Main Engine Cut Off - T+218: Starliner Flies, Dragon Gets More Flights

Starting point is 00:00:00 hello and welcome to main engine cutoff i am anthony colangelo back after some vacation time and as you probably can hear in my voice i'm getting over some sickness some non-COVID daycare or travel-based funk. So I don't sound my best today, but I did miss a lot while I was out. And the biggest thing that I missed was Boeing flying Starliner's second uncrewed flight test to the International Space Station. They completed that successfully, though there were a bunch of issues with the flight itself. So I want to talk about that. And then also, hot off the landing of Starliner, NASA announced their intent to buy a bunch

Starting point is 00:00:53 more Dragon flights to cover every bit of transportation for astronauts that they need all the way through what we currently think is the maximum extent of the International Space Station. So, very related stories. I just kind of want to do a commercial crew check-in today because it's been a while since we talked about it on the main show. I will mention, you know, I said I missed a lot while I was on vacation. I caught everyone up, including myself, up on the latest episode of Main Engine Cutoff Headlines, MECO Headlines, that you can get if you head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. I do shows typically when I'm not on vacation every single end of week or weekend, something in there, catch you up on all the stories that happened that week, give you my thoughts on them. So if you also missed out on

Starting point is 00:01:37 a lot of stories like I did, there's a bunch over there waiting for you. But for now, let's dive into what's going on with commercial crew, and we'll start with the flight of Starliner itself. So this is a long saga to do a little previously on Starliner. Back in December of 2019, Boeing went for their first uncrewed flight test, and they had an entire host of issues with that mission. It never made it to the ISS. It didn't even stay in orbit for more than two days. They brought it down about two days after it launched, after not being able to reach the ISS because of issues that got them into an incorrect orbit. A whole bunch of issues there, issues coming back in. So after figuring out what they were going to do there, Boeing

Starting point is 00:02:23 eventually announced a couple months later that they were going to do there, Boeing eventually announced a couple months later that they were going to refly the uncrewed flight test, and it would be not something that NASA's paying for, it was out of their own pocket. Something around $400 or $500 million was the final accounting on how much that mission, the one that just happened now, would cost them. So that was a huge impact to their program overall. They had to fix all those issues and then they got into the flow for this actual flight. And even when they began working towards this flight, they had a bunch of issues with this vehicle as well.

Starting point is 00:02:57 So it's been a huge saga from December 2019 until 2022, when they were actually able to fly. The most recent issue was back in August of 2021, when they were getting ready for a launch attempt. They had some issues with a bunch of different valves on the vehicle. And this has now been the source of a lot of drama between Boeing and Aerojet, where Boeing says it's a problem that Aerojet Rocketdyne has to fix within their system because it's under their purview, and Aerojet saying their stuff worked,

Starting point is 00:03:34 and then, you know, are they going to redesign the valves? Are they not going to redesign the valves? There's been a lot of questions around that. But that was back in August. They had to figure out what the issue was, get ready to fly, uh, with a different service module. So as you can tell, there was a lot going on that even led up to this launch. I don't want to dive into every little detail, uh, leading up to the launch. You can read into that from some of the links that I've got in show notes. Um, but that's all to say

Starting point is 00:04:01 that this has been a really long road. And in that time, SpaceX's Dragon has flown a number of crewed flights. Um, they first started flying to the space station with people, you know, Bob and Doug back in May, 2020, and they've flown a bunch of different missions for NASA, but then also those private missions, right? Uh, Jared Isaacman and Inspiration4 went up. We had Axiom flights recently. Sigman and Inspiration4 went up. We had Axiom flights recently. So Dragon has been hitting a very operational cadence, and Starliner has been struggling to get to the launch pad, even uncrewed. So there is this drastic schedule mismatch in where they are at in the programs that will

Starting point is 00:04:36 come into play in the second half of this episode. But let's talk about the launch itself. This is the second time the Atlas V has launched in this configuration with two solid rocket boosters, two engines on the upper stage Centaur, and that weird little adapter that they need on top of Centaur to make Starliner work. Starliner's wider than the Centaur upper stage, so there's that skirt, I think they call it, the aero skirt, that they need to make it all work. So second launch for that still went well, right? The first time

