Main Engine Cut Off - T+278: Firefly Alpha’s New Launch Sites, ISS News Blitz (Deorbit Vehicle, Collins Spacesuits, and Starliner)

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

Firefly added launch sites in Virginia and Sweden for its Alpha vehicle. NASA has selected SpaceX to build the ISS US Deorbit Vehicle, closed out their task orders to Collins for ISS spacesuits, and decided to keep Starliner at the ISS for a few more weeks.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Joel, The Astrogators at SEE, Warren, Russell, Joonas, Stealth Julian, Pat from KC, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Benjamin, Tyler, Harrison, Lee, Steve, Theo and Violet, Jan, Matt, David, Bob, Ryan, Donald, Pat, Kris, Josh from Impulse Space, Better Every Day Studios, Fred, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, SmallSpark Space Systems, and four anonymous—and 818 other supporters.TopicsFirefly Aerospace Adds Alpha Launch Capability on Wallops Island, VirginiaSSC and Firefly Aerospace to Launch Satellites from Esrange in SwedenNASA Selects International Space Station US Deorbit Vehicle - NASAEric Berger on X: “Bill Spetch, operations integration manager for NASA’s International Space Station Program, confirms that the US Deorbit Vehicle will be based on "Dragon heritage" hardware. It will involve modifications of the trunk.”NASA’s International Space Station Deorbit Analysis Summary White PaperNASA’s commercial spacesuit program just hit a major snag | Ars TechnicaNASA Collins xEVAS Update  – Space StationStarliner to remain on ISS for more thruster tests - SpaceNewsThe 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 SpaceXWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. I want to catch up on a bunch of ISS news that's been going on. There's been a whole bunch of things happening, some of which I felt like I should make a couple comments about. But I do want to start with Firefly Aerospace, who has made a couple of announcements in the last week about launch sites for their Firefly Alpha vehicle. That's the vehicle they're flying right now. About a one-ton-to-orbit vehicle.

They've been flying it out of Vandenberg Space Force Base for the first couple of launches. They've been going primarily to polar orbits and imaging orbits that are better from that site that can access very high inclination orbits. But they were supposed to have a launch site on the East Coast at Cape Canaveral that they were going to build up after this Vannevar Gouin had been turned online. We hadn't seen a lot of activity there over the years, so there were some question marks around what had happened.

Well, they announced this week that they're actually going to be moving their East Coast operations to Wallops Island, Virginia, at the same pad that was host to Antares over the years. This is pad 0A at Wallops Island. This is where Antares flew from and Antares will fly from in the future. As an important little side note to this, you'll remember that Firefly Aerospace announced a partnership with Northrop Grumman to build out a new first stage for Antares. Antares was using Russian rocket engines, a Ukrainian first stage, that whole

thing has went out the window given geopolitics. So Firefly was going to be collaborating to build a new first stage that was, we haven't gotten a ton of details about this, but it sounded like it was going to be very much in common with the first stage for Firefly's medium launch vehicle. They've talked about that over the years in various different names that it's been under, but it was very close in performance to what the Antares first stage would need. So Antares 330 would be using Firefly's engines and would have a lot of commonality with the Firefly vehicle that would have a different upper stage, different fairing, commonality with the Firefly vehicle that would have a different upper stage, different fairing,

whereas Antares would keep some of its lineage with the upper stage and the fairings that it's used in the past. Now that same vehicle is going to fly out of this Pad Zero A at Wallops, and Firefly announced now that they will be moving in there for the Alpha size as well, with launches starting as soon as 2025. Seems a little bit soon, depending on what kind of modifications they need for the pad in terms of a new launch mount. Maybe it's not that much, right? They can use a lot of the existing hardware there, a lot of the existing infrastructure. Rocket Lab's right next door, so there's been modern work on that pad as well, which might make things a bit easier that they can leverage some of the stuff that's been happening there recently. It's not like this is a completely dormant pad that's just been sitting, you know, weathering away at the coast. This is something that is actively working today. So I think all in all, this is a smart move for them to consolidate

