Main Engine Cut Off - T+299: Starliner, According to Butch and Suni (with Eric Berger)

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Eric Berger of Ars Technica joins me to talk about his recent interviews with Butch and Suni in the aftermath of their flight, the update NASA put out about Starliner, and how it all lands from where we are now.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Ryan, David, Theo and Violet, Fred, Steve, Warren, The Astrogators at SEE, Matt, Pat, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Joakim (Jo-Kim), Will and Lars from Agile, Josh from Impulse, Joonas, Russell, Bob, Donald, Pat from KC, Jan, Heiko, Stealth Julian, Lee, Joel, Better Every Day Studios, Kris, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsEric Berger (@SciGuySpace) / XEric Berger | Ars TechnicaStarliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought - Ars TechnicaNASA to put Starliner’s thrusters through an extensive workout before next launch - Ars TechnicaNASA likely to significantly delay the launch of Crew 9 due to Starliner issues - Ars TechnicaThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!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 FireflyWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Manage and Cut Off. I'm Anthony Colangelo back with Eric Berger of Ars Technica, our old friend here to talk about the Starliner saga. He had an amazing interview with Butch and Sonny after the Starliner Saga was complete. They've done a round of interviews and he got a lot of information about what the flight to the station was like and it was a lot hairier than we had heard or been led on to believe previously. So I figured it would be good to talk with him one more time about Starliner and kind of check in now that the mission is done. We've got a couple updates out of NASA regarding it,

so let's jump in. Eric, welcome back to the show. It's not been very long since you've been on. I think it's only, this is probably your shortest distance between two shows, but I thought I needed to have you on here after your story this past week, after talking to Butch and Sunny. It's a Starliner saga,

needs a nice little bow on it. So, I figured we could tackle it together. Yeah, you know, I'm still waiting on my appearance fee check from the last time I was on the show. Yeah, yeah, it's in the mail. Philly Post Office is pretty slow. So, I'm moving soon as we were just talking about. So, maybe it'll pick up a little faster when I mail it from the Jersey side.

I should say upfront, we're not going to spend a bunch of time recapping your article because we just want to talk about the good stuff. So if you're listening to this and you have not read Eric's article in which he talked to Butch and Sonny and got an excruciating amount of detail on the flight to the space station and how precarious it was, pause, go read it, come back and you'll be ready to talk about it. Eric, you were the last person in the room. I feel like I've talked to either you or Christian Davenport about moments in which you're the last person in the room and you get a lot of good.

Was this you requesting that or did it just happen to be that Eric was the last one there? No, it was accidental. Honestly, they had Johnson Space Center, Public Affairs and their wisdom declined to offer me interviews to Butch and Sonny last Friday. Wow. And offered an interview with Nick Hag and I was like, well, that's nice, but I had asked to talk to Butch and Sonny and I was kind of one of the people that was covering the story the closest. So I wrote back sort of saying, you know, look, I just think this is not right. And so Monday morning, they contacted me like,

okay, we found some time to talk to Butch and Sunny. So I had 10-minute interviews with both of them like everyone else. And I guess they just added the interview with Butch at the end of the day. So I think that's why I was the last interview with him. Well, it worked out. I was the last interview with him. Well, it worked out. Yeah, I think he wanted to tell the story to someone. And maybe he trusted me because I was standing outside the studio, Studio AA at Johnson Space Center. And he was finishing up an interview with someone

in Tennessee. I don't know if it was radio or television, but he completes that interview virtually. And then I hear the PO person She says okay, you're almost done. You got one more interview today. That's with Eric Berger and he says something like oh good I've been waiting to talk to him so That was maybe he had

I don't know But yeah now that's interesting because in the last few weeks as the whole Elon Musk, you know, talking trash about hovering flights on Dragon and Biden specifically in some cases rebuking this or whatever the storyline has been. Butch was the one out there on these interviews saying, yeah, what what Elon's saying is factual and no one else I don't I haven't heard a single other person be able to find any evidence other than what Elon has been saying the president backing him up on that. Other than Butch saying what he said

is factual. It was maybe precise worded. How did you read all that? You have to parse it carefully. First of all, I think Butch is Republican. So he's sympathetic to the Trump administration, I think. But also you read it to the Trump administration, I think. But also, you read it carefully. He says, I don't have any reason to believe it wasn't factual, right? Is basically what he's saying.

