Main Engine Cut Off - T+275: Starliner’s First Crew, Starship’s Fourth Flight

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Starliner flew its first crew, Starship flew its fourth flight, Chang’e-6 collected its first samples, and Agnikul Cosmos flew its first mission.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Warren, Bob, Stealth Julian, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Harrison, Jan, Josh from Impulse Space, Russell, Lee, Donald, Ryan, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Pat from KC, Theo and Violet, Joonas, Better Every Day Studios, Pat, David, Fred, The Astrogators at SEE, Matt, Tyler, Kris, Joel, Benjamin, Steve, Frank, SmallSpark Space Systems, and four anonymous—and 817 other supporters.TopicsAfter a drama-filled day, Boeing’s Starliner finally finds its way | Ars TechnicaStarliner docks with International Space Station on crewed test flight - SpaceNewsStarship survives reentry during fourth test flight - SpaceNewsStarship’s Fourth Flight Test - SpaceX - LaunchesSpaceX on X: “Starship made a controlled reentry, successfully making it through the phases of peak heating and max aerodynamic pressure and demonstrating the ability to control the vehicle using its flaps while descending through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds”Chang’e-6 spacecraft dock in lunar orbit ahead of journey back to Earth - SpaceNewsCNSA Watcher on X: “Concise version Chang'e 6 sampling video on the far side of the moon.”India launches nation's 1st 3D-printed rocket engine | SpaceThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by ULAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and we've got a lot to talk about today with the star-named spaceships. Starliner flew its first crew successfully up to the ISS. They are on board there now for a week at a minimum. That's part of what we'll talk about is how long they're going to be there. And Starship completed its fourth flight test this week, fully successfully, I will say. Both stages landing softly on the ocean, half a world apart, but both softly landing. Major success for the program. Epic video, as always.

So some bigger picture thoughts on both of those. We'll start with Starliner, because that's a really big one. It was a journey, right? Even to get to the launch, it was. But then the launch itself, they were quite a bit out to the pad and back. There were some helium leaks they discovered before the mission took off and then the day that it took to get to the iss was filled with all sorts of chaos as well they discovered two helium leaks while on board

or while on the way to the iss it's two more from the one that they had on the launch pad and then once they docked the iss they discovered another one, though that one was quite a bit smaller. It's a complicator for the storyline that we've heard about that helium leak that they found on the ground and they weren't going to fix because they said, well, it's just a seal and we've got enough margin, we'll be fine.

That last part's true. They still have quite a bit of margin. So one of the things that came out of the post-flight press conference was that they've got about 90 hours of flight time left to undock from the ISS and head home. It will probably be less than that, but that's what the plans are. And they've got about 140 hours of helium, even with the current leak rates, when they don't have things closed off as they do now on board the ISS, they closed off these manifolds and those stopped the leaks from

happening. But when they're in flight mode, they've got about 140 hours of helium. So they've got quite a bit of margin, more than they need to get back home safely. And that's why they decided to go ahead and dock. But the complicator is, you know, if this was really just a seal and it was a seal that went bad or something, and they made a decision to fly because they needed, you know, other parts would have come up on their lifetime limits, and it would have pushed the schedule quite a bit for this mission. Well, now you've got four leaks overall. Are they all bad seals? Do you have, did you pick bad seals, or did you install them improperly, or is this a different issue? And now you're going to find that out because you do have all these issues. The other

thing that happened en route were some thruster issues. They were referred to on the live stream as thrusters failing. And something I talked about with Jake the other day before we did Off Nominal, by the way, we had Matt Dash on Off Nominal yesterday as we record this, and he's awesome to hang out with. It's worth a listen if you've not checked out that show. Matt Dash of Iridium, he's the CEO over there. Really cool to talk with him about the industry overall. But anyway, we talked about before the show that these kinds of things are hard to diagnose in real time or hard to react to in real time because some things are phrased in a way that sound apocalyptic but you know when you get around to hearing the details they're way less serious than that and maybe they are more serious internally than they let on externally but what was talked about in