down to a single launch site. They mentioned the busyness that is happening at Cape Canaveral these days. There's a Starlink launch every other minute down there right now. It's not going to get any less busy as New Glenn comes online, as Starship comes online there. Vulcan is going to start its ramp up. A lot of these vehicles are big vehicles that demand a lot of resources in the area, and they are getting increasingly busy schedules over the next couple years, so it's harder and harder to find slots on the schedule at the Cape, which was a big reason that Rocket Lab chose Wallops as well. Now, the other aspect here is that if you're a company like Firefly or like Rocket Lab and you look at the slate of things that you have on your manifest and you run the numbers and you realize you can hit them all from Wallops. And there's certainly some incentives to fly from there as well.

In the case, you know, the Virginia, I forget, it's like the Virginia Spaceport Authority or something. I forget what the Virginia state name is. Someone's going to get mad at me because I've definitely talked to people there. Virginia Spaceport Authority. I think I had that right. There's always been incentives to bring companies there and attract companies there. So there's that aspect as well. But I actually do buy some of the schedule concerns since we've heard them from launch providers that are active at Cape Canaveral as well. So if you know that you can hit what you need from that launch site, it's a bit higher inclination that you would be going into without a dog leg or anything like that.

Then all in all, it can work out for sure. And with a vehicle, I mean, it works out for Electron, which has, you know, very small payload mass compared to all these other competitors out there. But with Firefly Alpha, if you've got about one ton to orbit, you might have a little wiggle room for your standard class of payloads. So, you know, maybe you can carry one or two less satellites on a rideshare, but you can still hit the orbits that you need from that launch site. And like I said, I think going down to a single pad on the East Coast, if you are leaning in this medium launch vehicle, Antares 330 direction makes a lot of sense for them. It limits some spending and some resources that they would need to spread across both sites. So that really, I think overall helps them out

downstream. Now the other announcement they made is an agreement with the Swedish Space Corporation to launch out of the S-Range, S-Range, I don't know how to pronounce S-Range Space Center. I'm just going to say it like that, like it's written, but you can tell me how to actually pronounce that. So they are signing an agreement there to launch starting in 2026 out of Sweden, Launch Complex 3C out there, they're going to be modifying some pads to support that. This is the case where there's a bunch of different launch sites that are kind of cropping up in mainland-ish Europe. They're all off on either some coastal sites or islands or something that's close enough,

but in terms of the sovereign interest to launch from, you know, European land, this definitely fits the bill. And there's been interest in that, especially from the small launch companies that are starting up in Germany and around Europe, that they would want to fly their payloads from, you know, their own sovereign soil. And there's been a handful of companies like ABl that's that's uh sparked up an agreement to fly out of european spaceport fireflies looking at it in this case there's been others in the past that are looking more at containerized launch but um this is a trend right is that there's payloads that fly from europe they don't want to make the trick all the way down to french guiana

they don't want to fly out of the u.s they don't want to fly out of some other you know foreign launch sites they want to keep it closer to home. Maybe there's security concerns around transferring tech outside of European area. And that makes sense. So if you're able to find access in that range, it does kind of open up some potential customers and some potential contracts for you as well, and expands the offerings. So for launch vehicles like this that can fly from uh smaller spaceports it makes a lot of sense you know starship flying from sweden would be a whole different thing and that's uh you know just the scale and everything that else goes on with it is totally different than a launch vehicle in this class so it makes sense