Starting point is 00:05:05 was fine. This time was fine as well. But they did make it successfully to orbit and eventually the space station. Although on the way there, Starliner had two of their 12 aft-facing orbital maneuvering thrusters fail. They had enough redundancy in that system to overcome those failures, but it was something that is obviously not optimal. Eventually, after leaving the space station, they test-fired those same thrusters again, and they saw that they were only producing about 25% of their expected thrust. So they were trying to get as much data out of those thrusters as they could, because the service module where those thrusters live burns up on reentry, so they're not going to get those back to study. So they needed to figure out as much as they could while it was still on orbit. So that's a big issue that they're going to have to look into

Starting point is 00:05:53 after the flight here. On the smaller engines on the vehicle, they had two reaction control system thrusters fail during the approach to the space station. Those eventually were recovered on the mission. They worked well after undocking from the space station. They reactivated them as part of the system. But again, something else that they need to look into. And I'm mentioning all this because it plays into what we're looking at for the timeline here overall. One of those same smaller thrusters that actually lives on the crew module itself appeared to stop working during re-entry and descent. So they're going to have to look into that. The benefit there is that they actually get that thruster back. So hopefully that helps them figure out some of the issues with that, but the

Starting point is 00:06:35 other ones as well. And then they had some issues with the spacecraft's cooling system. They were actually seeing pressures rising and colder than expected temperatures in thermal control system loops. They had a fix in flight to bypass the loops and warm that fluid up in the system a little bit to help control that pressure issue. So, you know, the fact that they already had this fix in mind and were able to deploy it on the flight is encouraging for that one. But all these little issues add up and they add up to the time between this flight and when we would actually see them fly with people. So I wanted to mention all those things because it does play into what you need to look at for the schedule coming forward. Eventually, the spacecraft did touch down at White Sands successfully. It did all of its docking

Starting point is 00:07:22 successfully at the ISS as well, and that was really the important thing that they needed to test on this mission because last time Starliner did not even get close to the ISS this time it made it all the way to docking astronauts could you know go poke around inside the vehicle they could play with the zero g indicator which was Jebediah Kerman from Kerbal Space Program which is the saga of Starliner. Having a Kerbal as the zero-g indicator is just so on the nose that it's kind of hilarious. And I hope someone in Boeing is having a little bit of a sense of humor with that, or maybe they didn't really think about it. But every time you hit launch on Kerbal Space Program and Jebediah's face is looking like he doesn't know what's going to happen next, that's how we all feel when we're watching Starliner after this long of a saga. So it's a little bit

Starting point is 00:08:08 on the nose, but I dig it either direction, either just as having a Kerbal on board is cool, or if it's a little bit of comedy there from the Starliner team, I appreciate that too. So in the aftermath of this flight, Boeing was talking up that they are on track to have the next Starliner spacecraft ready to fly with astronauts by the end of this flight, Boeing was talking up that they are on track to have the next Starliner spacecraft ready to fly with astronauts by the end of this year. And that would be the next step here is to have the crew flight test that'll last about a week or two going up to the ISS before they get into the operational missions that they have on contract. And if you remember the original contract here that Boeing's working off of, they were supposed to have an uncrewed flight test, a crude flight test, and then they have

Starting point is 00:08:47 six operational missions that are actual, you know, the full rotation missions that, like SpaceX is doing right now in the ISS, where they go up for six-month stays. So those will start once they get signed off on the system overall. But what's up next is that crude flight test. There has been a lot of talk over time from Boeing that they could compress the schedule between the uncrewed and the crewed flight test, but that was always assuming that they didn't have a lot of issue in the uncrewed flight test to rework before they get to the crew. So now that we know they've had all these issues with the valves, there's a dispute about whether they're going to fix it or AirJet's going to fix it. Latest I heard was it sounds like Boeing is