that post-flight press conference or the post docking press conference, I should say, was that in many of these cases, it wasn't that they were failing, like the hardware was failing, and they were no longer able to be fired. But the control systems were excluding them from their maneuvering capabilities, because if some parameter didn't come up to spec appropriately. So in the example they gave was something had to be 110 PSI, when that burn started, it only made it to 108. So the system took it offline and excluded it from that system. Well, that's one of those cases where they either have very conservative constraints for these kinds of flights, these early flights, and they can relax those over time as they characterize the system, or maybe,

you know, a piece of hardware itself is operating a little differently than the standard, so they relax these constraints to an extent, right? You can't do that all the way. You can't just say, like, I don't actually care what the PSI is. You still want to have something in place, but maybe they can drop that down to 105, and it's totally fine. Now, there was one thruster they've talked about as that's failed, and that's offline for the rest of the mission. I don't remember the particular details around that, nor do I think they fully know what's going on yet. But the other four, but I think it's tough, right? Starliner gets beat up more than anything else in this industry and quite frankly deserves a good portion of that, right? But there's definitely stuff that they don't. And there's definitely the case that the third flight of any spacecraft,

it's not great that you're finding issues that are the same ones that you had on the previous uncrewed flight test, which is the case with a couple of these. That's not great. That's not a good look. But, like, this stuff happens on these kind of missions, and you work through them. And that's the problem, right? The problem is not all these issues that Starliner is having. The problem is Starliner is afflicted with a very low flight rate.

And this is something I've been thinking about more and more as, as this has gotten later into the ISS program before Starliner is actually online. When you think about either finishing out the ISS program and maybe extensions, if ISS gets extended beyond that, or, you know, the thought that Starliner might ever get sold as a commercial mission, um, in all those cases, you know, when you're looking at might ever get sold as a commercial mission. In all those cases, you know, when you're looking at Starliner overall, they've got themselves into a point where their flight rate is really hard to operate a spacecraft successfully and iterate on it effectively when you are at best going to fly once per year. And that is where they're at at this point. You know, if they had flown first and it took SpaceX four years to get flying,

Starliner would have had a whole bunch of reps in the last four years. But that's not where they're at. SpaceX has been flying for four years and have flown many crewed missions that are not flying for four years and have flown many crewed missions that are not NASA commercial crew missions. They have had a ton of reps, not to mention the commonality they have with the cargo spacecraft. You know, now they are pretty much the same spacecraft, even before though, flying a dragon and then flying a crew dragon, like you were, your team was getting a lot of reps, your hardware that was common between these was getting a lot of reps. You were able to fly this very frequently. And that is certainly the case where, you know, that's how SpaceX does all their things. But the other good companies in the industry, too, have high flight rates. And that works out a lot of issues.

It works the issues out quickly. It keeps the team fresh. All of the criticisms that we've ever had for SLS and Orion and their flight rate, that is also the best that Starliner should ever achieve in the next five or six years. Unless they start selling commercial missions, which I see absolutely no path for, I see no appetite for that at Boeing, I see no path for who would actually want to buy those missions when they have another option that's flying so much and is presumably cheaper and has been more tested and is, let's be honest, operated by a company that has an attitude of like, let's do

that thing. Whereas Boeing is Boeing at this point, and it sucks to be Boeing right now. So unless commercial contracts, I mean, I feel like I'm channeling that time, longtime listeners will remember a time in which I declared defiantly, I don't know if the best salesperson in the world can sell an Atlas 5 these days. And literally the next day, like less than 24 hours later, Amazon bought all nine of them that were remaining. So maybe I'm channeling that. Maybe tomorrow there will be a huge contract for commercial flights on Starliner, but I really

don't see any of those coming about unless something drastically changes with Starliner. So, you know, let's just throw them a bone and say that they do sell a commercial mission, or they are able to land something like that. Well, it's not happening anytime soon. They need to work through all of the stuff that they need to work through on this mission and the fallout of that. And if this helium thing needs to be reworked when they get on the ground, they need to work through all of that and get flying with these rotational missions before they even consider doing a commercial mission with Starliner. The other thing they have to do is figure out what it's going to fly on.