if you have this kind of business to spread it around a little bit, potentially give yourself some other lanes in. And if this is the strategy here for Firefly to go out and do this, it makes a lot of sense. You know, they've also recently struck up an agreement with Lockheed Martin. They sold something like 25 launches to Lockheed Martin, who has a habit of buying a lot of small launch vehicles. They had that agreement in place with ABL, which was like 50 something launches on on ABL's vehicle. So you know, Lockheed does kind of have a habit of buying those launches in that way. But if Firefly who's kind of on this, you know, new lease on life and the private equity version of itself is looking to this kind of expansion territory. These moves make sense. I think the biggest thing for Firefly right now is they've got to get flying more regularly. They've got to get flying more

successfully. They've had a lot of upper stage issues with their vehicle. So all these expansion plans are great, but you've got to get flying regularly and efficiently and effectively so that you can continue to put together a manifest and deliver for customers and not have these upper stage issues or these shortened orbits or qualified successes or things that you've got to fend off an asterisk going on your list of launches on Wikipedia. There's definitely work to be done in that department. I like these strategic moves, but I really do want to see them fly a bunch more frequently and much more regularly and successfully than they have been in the past year. So they've got a launch on the pad as I record this. I think it's going to

fly tonight is the opening of the window. So we'll see if they start to get on that horse and they start to upgrade their launch rate and her cadence and all that, because that would be really the big sign that I'm looking for. But overall, I've always had a soft spot for the one ton launch vehicles. I could be totally wrong, but it certainly feels like an interesting spot of the market. So we'll see how it shakes out over the long term. But you know, we had a we had a trend for a little while for everyone moving up to this one ton range. And now everyone's moving on from it up to the Falcon nine competitor range. So ABL a little bit of mystery right now on, on why it's taken them so long to get back to launching. Uh, relativity has moved on entirely to, to Terran R, you know, Neutron has jumped right

over this class. So this was going to be a very busy section of the market and is now emptied out quite a bit. So, uh, we'll see what Firefly can put together. Uh, ABL is their other big competitor to look at. And then you've got some in Europe as well that are targeting that class. So it could be interesting. It's definitely whittled down in terms of the competitors in that size. So we'll see how that turns out overall. All right, before we get to the ISS updates, I want to say thank you to all of you who support

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a show that I do every single week running through all the stories that you need to be paying attention to. I cut out all the noise, I cut out all the junk, and I just get down to the stories that you need to care about to stay up to date on the space industry. So it's a great way to keep up with what's going on. It's getting really busy out there, and I find it is a real practice of curating that list and kind of letting you know the things that you need to know to stay up to date. So it's an awesome way to support the show and get some more content in your feed. So check that out if you would. I appreciate all the support. Everything that I do on this show happens because of you. So I thank you so much for that. All right, the ISS

has been a very, very busy place for a variety of reasons. We'll start and kind of traipse through and end up at Starliner because that's the biggest one that's going on right now. But last week, or yeah, it was I think it was last week, man, my timeline's totally screwed because there's been so many ISS stories. But NASA selected the partner for the US deorbit vehicle. And somewhat surprisingly, I would say, well, surprising in some ways, not in others, NASA selected SpaceX to develop and deliver the U.S. de-orbit vehicle, which is the thing that they're going to be targeting for ending the ISS's life. You know, the standard up to this point, the standard was going to be three progress

vehicles from the Russian side of the station doing the controlled de-orbit of the ISS. After everything that has gone on in recent years between Russia being a, at times, very unpredictable partner on the space station, invading other countries and starting wars and rabble-rousing, thanks to Dmitry Rogozin finally having headed out from Roscosmos, some of that has quieted down on the space side of things, but certainly not elsewhere. I should say on the space station side of things. On the space side of things, things are still a little bit chaotic. So NASA was kind of shoring up the plans here and wanted to develop this U.S. deorbit vehicle and then put out a call for proposals. There was some flexibility in this RFP that went out as well that the

contractor could choose the contract mechanism, whether it was going to be a fixed price contract or a cost plus or some sort of hybrid option. There were options that people had to bid what their best bid would be. So in this case, SpaceX won a fixed price bid of $843 million. They will be delivering the vehicle to NASA. SpaceX will not be operating this vehicle. It will be delivered to NASA. NASA will operate the vehicle from that point forward. Strangely, the launch will be decided later