Starting point is 00:09:27 going to implement some fixes on their side for those valves. Now we have all these issues with these thrusters. Now they did have enough redundancy in the mission to overcome those failures. So that's a good test of the redundancy they've built into the system overall. But you don't want to have multiple failures on a mission and not look into it or just say, well, we had enough redundancy, so let's fly it again. Cause what if next time you don't have enough redundancy? So they're going to have to look into all these issues and, you know, end of year for crew flight test seems kind of tight because not only do you need to resolve all these issues before you're ready to go, um, you then have to get on the manifest for the Atlas 5. You have to get on the manifest

Starting point is 00:10:06 for the ISS vehicle visiting program overall, because the ISS has been very busy lately. There are a ton of vehicles coming and going. We even have some of these private astronaut missions that are flying to the space station now. So the schedule is very tight. And there's only two docking ports that crewed vehicles and SpaceX's cargo dragon right now can go to. So managing the port allocations is a really big deal on the ISS program. So, you know, does Starliner get a slot on that schedule right now? Yes. But is it a little tentative because they didn't resolve all these issues? Yeah, it's going to be the thing that they can punt down the line a little bit, especially because, you know, the way that crew assignments are, SpaceX has the schedule laid

Starting point is 00:10:50 out in front of them. They've already got, you know, several SpaceX crew flights slotted in with the crews ready to go. They've reassigned some crew from Starliner missions over to SpaceX missions as these delays had went on. And then I hate to bring it up, but the crew flight test is still a flight test, right? It's not like this is the first operational crew mission for Starliner. This is also a flight test. There might also be things coming out of this that they need to fix before they're ready for Starliner crew one. You know, whether that means technical issues with the vehicle or whether that means human issues with how the astronauts are interacting with the spacecraft. What are

Starting point is 00:11:29 the control systems like? How did the cargo manifesting work out? Are there things that they need to figure out to actually make a crewed operational mission possible that were not really planned for on that crewed flight test? The timeline between SpaceX's crewed flight test and Crew-1, right, it was May 2020, the end of May 2020, and then November 2020 for Crew-1. So they had a very compressed timeline there, but, you know, it was a different time then. We were in a situation where we didn't have a crew vehicle that we could rely on, and we wanted to get these missions going because we were already behind schedule on commercial crew program overall. When Starliner finishes their crewed flight test, there's already going to be a couple of SpaceX crewed flights on the manifest with flight crews

Starting point is 00:12:17 assigned in training, ready for a schedule. You know, they're going to have a particular launch day picked out for these missions, and Starliner is going to have to get worked into that program overall, before it actually gets a date on the calendar. So it's not like there's going to be, you know, this quick as possible turnaround between the crewed flight test and Starliner crew one, it's going to have to fit into the rest of the ISS program overall. So all that's to say that if the crewed flight test happens at the end of this year, or more likely early 2023, the first operational Starliner flight for a six-month rotation could be, you know, the end of 2023? It could be 2024. be 2024. Because right now we've got SpaceX Crew-5 scheduled for September 2022. And we've already got SpaceX Crew-6 scheduled for, I think, April 2023 is the current plan.

Starting point is 00:13:17 So those are those two flight increments. SpaceX Crew-7 doesn't have a particular date it does have two astronauts already assigned so theoretically end of 2023 could be the first operational starliner mission if all of the issues between then and now go well or get fixed know, quickly and get tested quickly, and everything on the crew flight test goes fine, then yeah, it could be end of 2023 when that first mission happens. So now that we've talked about how that all falls in the schedule, that plays into why NASA is going to buy more Crew Dragon flights going forward. So that's what I want to dive into next. But before we do that, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com support. There are 833 of you supporting every single month. I'm so thankful for your support. And that includes 41

Starting point is 00:14:14 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, Thank you all so much for your support. And as I mentioned up top, if you want to get Miko Headlines, which is an entire other podcast I do every single week, except for the ones I'm on vacation, you need to head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support, join at the $3 a month or more level, and you will get a special RSS feed to drop into whatever podcast player you're listening right now. And you'll get that start flowing into your feed. You know, as soon as you drop it in there, you can listen to