Because right now, all the Atlas Vs, as I just mentioned, are either sold or working on the Starliner missions that NASA needs. And they're going to have to foot the bill for human rating Vulcan, to whatever that means, if you're a person who wants to criticize that process. They would have to figure out how to get this thing up in space again. And again, I see no appetite for that. So all this is to say that Starliner is afflicted with this flight rate problem that we always criticize SLS and Orion for. Starliner is afflicted with this flight rate problem that we always criticize SLS and Orion for. Starliner's got it just as bad. Because it's important for NASA to have Starliner flying, they want to have this two options to the space station thing so that if one

has an issue, the other one's still flying. But NASA also needs to just keep doing what they're doing on the ISS even worse. So, you know, if it comes to a time where Starliner has to take some time to rethink certain systems or rework certain systems before Starliner 1 is ready to fly, NASA is going to take that opportunity. So I really honestly think it might be another year and a half before we see another Starliner mission after this one. I don't see them making, I just, I think the timeline's tight for them to make, you know, the second crew rotation mission next year, because these flights are every six months. NASA ideally wants to go a tick tock. So there's a dragon and a starliner. So it's, you know,

one per year for each. Um, there's one coming up beginning of 2025. There's one halfway through 2025. I don't really know if with work that comes out of these kind of missions and the path that Starland has had at this point, if they're going to be able to make that happen. The other complicator is all the atlases that need to fly for Amazon, all the Vulcans that need to fly for the national securities missions that they have got. There's a big log jam at that launch pad. So that's a complicator as well. NASA can definitely push people out of the way, but I just kind of, it being June, they're not gonna be back on the ground for a week at a minimum. I don't really see that timeline working out. So it could very well be

early 2026 by the time Starliner flies again. And with a vehicle that has had the issues like Starliner's had, that low flight rate is an absolute killer. There might be people that join the Starliner team and quit to find another job in the time between these two missions. And that's the kind of thing that is a real killer. So it sounds like a broken record because we talk about this with so many different angles of the space industry, but flight rate really is a thing that can eliminate a lot of issues in your spacecraft or your rocket or whatever it is and put you on a path to actually operating something more efficiently and being more vibrant and Starliner has none of that going so I hope it contributes well to the ISS

program I hope it goes on to fly all these Starliner one through six missions on a good schedule very successfully I have nothing bad against Starliner. It's a spaceship. We all love spaceships. It's not my favorite spaceship, but it is a spaceship. You know, if we're comparing, I would fly on a Starliner before I'd fly on Virgin Galactic, for an example. So it's not my least favorite spaceship, I guess. Now, in terms of the schedule from here for this mission, it was alluded to in the press conference the other day, and then Eric Berger either tweeted something or wrote something in an article that these two things together kind of hit in an interesting way. They didn't want to talk about the undocking schedule at the press conference.

They came right out off the bat, and they were like, we're not ready to talk about undocking yet. We're still figuring things out. Eric had some people that were talking to him saying that there's a lot of work going on on Starliner right now before they're going to be comfortable undocking to come home. So that might be, are they trying to figure out the helium situation or the thruster situation? Were there other things that we don't know about that they're processing internally that they're going on and trying to resolve before they're going to come home? But they said a week at a minimum, you know, on the way to the ISS, I was thinking, man, this thing might dock, but they might be heading out tomorrow. Might be like,

you know, Suni and Butch, take a look through cupola, have some time looking out the window, but we're heading back. You know, this is going to be a quick in and out. It looks like that's completely wrong. And it's the other direction entirely. We've got to the safe spot that we needed to. We're at the ISS. We're in a stable state. We've turned off these manifolds. So helium is not leaking. Let's use the time, try to make this thing much smoother on the way home. I hope it's that. I hope that's, I hope it's that, and I hope those things aren't like really bad, whatever they're working out internally. So we'll see what the timeline turns out to be in terms of undocking, but for now, Starliner's on the ISS with people aboard, and that's awesome on its own. Now I still want to talk all about Starship,

but before I do that, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are something like 850 of you. I really am frustrated with Patreon's interface these days. So much so, I'm thinking about throwing this over on Substack and not moving entirely. If you're on Patreon right now, I'm not going to change anything, but might also throw it over there to get a little something going. There are people out there I know that don't want to sign up on Patreon.