He's saying, I don't know. They haven't given me any reason to doubt what they're saying. And he also said, I don't know, and if I did know, I wouldn't say, right? Because astronauts are just not going to answer that question in a controversial way. You could ask it 10 times until you're blue in the face. I do think it's interesting that he would answer those questions and not Sunny. Because I think if she was being honest, she probably would give you a more straightforward answer.

But, again, they've both been astronauts for 25 years, something like that. They know how to answer these questions, right? So you're not going to get anything substantive. So I wouldn't read too much into it other than no astronaut on the record is going to call the administration a liar. At least that hasn't happened in a long time. Yeah, I mean, you know, they fight on Twitter these days, the former astronauts and others. Well, the European astronauts, Andreas Mogelsen is a current astronaut, right? But he's a European astronaut. And so his decision to fly is not being made by NASA, it's being

made by ESA. So the technical issues on the way up to the space station, I feel like you and I in talking about this Starliner flight over the summer, and we had some indication that it was hairier than they had said in these press conferences, but do you feel like the, was there a major divergence in what Butch shared compared to what you had put together

from public statements thus far. So I think there were two things that really surprised me, shocked even I think while I was doing the interview. You know, first of all, you're right, we knew there were problems. And if you go back and listen to the initial press conferences, NASA was very clear about the fact that there were five thruster failures.

But it was all kind of, you know, But it was painted to be not that big of a deal. They had these disaster failures, but they were able to overcome them. NASA expected to work with Boeing to solve them, and they even set a return date like eight days later, something like that. Right. And they were saying, we always had options at our disposal. They never really stated, well, we were in a position where we didn't know what were the things in front of us that we could do.

So we knew abstractly that there were thruster problems, right, and that it was going to be kind of a physics problem to solve. But we did not have any sense of what it was like to be in the spacecraft flying there trying to make the decision whether to dock or whether to abort and come back to Earth. The two things that surprised me about the interview is number one, it was a lot hairier inside that spacecraft than I think anyone really realized outside of NASA or perhaps Boeing. I mean, Butch made it pretty clear that if one more thruster had failed, he would have

lost complete control of the spacecraft, which he's like, I don't know what I would have done. This is a guy who is probably the most experienced pilot remaining at NASA right now. I mean, he's the guy who absolutely wanted those controls. The other thing was that he said it. He did not hold back. He could have been much more measured in what he said about things, but no, he clearly wanted to let the world know that the people in mission control at Johnson Space Center had played a huge role in salvaging that mission. I think he clearly wanted to know that there were real problems with the propulsion system,

that they knew about it in advance because he was quite clear about, in the interview, that was his number one concern going into the flight and that he had spent all this time in the simulator preparing. Tellingly, he said that in no sin ever did he prepare for four thruster failures like they experienced. So I think he wanted to get it out there that this was a really serious situation. I certainly wasn't expecting that though. Yeah, the description of them being in that moment where they're looking at the space station, they're right there, they know that's the safest spot to go and they don't actually know at that moment

Can they make it back with the thruster failures that they're having right before they did that initial reset when they got some back online? What was interesting? Yeah What was interesting about that is I interviewed sunny first and I just had to sort of standard ten minute interview with her And but she said the same she said the same thing at one point She said that we really wanted to go to the station. It was right there and we weren't sure that we were, it seemed like the best option. I said, well, that means you weren't sure whether you could come back to Earth safely. She said, yeah. She and Butch were very much on the same page in the sense

that because the performance of the thrusters were so dodgy and the control sort of so on the edge that probably we're trying to position Starliner to come back for a deorbit burn and intertian and coming back to Earth was more risky than trying to get to the station, quite a bit more so actually. We didn't know that at the time. I remember exchanging some messages with someone during the docking and that person was saying, I'm surprised they haven't aborted. Because they were in violation of the mission rules. But it's clear now why they didn't

abort. It's because that would have been more dangerous than trying to get to the station. Some of the vibes that you're getting from the astronauts is that even if they were told to abort, they might have just went to the station. It felt like it was borderline one of those scenarios where it's like a major disagreement and the crew is going to make this call. I think one of the concerns Butch had about giving up manual control is if it had gone on automatic control and it hit one of the red lines and the computer would have automatically aborted it. And they didn't want that. I'm trying to put this in context to the concerns that we had when the decision was made to have Starliner fly home uncrewed and there was the software change to, you know, undock and basically get out of the ISS as vicinity as fast as possible.