or contracted later, I should say. But given what we've heard about this since the announcement on a call last week, they confirmed that it will be Dragon Heritage hardware. There will be modifications to the trunk of dragon to make this possible. So, I mean, this is going to launch on some sort of a Falcon, depending on how heavy it is. It'll be the B Falcon nine, a Falcon heavy. It'd be really interesting if it was Falcon heavy, if that thing was beefy enough that they had to put a Falcon heavy and a dragon on top, cause it has not flown in that

configuration yet. So that's the one bit of intrigue on the launch side there. Now, you might just for more table setting, you might ask, you know, why do we need a specialized vehicle for this? Well, the plan to deorbit the ISS is to let the orbit decay naturally over time. ISS flies low enough that it still impacts some drag over time and its orbit is always dropping and they need to do these reboots that I talk about on headlines from time to time. So they're going to plan to let the ISS orbit decay down to a certain point once the last crew leaves. They would then fire up this deorbit vehicle to set up for a very controlled deorbit into the Pacific Ocean. And that last bit, when they do the final deorbit burn to drop into the atmosphere fully

and capture for its breakup and entry, that burn needs to happen in a very specific time window to be able to deliver the impulse needed to set up for that orbit in the time that it doesn't cause any unexpected deorbit events. They need to have it happen over a certain short period of time to happen precisely enough for a vehicle that mass. But they also can't do it with too much thrust.

If they put too much thrust in this thing, the ISS will rip apart and chaos will ensue. So there is this very fine window of performance that they need to hit where there's enough thrust, but not too much thrust. And it has to happen in short enough time, but not too much time. And for all those purposes, it needed to be a pretty bespoke vehicle, to be honest. Now, the intrigue here is that I think most people kind of assume that this would be a Cygnus-type program. Cygnus has done reboosts of the ISS. They've tested it out over a series of missions. It can reboost the ISS now. The engine is on the correct side of Cygnus, right? On the Dragon side of things, the biggest

engines that are used for orbit raising and orbit changing, when you see a Dragon coming in to dock at the ISS, there's four nozzles that you see at the front, kind of near the docking port. Those are the engines that they use to raise the orbit, do the de-orbit burn of Dragon itself. Those are kind of the biggest impulse engines. They're not the small, you know, reaction control thrusters that are used to set up for rendezvous and docking and actually do the docking maneuvers, all the fine maneuvering. Those are not the thrusters that are used for deorbiting the vehicle or raising the orbit when it gets to space.

So the engines are kind of on the wrong side for Dragon. Cygnus has that one engine on the back that they use for all that, so they can boost the stay station. So most people assumed, all right, we're going to be either adding a couple engines or adding a bit of fuel or getting us into that performance range that we need with a Cygnus, and that the change there would be much smaller than the change would be to Dragon or Starliner or something else. Starliner might even be, you know, not to start this whole thing up, but Starliner might even be more appropriate for this than a Dragon would have been if you were looking at what are the smallest technical side modifications we can

make. Now, where this comes down is, you know, we haven't seen the source selection document for this yet, so maybe I'll do another show when that comes out if we do get to look at that to understand, you know, what did, what were the other proposals out there? Did Northrop Grumman bid in a cost plus kind of environment and that was going to be too much? And SpaceX put a good proposal together to modify the trunk of a dragon in a certain way, deliver it to NASA and do that at $843 million. Seems like a good deal when NASA was out in Congress saying we're going to need, you know, one and a half billion dollars overall for this program. Now they still might need that because they've got a lot of NASA side costs on this. They're going to be operating this vehicle. They've got to be managing it the whole

time. There's going to be a launch to account for. So there's a lot more in that bundled price than I think just saying like, oh, this is, you know, half the price is the vehicle might actually shake out to be somewhat accurate. So, you know, even if the pricing was in range from Northrop Grumman, if all the other bidders bid cost plus or some sort of hybrid approach and SpaceX was the one that said, we're going to go fixed price. NASA might say, yeah, great. Like, let's do that. We know it from SpaceX. We love it from SpaceX.