So if you are somebody who would sign up for headlines and all on Substack, let me know because I'm going to need some people to test that out when I set it up. So hit me up if that's you. But for all those that are currently supporting, I do thank you so much for the support, including the 33 executive producers

who made this episode possible. Thanks to Warren, Bob, Stealth Julian, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Harrison, Jan, Josh from Impulse Space, Russell, Lee, Donald, Ryan, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Pat from KC, Theo and Violet, Eunice, Better Everyday Studios, Pat, David, Fred, The Astrogators at SCE, Matt, Tyler, Chris, Joel, Benjamin, Steve, Frank, SmallSpark Space Systems, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support. Everyone there and everyone that's at $3 a month or more is getting access to Miko Headlines, which is a show I do every week, running through all the stories in space, keeping you up to date on the things that matter.

So it's a great way to stay up on the news and support the show. It's how I keep this whole thing going. So thank you all so much for the support. And if you want to join up, mainenginecutoff.com slash support. All right, Starship, the most epic flight. It was amazing. It was absolutely successful, more successful than they could have hoped for.

SpaceX has to be thrilled with how this turned out. They did say in the run-up that they removed two tiles and put some sensors in place so they could keep an eye on temperatures and anything else. So, you know, I wonder how far they thought they'd make it through re-entry. I wonder if they thought they would go all the way to the flip and a soft touchdown on the ocean. Especially with the most epic video ever of that flap getting melted getting torn apart by plasma uh looking like you know a shell of itself by the time that it stuck itself out defiantly and flipped the ship it was very epic and uh you know if you have not watched the video you really got to dedicate the time watch launch skip the coast phase and watch re-entry uh it was

it was amazing so yeah i mean i am thrilled with how this turned out there are some things for them to figure out right i think they did lose an engine or two on the way up in the boost phase they've got this whole situation right now this interim hot staging ring uh that they're decoupling from the booster on the way back to landing because it's so heavy and they've got to figure out how to lighten it and change things around to help the weight of it all. So they've got some stuff that they're still working out. But all in all, to have pulled off a soft touchdown of the booster, a re-entry, a flip, and a soft touchdown of the ship and show how how rugged this thing could be this design could be

you know i i joked that this starship was doing its best b17 on a very appropriate d-day uh where you know b17s be coming back with half a wing with you know missing half the tail the huge holes in it and those things just kept flying much so that we've all got that you know graphic that was memed by michael baylor maybe on twitter somebody memed the survivorship bias uh image that came to your mind when i said that uh with starship and it's like totally true but that is the case right like the other thing i don't know is the the aspect or the the uh kind of perspective from that camera that we're seeing at the flap. Maybe it was losing less than we all thought or than it looked like. Certainly looked like it was a big chunk, but

maybe relatively it was not actually that much. But the fact that it all stayed together and it worked is amazing. There were two things I wanted to comment on. One is I really thought it was interesting that the FAA license for Starship got updated in the way that it did, in that there were three different failure modes stated as acceptable failure modes effectively. So if they had a failure of the thermal protection system during Starship reentry, if they had failure of flaps to provide sufficient control during reentry, or failure of Raptor engines during the landing burn, any of those failures, as long as it happened without casualties, without property damage, without debris outside the hazard areas,

there would have been no investigation required. And I guess there is no investigation required because guess what? The failure, the thermal protection system failed during re-entry. The flaps, we don't know. I can't see in the video. I assume they provided sufficient control during re-entry. Maybe they didn't. I don't know. Seemed pretty stable. Uh, the Raptors worked. So anyway, there, I thought it was cool that there's like this whole extension route. I honestly didn't even know that was an option. Uh, I would love, I should have asked people that I know if this was a thing that you could always do where you could put these exceptions in place. But, um, that was really cool to, to, to just look at that as an aspect of how can they speed up the