And, um, honestly, even, even the, uh, the like, those are those are very linked, right? The fact that they didn't have reliable control of its spacecraft, they wanted to get this thing out of the way of the ISS as fast as possible. But beyond that, where they're, you know, that the concerns about what if we're not even able to get Starliner home safely at all, right? That that that felt That feels now so much more in the cards than it was when we just thought, oh, they don't want to recontact the space station. But Butch being concerned, can we even complete a deorbiter and get home, make use of our

heat shield because we're in the right spot coming back in. That feels so much more real now than it did when Starliner did come home a couple months ago. Yeah, it was interesting. When this was all going down, the final decision to bring Starliner home versus Dragon, come home Dragon, one of the people mission control, and this was the person who first told me that Xena Cardman was going to get pulled off the mission and replaced with Nick Hagg as commander because they just wanted, they needed someone flying Crew-9 with previous experience. That person also told me that the primary concern with the software update was that if they didn't take the time to get it right, that they could break that port and that Starliner would just remain up there.

And yeah, that does seem sort of more credible. Now I reported that and some people kind of roasted me for it. My usual, the people who love what I write. And by the way, that's one of the reasons I wrote this story the way I did. It's basically like 80% direct quotes from Butch and Sonny was to basically say, look, this isn't me reporting that Starliner was difficult to fly to the space station. This isn't me reporting that the astronaut lives were in danger. This isn't me reporting that it got really hairy inside the cockpit. These are the two people that were there and this is exactly what they're saying. So anyway, yeah, I mean, it was it was clearly

a very serious situation. And on the outside, we were getting very, very little of the story. And the fact that now, you know, we pair this with an update that we got that they're still working on, what did they say? They're 70% of the way through the work that they were trying to do in the post. 70% of the way to the anomaly work, but they haven't solved the stressor issue, which is really like 100% of the issues that matter. Right. So it's 30% in actual, I don't know. It's a weird rating.

But that's an absolutely crazy situation. The fact that we had all these thrusts, clearly didn't fix these thrusts or failures before the crude flight and then had this crude flight and we still don't know an actual route. We have theories but we don't know a root cause or even what would be done. They're talking about more thermal barriers to prevent overheating but it doesn't feel like they're 100% confident that it is just the overheating and it's not some larger design issue at play. Right.

I'm not an engineer so I can't get inside the doghouse and where these thrusters are and really understand what's happening. Like, conceptually, I'm not a physicist or an engineer. But I think the big picture is this. They had thruster issues the first time they tried to dock the space station in 2022. They didn't get the service module back to really assess what was wrong. So they did lots of analysis and figured out

that we're pretty sure what the cause was, made some fixes and then flew the vehicle in 2024, bang. Same problems or very similar problems with the thrusters overheating or being deselected because there were anomalies. And then now, of course, you don't get the thrusters back again, right, because they're on the service module. So you've really got to run an extensive test campaign this summer.

And presumably, the very smart people at Boeing and NASA, they're going to nail this down or get to what is the most probable cause and fix it. And then Starliner will fly again. Now given what we know about this flight now with what Butch said, and given that NASA flew that vehicle in 2024 without having 100% certainty that the thrust ratios were fixed, at this point I would be shocked if the next flight has people on it. Just because that would be a terrible position for NASA to put itself in. The question is, why take that risk? That was the rationale to ultimately bring Butch and Sonny back on crew Dragon over Starliner.

We don't know how much safer Dragon was than Starliner, but it was safer, right? It had flown 10 times and so forth. So if your priority is safety, and that was the guiding decision behind bringing Butch and Sunny home on crew nine, then I would be surprised and almost shocked if the next Starliner mission had crew on it. Because that would not be the safest decision when you can take that mission, put cargo on it, and just keep flying people on Dragon as long as Dragon is successful. Yeah, and the return home decision, if they came back on Starliner, it didn't get us anything better about the program. We're still going to have to go figure

out this issue that they had on the way up to the station. So there was no positive progress on the Starliner issue if they were able to come home successfully. I mean, it does give you, it does make you feel better that like maybe the thrusters were overused or overheated or stressed and sort of under a nominal mission profile, they're gonna perform fine. But yeah, you still have not simulated the performance of the thrusters on the way up

and docking with ISS. One thing I'd love to know, and I don't know an answer to, is if you were to take what is the total amount of stress or performance of a thrusters on a scale of 100, how much of that thruster work is done getting to stations? Like 70%, 90% 50%? I don't know. I'd love to know sort of like how much demand is flying up versus coming back. Yeah.

Yeah. And then, you know, timeline wise, I mean, you're right, the station is in a cargo situation right now where a cargo flight wouldn't be the worst thing because Cygnus is, you know, they've dropped the Cygnus mission, they're reshuffling cargo around Dragon so. I mean, it's crazy, like everything going to station from the Western world at this point is on SpaceX. All cargo, all crew, I mean, all on Falcon 9. It's wild.