It worked out. Got a good track record. You know, who doesn't believe them that they could put this vehicle together? You would be kind of silly if you didn't believe them. So maybe all in all, it just made more sense to go that direction. But very curious to see what the other proposals were for this. There was some thought of maybe this would be a Dragon XL based thing, since there's some of the requirements here are very similar to what Dragon XL out to the gateway would require. If you're Jake Robbins over and off nominal, he does not believe that Dragon XL is real. I'm starting to doubt that too,

to be honest. On the other end, maybe some of these trunk modifications are more what DragonXL will look like than the drawing that was released when DragonXL won the bid for Gateway Logistics Services. When they did like a, what, you know, it was almost like that image was typing into DALI or ChatGPT, like, you know, what would a SpaceX designed Cygnus look like? And that's what came out the other end. I kind of feel like that's what that drawing was. So maybe that maybe Dragon XL is more dragon with a crazy trunk on the back or something. Yeah, yeah, it could be the case. So, you know, I wouldn't count it out. I wouldn't

I wouldn't fully file myself in Jake's column of Dragon XL is not real. I might start filing myself in like Dragon XL is not at all what we think it is. And maybe this is much more center line for for that. But I mean, hey maybe this is much more centerline for that. But I mean, hey, this is a pretty nice contract for SpaceX. They're going to be selling a whole Dragon with some modifications, maybe a Raptor. Not a Raptor, sorry, a Super Draco on the back of the trunk. Could be something like that, right?

So overall, I mean, I don't know if I have too many thoughts on the deorbit. Other than the one last thing I'll leave you with is NASA did put out a white paper on the options for deorbiting the space station. And this was put out to show that they had analyzed all these different scenarios. And in it, they list a whole bunch that they had looked at. So they looked at uncontrolled reentry, disassembly and return to Earth, disassembly, repurposing in LEO, boosting to a higher orbit,

you know, pulling it down in pieces. They looked at a bunch of different options and talked about the fact that, you know, there's other considerations with each of those. If they boost to a higher orbit, there's going to be more potential for debris events.

There's going to be degradation they have to worry about at that point. So there's other considerations with these. It's not as easy as just saying boost it to 800 kilometers and forget about it for 100 years. You know, you're putting that up into the range where there's a lot of debris already. So does that become a concern? They had one option of, you know, launching this to a 2, 000 kilometer orbit and you know how much propellant you would require so there's some bizarre scenarios in there um overall you know getting into the

whole debate of what we should do with the iss pieces after it that's probably ripe for another story but or another uh podcast but all in all very interesting that this is going to be a Dragon-derived vehicle pulling this off at the end. All right, the other storylines right now is one on the spacesuit side. Well, there's two on the spacesuit side. One is there's a big hardware issue that they had with the spacesuit on the most recent spacewalk where there was water leaking out and they have some issues to fix with the current ones that are also managed by Collins Aerospace. But Collins Aerospace was one of the two providers on the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services,

or XEVA's contract. There was a whole side of this where Axiom was working on the Artemis Lunar spacesuits, and then the other whole side where Collins was working on the ISS spacesuits, and this is the spacesuits as a service contract. Collins has dropped out of that side of the task order awards.

