NASA Finally Has an Alternative to SpaceX

A Boeing spacecraft launched from the coast of Florida into orbit this morning, taking off in the kind of picture-perfect weather that every rocket hopes for in Cape Canaveral. Two veteran NASA astronauts are now on their way to the International Space Station. This particular commute to the space station is a major moment in American space travel. Barry Wilmore, the mission commander, and Sunita Williams, the pilot, are test-driving the new vehicle, known as Starliner. It’s the first time Boeing has launched astronauts into space, and the first time a woman has flown a trial of a new orbital spacecraft.

Every astronaut vehicle that has blasted off from U.S. soil since the beginning of the Space Age has experienced a nail-biting maiden voyage. It is a relief every time a crew safely reaches orbit, especially on a test flight. But the initial success of this mission is particularly comforting because the astronauts are flying on Boeing’s creation, whose debut was delayed by a series of issues. On this first crewed launch, Boeing has proved that it is not a disaster. But its triumph will lead only to more nail-biters. To show that it is reliable, Starliner will have to bring the astronauts home a little over a week from now, and then repeat the whole endeavor.

The troubles of Boeing, the airplane manufacturer, have not reflected kindly on Boeing, the builder of spacecraft. Over the past couple of months, NASA has fielded questions from reporters about whether the mountain of safety issues at the company’s airline division has spilled over into the space department. Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, has told reporters that Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun has previously assured him about the quality of the leadership at Boeing’s space division. (At the end of this year, Calhoun will become the second Boeing chief to step down in five years because of the turmoil.)

Boeing has a long history as a space contractor—it worked on Apollo rockets, the space station, and many projects in between. It’s also the primary contractor for NASA’s newest rocket, the Space Launch System, which is scheduled to launch astronauts toward the moon later this decade. With Starliner, Boeing is attempting to prove that it can deliver the nation’s astronauts to the space station and back by itself—and keep up with SpaceX, which has been doing the job since 2020. The effort has had its own share of technical problems and oversights, including in the past few weeks.

When NASA retired its fleet of space shuttles, in 2011, the space agency turned to the private sector for transporting people to and from the International Space Station, and soon after gave Boeing and SpaceX billion-dollar contracts to develop their own crewed systems. When the companies weren’t carrying government workers, they could sell seats to private citizens, a service that SpaceX has completed several times. SpaceX beat Boeing to the launchpad for an uncrewed test flight of its Dragon capsule, in 2019, which was mostly smooth from start to finish. But when Boeing followed later that year, the attempt had to be cut short. Starliner’s flight software malfunctioned soon after launch, and on the way down, engineers found and quickly patched a software glitch that would have resulted in complete failure of the mission—and, if any astronauts had been on board, the loss of lives.

After spending a year and a half wringing out software bugs, Boeing prepared in 2021 for a second attempt, only to discover more than a dozen corroded valves on the spacecraft as it sat waiting on top of the rocket. In 2022, Starliner finally made it to the International Space Station and back, but before Boeing could attempt a crewed flight, it had to address newly found problems with Starliner’s parachute system, as well as tape within the spacecraft that testing revealed to be flammable. Boeing finally felt ready enough to bring astronauts on board early last month, but the launch attempt was canceled hours before liftoff because of a faulty valve on the rocket. (The rocket, from the manufacturer United Launch Alliance, is used frequently, but it had never flown astronauts before today.) Over the next several weeks, engineers encountered more problems with Starliner itself, but by Saturday, NASA and Boeing felt ready to try again. “All is going well,” Mark Nappi, the manager of Boeing’s commercial-spaceflight program, said at a prelaunch press conference last week. But Starliner was grounded once again: an issue with a launchpad computer this time, one that turned up less than four minutes before the scheduled liftoff, when the astronauts and everyone watching likely believed that they were finally going.

Like the officials, the astronauts now flying on Starliner have stressed that the crewed mission may experience some problems. “Flying and operating in space is hard. It’s really hard, and we’re going to find some stuff,” Wilmore told reporters in March. Officials said the same about SpaceX’s first few crewed Dragon missions, but SpaceX’s launches weren’t preceded by quite so much bad press or quite so many glitches.

Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to arrive at the space station tomorrow. Along the way, the astronauts will briefly take control of the Boeing craft and see how it handles. Then Starliner must dock with the space station and later endure a fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere to touch down in the western United States, ideally at the primary landing site in the New Mexico desert. Starliner must pass each of these tests before NASA certifies the vehicle for regular flights, with more than two astronauts at a time, to the space station.

SpaceX underwent the same process in 2020 with its own inaugural crewed flight. By now NASA astronauts have flown on SpaceX often enough that it’s hardly a blip on space watchers’ radar. But the first few crewed flights on Dragon were all nerve-racking. The same will be true for Boeing’s Starliner. Boeing, in other words, is about to be tested publicly again and again. The writer Jerry Useem recently observed in The Atlantic that Boeing’s decisions in commercial air travel have in recent years turned “the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits.” Another truncated space mission would certainly ding Boeing, and a major failure could turn a company that helped define the Space Age into an emblem of constant calamity.