boeing was really adamant that this was their decision, they should have been in front of that. But here we are. SpaceX is doing really well on their commercial crew missions. They had a great DM-1. They obviously had the issue where the DM-1 spacecraft was destroyed in a static fire test that happened after that, but they got to fixing that issue, and they're good to go here with DM-2. They've got, from what we can tell, the green light to proceed to the launch campaign of DM-2. There's a lot of

pomp and circumstance going on right now with videos being posted on Twitter of testing the emergency egress system from 39A. They're doing the walkout demonstrations with everybody in suits going out up the launch tower, out the crew access arm. They're doing all the things leading up to launch because they've got that green light. And then you had this announcement at the end of March with adding crew members to Crew 1, the flight after DM-2, which means that NASA is confident in DM-2 being able to get up and being able to fly successfully with no problems, and being able to not only have a short turnaround between DM-2 and Crew 1, but literally dictate DM-2's schedule based on the schedule of Crew 1, but literally dictate DM-2's schedule based on the schedule of Crew-1, which would come after it.

So that relationship puts a lot of confidence in both DM-2, Crew-1, and their relationship. The fact that there could be just a month turnaround between, you know, that mission coming down and the next one going up. And obviously, with DM-2, once it launches and docks to the space station successfully, there's a certain amount of, you know, we've checked everything off at that point that you can kind of assess, and obviously you still have to get back down to Earth successfully, but a significant portion of the mission is already done once Bob and Doug are safely up hanging out in the cupola. But nonetheless, that all says that NASA is very confident in that schedule, and the fact that they are going to be flying six astronauts up to the space station in 2020, if this schedule holds as is, is enormous for NASA and for international partners JAXA,

ESA, and in some cases, Roscosmos, which we'll talk about in a minute. But six astronauts in the course of, you know, just about six months is pretty enormous for the space station program. Because if you think back to the last couple of missions, if we want to count six of the US orbital segment crew members that have went up, that's NASA, ESA, and JAXA, Japan, Europe, and the US Space Agency. If we want to count six crew members up on the space station, we have to go back to Soyuz MS-12 that launched on March 14th, 2019. So to run through the schedule, we had Soyuz MS-12 March 14th, 2019 with Nick Haig, Christina Cook. MS-13 was on July 20th, 2019 with Luca Parmitano of ESA and Drew Morgan of NASA.

MS-14 was uncrewed. That was a test of the new launch vehicle configuration for Soyuz. And then MS-15 was just back in September. On September 25th, 2019, Jessica Meir, forget how to say her name. I think it's Meir. Jessica Meir. The third seat on that flight was taken by Hatsa Al-Mansouri, the astronaut from the UAE. And then I'm kind of committing what is a huge sin here in the world of delayed space

podcasting. I'm recording this on the night of April 8th, early morning before I'm even awake tomorrow. I don't know if I'll wake up for it. I probably will, probably won't. Who knows? Pandemic life. But Soyuz MS-16 will be launching right now. It's scheduled for 4 a.m.

Eastern time on April 9th with Chris Cassidy. So we have to go back over a year ago to get six different crew members on ISS. And that's also, you know, not only is it six crew members, but it's also one, two at a time, which means you've got very limited crew time on board station. But this is two for a couple of months that are in addition to the regular ISS crew complement, and then four all in one go. So having more people on station has this compounding factor where you've got more crew time available the more people you have concurrently on station. So it's not just six additional astronauts this year, it's six with

extreme amounts of crew numbers at the same time on station, which lets them get a lot more done up on station day to day. So that is, you know, the beginnings of the transformative era for ISS to have this amount of crew flying up to ISS is just kind of going to change everything about ISS, at least on the US orbital segment side. So I don't think that these two things are completely detached. I think it is notable that the crew assignments, the schedule for DM-2 and Crew-1 all came out the week leading up to it coming out that Boeing was going to be reflying this Starliner uncrewed flight.

I do think that is a heavy relationship between the two. Maybe, you know, Christian Davenport, being a great reporter that he is, started digging a little bit once all this Crew-1 and DM-2 news was coming out, started digging and found this. But it just seems like that is, you know, from one week to the other is just too many news stories that are connected to really be disconnected. Now, I think if in a world where SpaceX wasn't doing as well on the commercial crew stuff, in a world where they were having problems getting to the launch pad, or in a world

where Boeing was the only provider of crew flights to the ISS, if they only picked one provider on commercial crew, I do think there's a good shot that this second orbital flight test with no people aboard, I think there's a good shot that would not have happened. I do think if we were faced with this scenario where it was either, you know, accept a little more risk, make sure you get everything right this time, but accept a little more risk or lose access to the ISS because of the situation with limited Soyuz flights up to the ISS. I do think there's a world there that you would accept that risk and fly on the next mission of Starliner. But this proves the strength of the idea here to have two different providers.