So cargo mission, not the worst idea for Starliner. They need to do it to actually have a good flight, take some cargo up the ISS to get it comfortable. Yeah, so would that, is this an additional mission or it would not count for one of those three missions that they already have the, so parsing the statement, right? NASA said we want this to be a crew capable mission, which I think meant don't half-ass the spacecraft,

make it a real thing that could have people in it because you need to make us sure that you can take the entire spacecraft all the way to the station. Yeah. Not that there are people in it, but that it could carry them, versus something like the last flight of Orion

that didn't have the life support system and didn't have. Right, no, it needs to be an all-up mission. You're taking the temperature on that first night in space to make sure it's not 45 degrees in the cabin, all that stuff. So does that come out of their three that they already have the proceed ahead? I mean, what's the word I'm looking for? Authority to proceed, the ATP, to use NASA jargon.

I don't know, man. I'm not a NASA contracting officer. But there is a- You probably can't be at this point. No, I shouldn't be. I think they're not going to fly their six operational missions to ISS, right? So the question is, do they fly three, four, or five

at this point? I don't know how much they would get $100 million more if they flew crew on that mission. I don't know what that answers. But NASA is going to try to work with Boeing. It's in their interest for Boeing to be successful and not to take a bloodbath in terms of financial losses on these missions. So NASA will try to work with Boeing. But yeah, I mean, they're not in the commercial cargo program,

and this isn't a crude mission. So where does it fall? I don't know. But they can come into some accommodation. I'm just thinking about the way the schedule stacks up against them. I think if this mission flew, if let's just say they're going to do the cargo mission, if it flew

in less than a year from now, I would be shocked. The fact that they still don't have a root cause identified and a fix identified and that none of that doesn't work. Then think about how long their launch campaign lead up is to get that thing ready to fly. I can't see this happening sooner than a year from now. Yes, I think spring 2026 would be no earlier. The earliest. That's a reasonable. Then, all right, say it's a year from now. Yes, I think spring 2026 would be no earlier. The earliest. That's a reasonable.

And then, all right, say it's a short duration mission. Yep. It may go up, drops cargo, some cargo off, come back. The post-flight review, is that going to be super short because it went well, or is it going to be let's actually go look at the data? If everything works really well and you look at the data, you could fly the fall mission?

Fall 26. 26? I think that would be a great, for probably best case, timeline. I don't think you can plan on that though because say you target April 2026 for the cargo flight and then Atlas manifest is screwy, the ISS port allocation is kind of hectic all the time. Yep. You need to have some, I don't think they kind of hectic all the time. Yep. You need to have some, I don't think they're flying a crew until 2027.

I mean, I wouldn't, I'm not ruling out 2026. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm ruling it out. Well, I'll bet you're wrong, but I, I just think the way that it jams up is it, it's problematic. You got to fly that flight and have enough time to make sure that you're good to go and also have this, the crew slated in to fly on it and know that they're going to fly on that mission in late 2026. Unless would you at that point, how does this work from the expedition planning perspective? Could they have again, two crews

ready and those would go on either expedition 70 whatever or 80 whatever depending on if they flew in the fall or spring and it's just a matter of does Dragon go first or Starliner go first or do those specific crew members fly in the fall whether it's Dragon or Starliner? Well I know they keep pulling people off of Starliner 1 and putting them on Dragon or Soyuz for that matter. I think that there's a couple of people that are manifested to Starliner 1, veteran astronauts, they're taking all the new people that they want to get into space and moving them off of that. I don't know how well that's all going to shake out.

I agree it's notional and really all of this is fiction until they get through the testing this summer and they have to get to root cause. If NASA doesn't get to root cause on this, Starliner's never flying again. Because people like me would roast them for risking people. What has not been said as much about the crew flight test is that NASA screwed up by letting that vehicle fly, right? Period. I really like the commercial crew program leadership and management and but they shouldn't

let it fly. And so they I don't think they're going to make that mistake again. That's the point of that. Yeah. And so I don't think they're gonna make that mistake again. That's the point of that. Yeah, and then the way I'm looking at that is, I feel like if everything went perfectly from today, they may get three crewed flights before the ISS is into de-orbit position.

I could see four. You could do 27, 28, 29, and 30. You could do that. Okay, so you're assuming we're still cooking with crews in 30. I think so. I mean, I think they've been sort of nebulous, but I think station flies to the end of 2030. And so if the last crew goes up in summer of 20, I don't know.