Starting point is 00:15:03 all the back episodes if you want to catch up on a lot of old news. But best way to do it is to drop it in and just pick right up wherever you are. And you'll stay up to date on all the news. You'll help support the show. And I thank you greatly for that. Okay, so we talked about how Starliner is probably not going to be in operational flow until late 2023. Historically, NASA has talked about the Commercial Crew Program as the intended model being, we have two providers, we have Boeing, we have SpaceX, and we will alternate Boeing and SpaceX flights so that we maintain two missions a year, one from each provider for these six-month duration missions to the ISS. And they overlap a little in there, right, where there's that handover time period that's accounting for launch windows and launch delays or departure delays. So there's

Starting point is 00:15:49 about a month of overlap or something like that. So it's every five-ish months that there's a launch happening, but you get one-ish a year, maybe, and however it stacks, you might get two a year if you're just looking at the calendar year, but that's the intention. Six-month rotation flights, one each from Boeing, one each from SpaceX, alternating back and forth. Well, by the time Starliner's ready for its first operational crewed flight, SpaceX Crew-6 is going to be flying, you know, in and around then. It'll be on either side of that Starliner flight, given the current schedule, SpaceX Crew-6, Starliner-1. So that schedule was already apparent a couple of months ago, and back in March, NASA awarded three additional missions to SpaceX. So that's Crew-7, 8, and 9 for SpaceX. That was a $776 million extension to add these missions

Starting point is 00:16:40 on to SpaceX's already manifested six. Because remember, the original contract, uncrewed flight test, crewed flight test, and six operational missions. SpaceX is going to be through their operational missions on the original contract by the time Starliner is ready to fly their first operational missions. There was already that mismatch, and SpaceX was doing a lot of the heavy lifting here in the early days for commercial crew. And they get awarded for that by getting these extensions to their contract, whereas Boeing is still working on that original fixed price contract, which granted was, you know, about twice the price of SpaceX's bid. But they're not getting additional money for these delays. That's

Starting point is 00:17:18 the benefit to NASA for, you know, fixed priced contracts is that they need to deliver on what was agreed upon, and they're only getting as much money as NASA outlaid at the beginning, plus or minus a couple of contract modifications here and there. But eventually, if you do well enough, you get extensions as SpaceX is here. So back in March, NASA added Crew 7, 8, and 9 to SpaceX's contract, and now they're at a point where they need to ensure crew transportation to the ISS through 2030, the currently envisioned end date of ISS. And Starliner is lining up to be, you know, late 2023 when it starts doing its operational flights.

Starting point is 00:18:01 You count out six missions from there, you're in late 2029 when they're flying their sixth, if they're able to fly once per year with Starliner. So in the original intention, yeah, they are only going to fly those six operational missions. And NASA now is putting out an announcement that they're going to buy five additional crew dragon flights from spacex so that'll be crew dragon let's count them out 10 11 12 13 14 so um with that in the currently envisioned calendar of iss this once it actually gets uh signed because this is just an announcement that they're going to sole source this modification to SpaceX, but once it does get signed, if and when, because I should put more qualifiers around that, NASA would have acquired all of the

Starting point is 00:18:55 transportation they need for the ISS program until its current end date in 2030. So I think some of the reaction around this announcement was, you know, oh my god, NASA really believes in SpaceX and doesn't at all believe in Starliner. But the reality is Starliner delayed long enough that NASA didn't need more flights from them except for the ones they already bought. They're not intending to have two Starliner flights a year. They're intending to have one Starliner flight a year, just as they always were. But Boeing ran the clock out on getting extra Starliner flights. NASA didn't intend to have multiple Dragon flights a year carrying people to the ISS. SpaceX was just ready. So whether or not Starliner was even able to fly multiple times a year,