Interestingly, a year or so ago, there were contracts given to each of the competitors to small design studies. I think they were like $5 million a piece or something like that for Axiom to look at a space station version of their suit and for Collins to look at a lunar version of their suit. So sort of like, here's some money, you know, show me what your modifications would be if you took your spacesuit and applied it to the other environment that you're not currently the task award, a task order winner for right now. Maybe that was a bit prescient. Maybe we should have taken more insight of that than we had. But Eric Berger broke this story a couple of weeks ago, we had, but Eric Berger broke this story a couple of weeks ago, maybe a week or so ago, that Collins Aerospace has reconsidered their spot in the program. They have overspent,

they've underperformed, they've had a lot of issues with this spacesuit project overall, and they had, NASA had started, you know, talking about this to them that they are underperforming, they're over budget for their own internal budgets, that them, that they are underperforming, they're over budget for their own internal budgets, that is, because these are fixed price contracts, and that it was looking increasingly likely that they would miss delivering on this task order. So as a result of that, Collins had asked to be taken off of that task order and their money basically zeroed out at that point. Now they've hit a couple milestones along the way. So they did get some money, but apparently this was still not heading in a good direction. So they've completely taken themselves off of that program. Now that leaves NASA in a weird spot.

They've got this contract for future spacesuits for the ISS that is now going unfulfilled. Are they going to award a task order to Axiom to actually make use of what came out of that design study to apply their spacesuit over to the ISS side? Are they going to on-ramp a competitor like SpaceX, who happens to be working on their own EVA suit right now, to bring in a second provider? I think that way does make more sense that you do want two providers in case, you know, Axiom does not feel like the most stable business in the world right now. Not that they're inherently unstable, but I mean, their business model is private astronaut flights to the space station and space stations. It's not like the most surefire

business model that they've ever had in the world. So I think if you are NASA, and you're really anyone you want to suppliers of a thing that's this important. Another thing that I would quibble about is like I've always felt odd about the spacesuit project being a task order based project and being a services based project. not having SpaceX operate that, where that, you know, there is literally a commercial service right now, granted on a different scale with less requirements, but there is a commercial service where you buy a satellite that attaches to your satellite and moves your satellite. That is literally a commercial service that exists right now. And space and NASA just bought a vehicle from SpaceX to do that. Where in this other realm, we're doing spacesuits as a service. Jared Isaacman doesn't even get spacesuits as a service jared isaacman doesn't even get

spacesuits as a service he gets let me fund the development of spacesuits that i will fly in and i guess technically that's a service but it's kind of a weird one uh i've always felt out about these spacesuits considering how bespoke and one-off they are in terms of of like you know there's list the customers for spacesuits right now. You're going to, you know, run out of ideas before you run out of fingers pretty quick. So not to say this all would have went fine if this was a cost plus contract. I bet Collins would have been underperforming on that anyway, given what we hear from this story and given what I've heard from some people that know things about Collins, it seems like that organization

has kind of been hollowed out from the inside and is not really what it was historically. So it's disappointing if you're someone working on a team, but it's probably not unexpected if you're working on that team that this was the direction it was heading. And I don't think a contracting mechanism would have saved that. But it certainly does leave NASA in a very strange spot where they have to decide now what with this task order based thing. We've got to on ramp a new competitor that wants to meet these requirements with even

shorter of a timeline than we did last time. And you're not really left with a lot of options other than, you know, I guess Axiom Space is going to get some sort of executed task order based on a follow on to that other design study they did. That would be the approach that they should start with. I think if they don't start there, they're making a big mistake. But if they don't on ramp a second competitor, that's probably a mistake too, right? Historically, we look back at, you know, the commercial cargo and crew programs where we've had people drop out, where we've had Kistler Aerospace drop out, other competitors on ramped. There's been times where,

you know, there's somebody that is dropping out of program and you can slot in somebody else that fills that gap and it works out overall. In those cases, the horizon was a lot longer than we have between now and the end of the ISS program, considering I started this segment with a de-orbit vehicle. So that is a little bit of a timeline concern that we're here in 2024, if a new task order is going to come in, and you're going to start developing a spacesuit that would be active at the ISS. Now, presumably, these are also going to be active for the commercial Leo era. So this task order award winner would also have to believe in the commercial Leo station era, which is a hurdle. So there's not a lot of good answers in