When you can have one going through hard times and another one that's doing well, that balances out the capabilities there and the schedule, and it makes it a lot easier to handle situations like this. So as shitty of a situation this is for Boeing, I do think this is really good optics here for NASA, especially when they're going in front of Congress. And if anything comes up about how long this program has taken, obviously cost hasn't grown a lot because these were fixed price contracts. But there has been times in the past where NASA

was in front of Congress and Congress was asking questions about why commercial crew was so delayed, you know, old funding issues notwithstanding, I do think this is a good thing to pull out and say, look, we picked two providers for exactly this reason. One of them is having trouble. One of them is doing great. We can balance out the schedule and we can, you know, lean on one when the other's struggling. And there will probably be a time when the other one's struggling and we'll lean on the other. And it just really shows the strength of this, not only for crew, but for cargo. We've seen it in the past with cargo different uh providers have had in-flight anomalies or whatever the case was between spacex and orbital atk and unfortunately some of those happened concurrently which made

things kind of weird um but i i do think this situation here with starliner and with dragon 2 is just so indicative of great strategy from NASA that they should carry forward. If Gateway does in fact happen, there should be two providers for these kind of things because it shows here how important that strategy is. Now, one more thing I want to touch on with this topic. Up front, I mentioned that when NASA originally announced Crew for that Crew 1 flight on Dragon 2, they said there would be two international partners, and then now it turns out it's only one JAXA astronaut. Roscosmos is not going to be flying on this first mission, this first operational mission of Dragon. The week that NASA announced the Crew-1 assignments, there was a teleconference of the ISS Advisory Committee, and Tom Stafford

on that committee, he said this about Roscosmos. I'm going to read here from a Jeff Faust story on Space News. Stafford said that the Russian officials who met with Stafford's committee in Houston in December were reticent to fly cosmonauts on what to them are unproven vehicles. Quote, the Russian side noted that prior to agreeing to the mixed crew plan, there needs to be a successful U.S. crew launch. Roscosmos will consider participation after successful launches, but will not participate in the first launch of the vehicle. So what he's saying there on the mixed crew launch idea is, this is something we've heard for years about commercial crew, that once commercial crew is up and flying, we'll still fly NASA, ESA, and JAXA

astronauts on Soyuz, and Roscosmos will fly a cosmonaut on the U.S. crew launches. That way, if there's an issue with Soyuz or an issue with U.S. launches, each side could still get access to the ISS and maintain presence on both sides of the space station. Now, in this case, I think this is another example of Roscosmos being, of late, a bad to unreliable partner on the International Space Station front. They had all these issues a couple years ago, I think it was, what, MS-9 and MS-10, where one had the in-flight abort on, I think that one was MS-10. Let me make sure I'm getting all this right, because if not, I'm going to get a bunch of tweets and emails and stuff.

Yeah, I was right. So MS-09 went up, and then the drill hole was discovered in that one. That was the hole that had been plugged somehow with gum or whatever it was that was on station and then sprung the air leak. The cosmonauts went outside and tore through the thing to find the hole in an attempt to do something that we still haven't figured out. And that still has never been clarified. That also involved the time period when there were certain people within Russia, within the Roscosmos organization, that were floating the idea that maybe a NASA astronaut did it while on station. And we're really rubbing people the wrong way with that one. And then MS-10, hot on the heels of that, was the in-flight abort that was an issue with Soyuz launch vehicle that caused Nick Hague and Alexei Ovchinin to abort in flight and have a ballistic reentry.

So they had these two really bad problems that had very limited follow-up, at least from what we can see publicly. And a lot of the bickering around that and elsewhere in space policy just really showed to kind of be the tip of the iceberg that this relationship was getting a little bit more sour over time. And then in this case, you know, it's not surprising that Roscosmos is being a little grumpy about commercial crew coming online because right now, crewed flights are a huge portion of the Roscosmos budget. Those are seats that they've been raising the price on for years. You know, now they're in the $80 to $90 million a pop. And that's a ton of money. When we're buying

three or four a year, that's a ton of funding that was heading to Roscosmos previously, that they won't be seeing anymore once commercial crew starts. So it makes sense. And I expected there to be a little bit of this pushback. But also, you know, right now the Russians are only flying two crew members onto the ISS because they don't have their new module they were hoping to get up. And from some reports, they don't have a lot to do. So this could be trying to prevent some, you know, maybe embarrassment that there's not a lot going on. So they don't need another crew member. So why would they train one and fly one and go through everything that would take to fly a crew member this side? I do think it's kind of silly to

say we won't fly on an unproven, unreliable vehicle, you know, to imply that after we've seen so many issues with the Russian vehicles over the past couple of years. So it kind of feels like another one of these moments where there's just a little bit of heads butting that is getting uncomfortable to a certain extent. So we'll see. When they do start flying on these US vehicles, I'll be very interested to see how that is played out and what their comments are from there. But until then, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. So that is a long drawn out update on where Commercial Crew is. But before we get out of here for the day, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who made this episode possible.

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