With the economy collapsing, geopolitical tensions threatening outright war, and an historic election on the horizon, one could be forgiven for missing one of the more interesting and portentous stories unfolding in the news—namely, the fact that two NASA astronauts seem to be stranded on the International Space Station as a result of the legendary incompetence of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
With two NASA astronauts still stranded in space for weeks, officials at the space agency have insisted that the troubled Boeing Starliner, plagued with technical issues, can take the two explorers back to Earth.
So, why haven’t they already?
An unnamed retired astronaut tells The Atlantic the obvious truth that NASA has been dancing around since the beginning of this space boondoggle: it’s just too risky right now.
“Of course they don’t feel comfortable putting them in the vehicle,” the retired astronaut told the magazine, referring to the Starliner, which transported the astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) back in June and is meant to return them back home. “Otherwise they would have put them in it already.”
Although Boeing claims a return trip should be possible this month, the Starliner’s checkered history of failures and delays calls this timeline into doubt.
No date has been set for a return trip, with the earliest date now pushed back to August. To explain away the delay, NASA officials have said repeatedly that they want to test and troubleshoot the Starliner capsule before committing to a return trip.
The trouble started when helium leaks were discovered on Starliner prior to takeoff. They opted to launch anyway, and on its journey toward the ISS, it started experiencing additional leaks and malfunctioning thrusters.
Boeing has gotten the brunt of the negative press, not least because the company’s airplanes have been in the news for falling doors and other quality control issues, casting a pall over its space efforts as well.
But NASA shouldn’t escape scrutiny, the Atlantic article argues, and the space agency has been less than forthcoming with issues surrounding the Starliner, which has been ill-fated from the start of its development with various technical issues and aborted launches.
Things are getting so bad that, despite Boeing’s strenuous protestations to the contrary, it looks like there is a strong chance that Boeing’s competitor SpaceX will have to send one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft to safely return the stranded astronauts to earth.
NASA this week has been discussing the possibility of returning Starliner empty and instead using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft to return its astronauts. There is no consensus among those responsible for making the decision, that person said, calling the outcome of NASA’s ongoing discussions unpredictable given the variety of factors involved.
Boeing’s ill-fated Starliner program has been in the works since 2010, making the project nearly 15 years old. The idea of the Starliner was to develop a spacecraft and space capsule capable of taking astronauts and space tourists alike to the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit. The first Orbital Test Flight did not take place until 2019, almost 10 years later, and it was a spectacular failure as a “software error” forced the test launch to abort prematurely. Numerous failures, billions of dollars, and years later, the Starliner managed to dock successfully in an unmanned mission to the International Space Station in May 2022. After multiple delays, Starliner’s third manned flight to the space station took off on June 5th of this year and was scheduled to return on June 14th, barely more than a week later. As of the time of this writing, it is August 6th, and the Starliner has still not returned, leaving two astronauts effectively stranded on the International Space Station on account of thruster problems, helium leakages, and a whole host of other difficulties. How embarrassing!
As mentioned above, there is a decent chance that Boeing will have to have their competitor, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, rescue the stranded astronauts with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. NASA’s Associate Administrator William Gerstenmeier gushed about how excellent Boeing’s Starliner proposal was, enthusiastically approving Starliner’s $4.2 billion contract compared to SpaceX’s $2.6 billion contract. Ironically, Gerstenmeier currently works at SpaceX as Vice President of Build and Reliability. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has had multiple successful crewed missions (including return trips) spanning all the way back to May of 2020.
It is worth taking a step back and noting how pathetic this situation is. On Boeing’s side, we have a decade-long multibillion-dollar failure to even accomplish a successful crewed round trip to the International Space Station in low-earth orbit. Think about that in relation to the fact that over half a century ago, NASA accomplished multiple manned missions to the moon using slide-rule technology.
There is perhaps no better symbol for the decline of America than the failure of our once great space program, which is why we at Revolver have followed these failures quite closely.
There was the James Webb Telescope, designed to replace the legendary Cold War-era Hubble telescope. While the James Webb Telescope is successfully launched in space, the saga leading up to this launch is instructive. Indeed, the James Webb Telescope was 14 years late and a whopping 20 times the original budget!
The JWST started development in 1996, with a 2007 launch date. Originally budgeted to cost $500 million, that price tag has ballooned to $10 billion.
The project’s Wikipedia page lists at least 14 times NASA has promised a launch date for the JWST, only to kick it back farther[.]
If the disastrous war in Afghanistan were a telescope, it would be the James Webb telescope.
