Starliner Misses Space Station

Today was the debut launch of Starliner, a NASA-funded Boeing project to ferry astronauts between Earth and the International Space Station for the first time in nearly a decade. The last post from this blog stated,

I also note that Boeing is having trouble developing safe passenger airliners after embracing diversity as a core principle. I'd put their odds at less than 50%, and predict there will be problems either way.

Previously this blog has stated that the US is out of the manned space business for good. We will not be sending men to Mars, or the moon, or even out of low-Earth orbit. For the less ambitious goal of low-orbit launches, however, it is possible they will succeed, but there is reason to be much more pessimistic than the conventional sentiment. Most people can't fathom why an American venture to send astronauts to low-earth orbit would be anything by an easily obtained success.

We expect the reporting on the event to come through rose-tinted glasses. If the mission is a success, we will of course hear raving review. If the mission is a complete disaster, then they will have no choice but to admit so. The uncertainty is whether we'll hear honest reports about failures that wouldn't otherwise by apparent to the public.

NASA reports on the launch,

“Early this morning, NASA and Boeing successfully launched Starliner on the first human-rated United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida.

Ah, a success then! Perhaps I was overly pessimistic. Let's read the next paragraph of that report.

“The plan was for Starliner to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station and return home safely to Earth. While a lot of things went right, the uncrewed spacecraft did not reach the planned orbit and will not dock to the International Space Station.

Well, that doesn't sound like a success. The rose-tinted reporting must be in effect. If the measure of success is that the rocket didn't explode on the launch pad, or fail to reach orbit, then it was a success. Does the success mean that the launch would not have killed human passengers?

From CNBC coverage, chosen only because it was the top hit in a news search,

Boeing said it has been able to at least partially correct Starliner’s trajectory in space, getting the vehicle to stable orbit around the Earth while engineers assess the options remaining for the mission. If astronauts had been on board, both NASA and Boeing believe they would be safe.

That's not very re-assuring. Believe they would be safe? Believe is frequently used as a cop-out word, such as when used by politicians. It sounds like there is a chance than astronauts would not have survived the launch. It also sounds like the controllers struggled to get the craft into orbit at all, rather than merely missing the desired orbit. A failed orbital injection would not necessarily be disastrous, but ballistic re-entry means means losing control of the splash-down zone.

“It appears as though the mission elapse timing system had an error in it,” Bridenstine said.

The mission elapse timing system is essentially Starliner’s internal clock. It is crucial to telling the spacecraft’s computers when and how to fire its rocket thrusters to reach the correct orbit.

“That anomaly resulted in the vehicle believing that the time was different than it actually was,” Bridenstine said. “Because that timing was a little bit off, what ended up happening is the spacecraft tried to maintain a very precise control that it normally wouldn’t have tried to maintain and it burned a lot of [propellant] in that part of the flight.”

This is actually a hint that they're being honest. Whatever is the highest criticality rating that Boeing assigns to software components, it surely applies to the system clock. This is a system that they would have developed to the highest level of confidence. It's not the kind of failure they'd like to admit to, if they could at all help it. It's a bit like the Martian lander than become a crater because of failed unit conversions between metric and standard.

Boeing’s human flight controllers tried to communicate with Starliner during the flight to correct the error. But the spacecraft was in a communication dead zone, a gap between two communication satellites.

“We couldn’t get the command signal to the spacecraft that it needed to do the orbital insertion burn soon enough,” Bridenstine said.

With no astronauts on board to take over manual control of the spacecraft, Bridenstine noted that part of the issue comes down to automation.

It is an understandable sequence of events. Normally, disasters don't arise from a single failure, but a series of them.

This represents a blow for NASA as well, likely further delaying the agency’s return to being able to fly its astronauts to the space station. Delays have plagued the commercial crew program, as NASA intended the first launches to happen as early as 2017.

The program was announced in 2010, with a goal of operation by 2015. The five-year plan was just two year's shy of the time between  Kennedy's announcement of a moon-landing deadline and the (supposed) completion of that mission. It has now been nine years to get to a failed unmanned space docking - a feat the Russians achieved in 1967.

With all that said, there's no reason to expect any test mission to be successful. If failures weren't expected, there'd be no need for test launches. Also, Space-X succeeded in a similar test earlier this year, so perhaps one of the programs will succeed. Still, the failure of the maiden voyage to due to a failure of critical software falls in line with our expectations of the Boeing manned-flight program.