process between these flights. That's a really interesting way of like, these are the ways that we think this mission will go bad. But if we keep it within these constraints, then we're good to just go, you know, as soon as we can. The last part that I'm still honestly just a little bit mystified by is the step by step-stepness of this Starship program at the moment. They did a lot of tests on the third flight where they did payload bay door tests and header tank transfers, and they tried to fire up the Raptors in flight, but they were spinning too much. This time, they just avoided any in-space tests. They really focused on that re-entry portion. I still don't know if that internally is because they weren't ready to do the other testing that they needed to do, but they are pretty hesitant,

hesitant to do this whole in-space Raptor relighting, um, situation. They don't want to commit to putting themselves in orbit before they're able to demonstrate that presumably. So I'm very curious to find out what the flight five, um, mission looks like. Is it going to be, you know, we're going to attempt to go up and relight into orbit and then relight to come down and you know maybe this time re-entry is over the area they originally thought in hawaii where they can get some assets not too far away to be able to do some more imagery of this kind of thing what that trajectory looks like what the mission plan looks like for flight five is going to be something to watch. And, um, yeah, man, I really got to get down there. I gotta be honest. Uh, I was watching

it with my son before school the other day and he was telling me that too. So gotta make, gotta take some action on that one. Uh, things, the schedules are, I'm just waiting for them to get a little bit more sticky and they kind of seem like they're getting there now. All right, two things on the way out that I want to mention, because this news week was absolutely nuts. China pulled off a very under-the-radar sample return mission. Not under the radar in that no one knew it was happening, but it happened so fast over the weekend on the week with all this other stuff going on that I feel like it got stifled by that. But they did land Chang'e 6 successfully on the far side of the moon, not the dark side of the moon. Administrator Nelson, who said in Congress, said it's always dark over there. It is just the far side of the moon. It's

light half the time. They landed. They collected two kilograms of samples. They lifted off back to orbit. They docked with the return capsule already. So this all happened very quick. Now, interestingly, it's going to wait in orbit quite a long time until it comes back. It's not going to be back at Earth until June 25th or so. But successful Chang'e 6 mission over there on a pretty smooth looking timeline overall. The other thing I'll mention is something I didn't see covered a lot. But a couple years ago, I was sort of browsing through the companies that were starting up in India to do commercial launch. One of them caught my eye, Agnicool Cosmos. I don't know why it caught my eye. I think it was at the time they seemed the

most far along or the most put together or whatever the case. But they had a successful suborbital technology demonstration mission this past week. They launched, they had about a 65 second burn of a engine they developed in-house and got to about an eight kilometer apogee, two minute flight. This is an RP-1 and LOX engine for their launch vehicle called Agnabon that's supposed to lift about 300 kilograms to 700 kilometer orbit. So very much in the realm of the small satellite launchers out there. kilometer orbit. So very much in the realm of the small satellite launchers out there. But this was really cool to see. There's a great video of the mission. It's pretty cool to just track and follow along with. I wouldn't be shocked if this is a name that we hear about quite a bit in the coming years. So I wanted to throw it out there for anyone to check that out.

There's an article on Space News or Space.com and some video that they put up on Twitter as well. So two things to check out if you were not tracking those things. So anyway, that's what I've got this week. I appreciate all of you listening and all of you supporting over at managingcutoff.com slash support. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up, anthony at managingcutoff.com or on Twitter. We have Miko or on Mastodon. I'm Miko at Spacey.Space.

And like I said in the middle there, if you're somebody who would check out headlines and whatnot on Substack and have not played around with Patreon as much, let me know because I'm probably going to set that up and I need some people to test it out. And I want to know what kind of interest there is there in getting this show, specifically the premium stuff,

the headlines and whatnot, over on Substack. So let me know if that's you. But otherwise, thanks, and I'll talk to you soon.