Starting point is 00:19:38 whether or not Boeing even wanted to do that, whether Boeing did want to continue selling Starliner flights to NASA, it wasn't an option because that's not how NASA's plans worked out. And SpaceX gets rewarded by being more on time than Boeing did and being more prepared for these extensions than Boeing was. So it's not as surprising as the original announcement seems that SpaceX is going to fly 14 times with the ISS and Boeing only six with those operational missions. It just kind of is the reality of the current schedule. Now, there are a lot of things that come out of that, right? Like SpaceX's, their pace of crewed missions is going to change a little bit when Starliner does fly

Starting point is 00:20:20 because they're not going to have as many NASA flights a year as they currently do. But they are starting up a lot more of these non-NASA flights anyway right now. We've already seen Inspiration4 fly. We've seen Axiom1 fly. The Polaris program from Jared Isaacman has already booked out some more flights. Axiom's booked out some more flights. And, you know, would you be shocked to see other free-flying SpaceX Dragon flights on the manifest in the near future? Not really. You know, they made that really sweet cupola window instead of the docking port on Dragon, and I don't feel like that would be a one-off thing that they fly only for Inspiration4. I feel like they're probably going to want to use that some more for other crewed flights. So seeing more of those private missions fill out, you know,

Starting point is 00:21:09 another one or two missions a year on SpaceX's human manifest would not be super surprising for, you know, the rest of the 2020s. So even if SpaceX drops down to one commercial crew flight a year, I do think they'll probably still get three or more human flights a year, just given the current schedule. And that's not even counting something in the future, like commercial LEO destinations, those commercial free-flying space stations that NASA has that program underway to develop from the different providers. NanoRacks, Blue Origin, and Northrop Grumman are working on different designs for it right now. And those will eventually result in contracts to build out and operate

Starting point is 00:21:49 those free-flying space stations. So SpaceX presumably would fly some missions there if the companies that they've partnered with are going to actually go ahead and build those space stations out. Starliner, on the other hand, they're partnered on the Orbital Reef program from Blue Origin. I guess they're a team member, not a partner. The partners, CR Space and Blue Origin, team members are Boeing and a bunch of other companies. But these contracts, the way I'm talking about it here, you might be a little confused because NASA is not going to be buying more crewed flights for the commercial LEO destinations program. NASA is going to be buying services from those different space station companies, and those services include transportation to and from their space station. So the operator of those

Starting point is 00:22:36 space stations would be buying crewed flights from SpaceX or Boeing or anyone else that comes along and wants to sell crewed flights in their direction. So in the late 2020s, it's likely that we're going to be seeing more crewed flights from these providers that go to commercial space stations. It's just a matter of exactly who gets the contract, when they actually get deployed, and at that point, you know, what the landscape looks like. There are certainly more barriers to Starliner flying more crewed flights than there are to SpaceX continuing crewed flights with Dragon because Starliner currently flies on Atlas V,

Starting point is 00:23:15 but there ain't any Atlas Vs left. So they're going to need to transition to either Vulcan from ULA, New Glenn from Blue Origin, be able to fly on any launch vehicle like Falcon 9 or whatever, they're going to need to figure out a plan there if they want to continue flying their vehicle to low Earth orbit. And certainly that's not like the most Herculean task I've ever heard of in my life. That feels like something that there was probably somebody working on different plans within Boeing just to have that stuff ready to roll if and when they

Starting point is 00:23:45 need it. It was mentioned as part of some of the orbital reef rollout in the first place. So presumably there are some either even hypothetical plans on the drawing boards, but they are going to have to put that work in if they do want to sell more Starliners to the commercial market. And that becomes the big question is, you know, knowing that they're only flying six operational missions for NASA, that there's no other money coming Boeing's way for these flights from NASA. Is Boeing actually going to put what they need to into the program to make those other commercial things possible? Or is this a signal that they're not necessarily going to keep investing in the Starliner program beyond