When Americans squander decades of time and billions of dollars, they can generally rest assured that a defense contractor is lurking somewhere in the storyline. Naturally, Northrop Grummon was the James Webb Telescope’s prime contractor.
Read More: NASA, Decrepit, Woke, and Desperate, Is 14 Years Late on Hubble Replacement. Why?
But the James Webb Telescope is nothing compared to the embarrassment that is NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System).
To this day, the most powerful single combustion chamber rocket in US history remains the F-1 rocket engine. This was the engine used to propel the Apollo moon missions. But today, American rocket engineers are incapable of reproducing the F-1. They remarkably lack the skills and know-how to match earlier achievements from generations ago.
In other words, antiquated technology is as elusive to us today as future technology. America’s reached its high water mark for a task as rote and mechanical as rocket power over 50 years ago.
It’s not for lack of throwing money at the problem. The Space Launch System (“SLS”) was supposed to be NASA’s solution to the rocket impotence problem. NASA began development on SLS 13 years ago, despite costs to taxpayers ballooning up to a whopping $40 billion and counting. NASA’s SLS has done nothing but miss deadlines, fail tests, and burn through budgets for a decade. It is the famed SLS program, specifically the lunar Artemis program, that is supposed to meet NASA’s stated mission of sending the first woman and first person of color to the moon.
Instead, after 13 years and $40 billion spent, the SLS managed, as of yet, to send an unmanned Orion spacecraft to merely orbit the moon in November 2022 as part of its Artemis I mission. It is striking, for that matter, just how unambitious the mission actually was. We had Surveyor missions sending robotic spacecraft to the moon as early as the mid-1960s. Of course, the difference with Artemis is that this is allegedly in preparation for a manned lunar mission, though the completed Artemis I mission in question was unmanned. What is particularly bizarre and discouraging about this is that the Artemis I mission didn’t even attempt to test a lunar module touchdown. It is remarkably unambitious and even a bit strange to go all the way to the moon to test the new rocket and not even simulate a touchdown on the moon—perhaps a task for another test mission several years and tens of billions of dollars down the road.
As for the manned moon mission scheduled for the second phase of Artemis’ mission, don’t hold your breath. After multiple delays, the next phase, which is a manned lunar flyby, is not scheduled until March 2025, though it is almost inconceivable that this will happen then. Note that even this, which certainly won’t happen by March 2025, is just for a lunar flyby, not a lunar landing!
Again, it is astonishing to think of this profound lack of progress in light of the fact that we conducted several successful manned lunar missions—round trip—over a half century ago with slide rule technology!
This was 50 years ago, a feat achieved with pre-pocket calculator technology, that no advanced nation has been able to replicate since pic.twitter.com/59kRRKVFil
— Darren J. Beattie 🌐 (@DarrenJBeattie) December 20, 2021
And let’s look at the costs for a bit, comparing the cost of the entire Apollo mission to that of the already ill-fated SLS disaster. Let us revisit this cost comparison from a previous piece.
It is instructive to compare the price tag of Artemis, the new lunar space program that aims to launch the first woman, person of color, and shemale onto the moon, with the Apollo program—NASA’s pioneer lunar program that encompassed multiple manned moon missions, including the very first in human history.
The 40 billion dollar price tag so far for the new Artemis lunar program (which encompasses the SLS rocket) already amounts to nearly one fourth of the 200 billion dollar inflation adjusted cost of the entire Apollo program.
It is important to keep in mind that this inflation-adjusted 200 billion dollar price tag for Apollo included research and development, government contracts, labor, and every other aspect of the decade long program. Crucially, this involved the cost of inventing from scratch new space technology that had never been tested before in human history — special rocket engines, command modules, lunar landers, computer equipment, and all of the remarkable component parts. Within each broad category of innovation you have an arresting volume of sub-categories, for instance, multiple rockets for each stage of a launch.
NASA’s new Artemis lunar program, by contrast, has already cost nearly one fourth of the entire Apollo program! This is especially humiliating given the fact that we have already gotten to the moon, multiple times. The hard part has already been done. One would think if the Apollo program cost 200 billion (in inflation adjusted dollars) the same lunar feat should cost a fraction of that in 2022. Indeed, one would think the cost efficiencies of over a half century of technological advancement would at least offset the cost of inflation.
The SLS program, like the Starliner program with which we opened this piece, is a joint Boeing-NASA collaboration. Can this all be explained by virtue of DEI, or is there something else going on? Inquiring minds want to know.
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