this case here. You know, it's a bummer, but you know, NASA's in a bit of a jam, I'll be honest. All right, on to Starliner, which I don't know if I have too much to say about, honestly. I think I said a lot of what I was going to say in the last show that I did about them a couple of weeks ago when they first launched the station. But just one comment on this recent turn of events. So there was a call last week in which NASA talked about the decision to switch Starliner's return to a TBD, effectively. There were a couple of scheduled dates. It was going to be, you know, mid-June and late June, and they kept pushing it back. And now they've said, you know what, we're just going to reassess when Starliner is coming home. That sprung off a

whole thing where there was like stories written that astronauts are stranded. You can quibble of whether they are or not. I don't think they are, but a sub note to this whole storyline, we'll get to the Starliner questions in a second, but a sub note to this whole storyline was NASA starting this press conference off by saying, y'all covered this poorly. Like that was the basic start was, we don't agree with how this has been covered in the media. That's how they're starting out this press conference, which was just setting themselves up for, they were laying out the coals that which they would be raked over for the following 25 to 30 minutes, which just felt like a really bad way for them to use their Friday because it's also inaccurate.

And all of the reporters that got in to ask questions, you know, we're talking about the fact that, you know, it's on you to provide us with more information and give us more updates. The blog posts have been few and far between. The press conferences have been like two of them ever. We haven't talked to the astronauts. You've given us no insight. So we need to fill in the gaps. And that's on you to fill in those gaps. They begrudgingly, they being NASA and Boeing, begrudgingly agreed that there should be more info, but, you know, we're busy was one of the answers. We're all really busy, so I don't know that we can give those kind of updates. None of those were good looks for the program, I'll tell you that. Now, to just tack back to the technical side of this, NASA is putting the return TBD

because they want to do testing on the thrusters out at White Sands. They're actually going to take the thrusters, you know, thrusters here on the ground and run them through the same procedures that they had on the way into docking. And that's when they were seeing those thrusters being deselected. Go back and listen to the show I did about this if you want to hear more details. But they're going to basically mimic what was happening on docking approach so they can figure out what was causing those thrusters to be failing or deselected, as they said, because based on what they find, they might want to do more testing on orbit before they destroy that service module. The service module gets destroyed and burn up in the

atmosphere on the way back in. So if there's any testing to be done, it's going to be while it's at the station or else you don't get a chance. Now, the alarming part of this is not the astronauts are stuck on the ISS. If you were giving me the chance to sit on ISS for a while or Florence Starliner, I would definitely pick sit on the ISS for a while. This particular Starliner capsule, you know, no shame on that, but ISS is a pretty nice, cozy place. There's a lot of room. There's other spaceships there. It's a great environment for hanging out in space. So the real issue is that they have not figured out

what the problem is with these thrusters. In some cases, they're the same thrusters they had issues with on the previous uncrewed test flight. They have not figured out the root cause for this thruster issue. And that is the headline that I think should be out there. The crew is safe. They'll be fine. We're going to get home fine, but we still haven't figured out the issues that we're dealing with on Starliner, and it's mid-2024. And we've only got a few years left to finish all

these flights out, and we're still trying to find root causes for some of the technical issues that we're dealing with. So they're going to do testing at White Sands over the next couple of weeks. Once that's done, they're going to set a return date. They had a 45-day limit on the flight originally based on battery charges and some of the other systems that they had, you know, basically proven out to that point. Since it's been on orbit, they've been able to characterize some of that stuff. They think they can go much longer than that with no risk to the mission. Overall, I think that's actually good for Starliner because it does give them more data on long duration test flights.

So they are maybe getting a little bit ahead on some things. If there's anything in there that they need to look at again before they go for a six month mission, this is giving them some additional time and additional data to understand what those levels are and what they need to be for a six month mission or even longer than that, given whether delays can happen and whatnot. So I think that's good overall. The real issue is, number one, they still haven't figured out root causes. Number two, the messaging was really bad around this. They billed this as an eight-day test flight. They should have set a minimum. The minimum target for this test flight is eight days. If we don't hit eight days, this is not successful.