Starting point is 00:24:25 what it takes for the commercial crew flights to get underway? That seems more plausible to me. You know, there's, I'm not sure if Boeing's going to make any profit on the Starliner missions. I don't know if they've already lost a bunch of money on the Starliner missions, and it's a thing they're doing because they, you know, had already signed the contract for it. But it doesn't seem like they're going to have the same aggressive commercial attitude that SpaceX is around Dragon. And that's not at all surprising because SpaceX continues to be the outlier on these kind of programs. If you look at commercial cargo, for example, between SpaceX and now Northrop Grumman with Cygnus, SpaceX was the one that took what they were doing in that program and actually made part of it commercially viable. And not only commercially viable, but

Starting point is 00:25:17 owning a commercial launch industry is certainly a great spinoff of a commercial cargo program. They developed Falcon 9 and Dragon for cargo, and Falcon 9 went on to, you know, dominate that commercial launch industry. They didn't sell any private cargo Dragon flights or the Dragon Lab flights they envisioned, but Falcon 9 itself went on to be a very, very successful commercial launcher. Antares and Cygnus, on the other hand, commercial launcher. Antares and Cygnus, on the other hand, Cygnus is being used on these other NASA programs like Lunar Gateway. It's being used as the basis for their commercial LEO destinations program that Northrop Grumman has proposed. So Cygnus is getting these kind of like derivatives as part of NASA programs. But Antares is never going to be used for anything but a Cygnus flight. And even then, it's a weird launch vehicle for Cygnus itself. And, you know, Cygnus has flown an Atlas V before, so there's nothing specific about Antares that Cygnus relies upon.

Starting point is 00:26:22 And it's not a commercially viable thing. And, you know, even Cygnus, yeah, they're pitching it to these other NASA programs, but they're not pitching that to other commercial companies or something like that. SpaceX at least tried to do that. Nobody wanted a Dragon Lab flight. But, you know, Northrop Grumman and the companies that have come before it, they haven't really talked that up as a thing, maybe because they realized that nobody wanted that.

Starting point is 00:26:45 But here we are again on the crew side, right? That SpaceX has turned Dragon into the premier human spaceflight, uh, solution on the private market. They've got free flying private missions. They've got private missions to the ISS and private missions to other space stations coming up in the near future. And Boeing has kind of had some like mealy mouth talk about orbital reef. So this is just another case of SpaceX being a dramatic outlier in missions like this, where, you know, they have a contract with NASA to do something, but they're able to figure out

Starting point is 00:27:19 applications outside of that contract that make them money and push their own missions forward and push their own vision forward. And there's just not a lot of other companies that have been able to do that in the same constraints as these NASA programs like we've seen SpaceX do over time. So, you know, much in the same way as I said about the contract announcement from NASA, this is not surprising. This is what we would have expected to see if you're drawing lessons from other programs that SpaceX has been involved in. And if you've seen what Boeing's been through the last couple of years, you know, it's not at all a given that they're going to continue investing in Starliner. If you're the Orbital Reef team, I really hope that you're, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:57 obviously thinking that Dragon would be a good way to get to Orbital Reef, but Blue Origin's probably got their plans still in works somewhere under wraps. There may be other, I mean, hell, the Europeans are talking about human spaceflight programs. So there's not going to be only Dragon that flies people to low Earth orbit, but Starliner obviously seems like something that's not going to get more investment from Boeing. It's not going to get, you know, more put behind it than, or that would be required to even turn on some other commercial engagements with Starliner. I would be shocked if they do, to be honest.

Starting point is 00:28:31 So that is where we stand with commercial human space flights. It's interesting to see that NASA has lined up all their transportation for the next eight years, and we'll see exactly how these commercial LEO destinations contracts shake out, because that'll be the next big thing that shapes commercial human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and beyond. So that is the thing we'll be tracking closely. But for now, that is all I've got for you today. Thanks again for listening. Thanks for your support as always over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on Twitter at we have Miko or an email, Anthony at main engine,

Starting point is 00:29:08 cutoff.com. And until next time, I will talk to you soon.

Main Engine Cut Off - T+218: Starliner Flies, Dragon Gets More Flights

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