I don't know what the end of life exactly looks like. My grading then is like every three months of delay on getting a root cause and getting into the process of deploying a fix and then flying this mission is chipping away pretty precipitously at their ability to fly four missions, three missions. And then how many missions, if you get another year or two delayed in here, because we're still,

I'm just wondering what the drop dead point is. It's not like, is NASA going to continue to work on this and is Boeing going to continue to work on this until there's only room for two crewed flights on Starliner before the end of the ISS? And maybe they will because the end of the ISS is very nebulous right now. So Stephen Clark and I had a discussion about this yesterday and we were asked to put the over under on the number of Starliner crewed flights. And the number we came up with was three and a half.

Okay, so they've done one. Oh, not just crew rotations, damn. Right, three and a half. So that would be two operational missions. Because that, you know, you've got the possibility it doesn't fly again, right? Or like this investigation takes 18 months, or they do the cargo flight and there's more issues, right? And so I think two and a half operational missions. So it's three and a half.

Three and a half was also the number of new Glenn flights we predicted between now and the end of 2026. So three and a half is the number of the day. I bet on them getting in a position for May launch here. Okay, good. That was still on the books. I'm like, all right, let's see what happens. You're going to get one of those emails saying your Amazon shipment has been unexpectedly

delayed. Of course, all of this ISS thinking is, here's your question for the way out the door is as Jared Isaacman sets up for his confirmation next week or confirmation hearing next week He met with Cruz this past week. Did you hear anything about what the conversation was? What I've heard is that things are going well and the hearing would not have been scheduled if there was significant opposition. So I And the hearing would not have been scheduled if there was significant opposition. So I could go really long on this, but there was concern way back in January about Cruz holding this up. Senator Ted Cruz, chair of the Commerce Committee, which handles nominations for NASA administrator.

And there was lots and lots of scuttlebutt in February about all this stuff that was happening. But the reality is that Cruz basically was sending the message to key people saying that he was not going to hold this up. He wanted to wait for some various reasons, but the fact that this hearing is scheduled for next week is an excellent sign. And so I would fully expect Jared to be confirmed at this point. Whereas a couple months ago, I think there were some real questions about it. I got nervous when he started tweeting a lot more. I was like, ah, something's going on here. There was definitely a time when

some people in the White House were looking at other alternatives for a NASA administrator. Yes, that's for sure. Well, we'll look forward to that story when you write it someday. But if people, I called out your article at the beginning of the show that people need to go read, so I'll put that in the show notes, but anything else that you're working on these days

you want to point people at? Working on lots of different things, nothing right now that really comes to mind that people should know, you know, need to follow. You know, I mean, it's extremely dynamic and interesting time in spaceflight, good and bad. And so it's just, it's a really interesting time to be in this industry. And we're going to, it's going to be a really frenetic next couple of months because Isaacman will get confirmed the president's going to roll out its budget requests for NASA There will be cuts in the agency in different areas

We'll start to see some policy positions from the White House the moon versus Mars clash is going to be pretty titanic And as all of that is happening, you know, for the Mars stuff to get traction, Starship's got to start working. The two failures this year really set back the idea of changing the architecture of Artemis 2 or Artemis 3. Like, I think those missions probably now

are likely to happen as intended because Starship hasn't flown. So while we're watching the policy stuff in DC, which is really gonna get pretty fast and furious, this next flight really needs to work. That's the perfect place to end it, man. It's a lot of Texas. So you'll track that for us.

But all right, thanks, buddy. Thanks for hanging out. My pleasure. Thanks again to Eric for coming on the show as always and uh yeah if you've not read that story you really gotta go check it out and everything else he's writing over at ours technique so do that and if you like this show you can support me over at manager cutoff.com support there are about 900 of you supporting every single month over there i'm so thankful for your support and that includes 32 executive producers who produced this episode of the podcast. Thanks to Ryan, David, Theo and Violet, Fred, Steve, Warren, the Astrogators at SCE, Matt, Pat, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut,

Frank, Joe Kim, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Josh from Impulse, Eunice, Russell, Bob, Donald, Pat from KC, Jan, Heiko, Stealth Julian, Lee, Joel, Better Everyday Studios, Chris, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this episode possible. If you want to join the crew and get Miko headlines in your life, head over there. Join the crew and I'll do an extra show a week for you in your feed running through all the stories in space, filtering out the ones that you don't need to pay attention to, filling you in on the ones that you do need to pay attention to.

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