This could go as long as fill in the gaps. Talk about the schedule early. When you're doing your launch prep, say we're going to launch on our minimum eight day test. This could go as late as August because there's nothing going on in the space station until mid-August. So we may say this is a really good spaceship. We're going to hang out up here. Two extra astronauts on the space station after we spent all this time and money getting them to space is really worth it. There's actually things

that can be done, experiments that can be run, maintenance that can be worked on, time spent on station that is outside of the normal. I mean, everybody in their life gets behind in their schedule during the week. Imagine if you're astronauts on the ISS, you probably get behind on your schedule during the week. It's not like you're just chilling, you know, looking out the window the whole time. You've got a lot to go do. So extra hands up there is really nice. There are spacesuit issues to work out. Extra hands on those are nice.

Unexpected things that crop up. There's so many things that can be done with astronauts on ISS. Message that early so you don't get in this scenario. Say minimum target is, you know, mid-June, but, you know, we could go all the way to mid August and we're going to decide that based on the flow of the mission. If you just start messaging that sooner, then you'll be in good shape. And they didn't start doing that. They

didn't get ahead of that storyline. They didn't keep anyone up to date. So, uh, and then the other aspect is Starliner. Starliner has had a horrible run to this point. Boeing is having an even worse run to this point. So it is a perfect storm. And if you're NASA, you need to be aware of that. You know, it's not shocking to me that that people within Boeing might have some blinders up and say, oh, we're getting destroyed by the press. And that's unfair. If you're NASA, you need to be aware that Boeing is going to get destroyed by the press and that it's going to catch headlines. It's the same reason that NASA does a lot of work to get out in front of some of the SpaceX storylines, because they know all the headlines are going to say Elon Musk's rocket explodes in test flight.

It's complete, utter failure and a meltdown of capitalism. There's going to be very extravagant headlines written because Elon Musk drives a lot of clicks in that case. If you're worried about that, if you're NASA and you're legitimately worried about that, then do the same prep that you need to on that. So I think Starliner in many cases does get a beating more than it deserves. It deserved it all along when they were underperforming. It still deserves it to some extent. But there are certain instances like this where you've got a good spacecraft on orbit, you've got two extra astronauts up there. If there's no pressing timeline to get home,

stay up there. You know, take the time on orbit, take the time with the service module still in existence. If there's things to be run that the engineers can think of, and you don't need to be home until mid August, or you're not going to get in the way of anything on station until mid-august stay up there just message that sooner and everything would have been fine so this was a longer rant than i realized i had in me so i i apologize if the last four minutes of that were excessive but uh yeah it's it's kind of annoying honestly to to watch from this side of some of these things seeming pretty low hanging fruit to get out in front of a story like that and to make it clear why your decisions are being driven in that way, because it was really, even in that call, still unclear of like, why do you need to finish that

test before we come home from the space station? Why? Why can't you come home from the space station and do those tests? Well, it's because we have hardware in orbit that we might also want to run tests on based on what we find. Then just say that up front and put that on front street and don't make it a thing that we have to realize that you might still be doing those kinds of things with the stuff that's in space. You know, I can draw that line, but, you know, not everyone out there in the media is a space nerd. So if you message that sooner, things are so much easier. Overall, general rule of thumb, you know, be clear early on, give everyone the data early on and things will be much easier for you in the long run. So that's what I've got cooking this week. I appreciate y'all for listening. I appreciate your support. Like I mentioned,

managingcutoff.com slash support. I think you can go to mainenginecutoff.com slash dot substack.com as well if you're a substacker. I'll have links to that up on the site soon. But for now, that's all I've got for you. Thank you all so much for listening. Thanks for your support as always, and I will talk to you soon. Bye.