Chris Davenport writes about Boeing’s woes. I think they’ll throw in the towel eventually, but it’s really hurting their reputation with NASA. When Starship makes Falcon/Dragon obsolete, Starliner will be even more so.
15 thoughts on “Starliner”
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Falcon/Dragon will fly into the early 2030s, even if Musk doesn’t “not commit suicide in prison.” Starliner can readily be brought back up to seven seats as there’s a 5th seat mount already built in, and two more could be built on the existing cargo racks. Might as well launch it on Falcon 9. Then there’d be 7 LEO taxi hulls, and maybe the fixtures to build a few more. Crewed Starship’s not coming as soon as we’d like, thanks to the you-know-whos (sh! sh!).
Boeing could admit failure but I doubt they will. However, it seems very unlikely they’ll get any follow-on flights even if the commercial space stations are built (which is looking pretty questionable). They only have enough Atlas V N22 rockets for their contracted flights and there won’t be any more. Getting Starliner certified to work on Vulcan will be a non-trivial expense and who is going to pay for that, especially when there’s no guarantee of future flights? An Atlas V N22 is a lot more expensive than a Falcon 9. Vulcan is supposed to be less expensive than the Atlas, but maybe not enough to lower the costs to be competitive with Crew Dragon. When they announced Starliner (then the CST-100), they said it was launch vehicle agnostic and could fly on Atlas V, Delta IV, or Falcon 9. I wonder it can still be flown on a Falcon 9, or did they optimize it for the Atlas V years ago?
As a payload, Cygnus is launcher agnostic. For a crewed vehicle to have a launch escape system, there has to be a launcher health monitoring system. The LES can be triggered from the ground (no different for the range safety system prior to Falcon 9). Or by the crew (as in Gemini, with it’s crew triggered ejection seats). The Falcon 9 one is automatic. But all you have to have is a system that lights up a “time to get off the rocket” light on the crew control panel so the commander can squeeze a “pickle.” Human reaction time is fast enough on a liquid fuel rocket (and note a Dragon 1 survived a second stage RUD intact). For Atlas and Vulcan it’s those pesky solids.
When you’re talking about a crewed capsule, there are several factors that go into launch vehicle integration. LES integration, as you mentioned, is one factor. Others include aerodynamics, vibration, as well as physical and electrical interconnections. As the Starliner development progressed, did they optimize the design to match the Atlas V N22, or did they keep the design general enough to also work with the Falcon 9? I honestly don’t know.
Those aspects are trivial. Starliner’s aero skirt would fit neatly over a Falcon 9 s2, so the reengineering would be a ring to lift the bottom of the service module above the S2 forward done. Probably a short slice of Dragon trunk would do it.
Buying a name (Boeing) is fraught with peril. For the longest time, Boeing kept Commercial Airplane firewalled from Space and Defense, realizing the cultural incompatibility of the business models. But then began the big aerospace shuffle. At one point, Boeing owned Rocketdyne, and bizarrely advertised itself as having built all of the engines that took men to the Moon (it had only built the first stage of the Saturn V). They never built a manned spacecraft, and there aren’t engineers left alive who did to hire – all of them work for SpaceX, and they’re all new. I don’t know why anyone thought it was a good idea to contract with them.
You’d have to ask the guy who thought it…
When you see the revolving door between flag ranks and defense contractors, the rea$on become$ clear.
I think we all know the larger picture, so it’s kind of pointless for me to rehash it, but here goes.
Of Dragon, Starliner, and Orion, only Dragon is well proven and relatively cheap to operate. No other orbital launch system is competitive on price and launch cadence with Falcon 9, so missions that use other launchers are going to cost a lot more. And Starship is looming on the horizon, potentially making capsules obsolete for most applications. Indeed, if Starship works as envisioned, it will be cheaper per flight than a Falcon 9, as it won’t need a drone ship (with escort) or a recovery ship for the returning capsule.
So is there a continuing use case for a capsule that would justify continued development? Perhaps the question is similar to commercial airliners vs private jets or general aviation, but as yet there isn’t the equivalent of small airports. We don’t have lots of little launch sites to connect to lots of useful orbital destinations, we have four or five main launch sites (the Cape, Boca Chica, Baikonur, French Guiana, and China), to connect to the ISS, the moon, or just some general low Earth orbit.
To build a lot more orbital destinations, I would bet on Starship being a success, in that the Super Heavy booster would be by far the cheapest way to launch large structures in orbit. But if Super Heavy is launching large structures, it would also be launching lots of Starships, so capsules might not have a niche to fill. But perhaps risks in Starship’s flip-turn for landing, or powered landing in general, will present a snag operating passenger Starships to their potential.
The Starship vs capsule situation strikes me as similar to the idea of planning to continue Apollo or Gemini capsules once the Space Shuttle was in development, given its promise of cheap, routine access to space (which of course didn’t work out). The answer to almost every possible mission was “Why not just use the Space Shuttle?”
If a capsule use case does remain, such as frequent crew transfers on various space stations, then I think the best business case would focus on lowering launch costs below that of Falcon 9, which perhaps leads to a junior version of Starship/Super Heavy.
So NASA funded the development of three new capsules, with one going into operational use, and the window where capsules are essential may be closing pretty quickly.
“So is there a continuing use case for a capsule that would justify continued development?”
One possible use case will be for lifeboat duty for commercial space stations just as it is for the ISS. I don’t see leaving a Starship attacked to a space station for months at a time. They could revisit the Crew Return Vehicle concept. A CRV could be delivered to a station inside of a Starship and left there for as long as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Return_Vehicle
Some form of “escape pod,” separate from uphill transport craft, seems inevitable, particularly for use on LEO stations larger than those now in the works and which rotate to produce artificial gravity. Starliner is hardly optimal for such a use case and is not economically competitive for uphill transport either so I don’t see it having any future beyond the annual ISS runs currently contracted.
Once ISS is decommissioned, I don’t see any future for Boeing in commercial LEO space stations at all unless Sierra Space elects to continue with a substitute for Orbital Reef, given Blue Origin’s imminent exit from that project, and Boeing elects to remain part of that coalition. I would rate the probability of Boeing doing so at near zero. Boeing joined that coalition for what it could get from NASA and Bezos. Absent Jeff and his Brobdingnagian wallet, I don’t see Boeing sticking around.
Some form of “escape pod,” separate from uphill transport craft, seems inevitable, particularly for use on LEO stations larger than those now in the works and which rotate to produce artificial gravity. Starliner is hardly optimal for such a use case and is not economically competitive for uphill transport either so I don’t see it having any future beyond the annual ISS runs currently contracted.
Once ISS is decommissioned, I don’t see any future for Boeing in commercial LEO space stations at all unless Sierra Space elects to continue with a substitute for Orbital Reef, given Blue Origin’s imminent exit from that project, and Boeing elects to remain part of that coalition. I would rate the probability of Boeing doing so at near zero. Boeing joined that coalition for what it could get from NASA and Bezos. Absent Jeff and his Brobdingnagian wallet, I don’t see Boeing sticking around.
The fastest and easiest path to a Crew Return Vehicle is a cargo Dragon. Keep the interior layout and environmental controls of the manned Dragon (perhaps adding more seats), and delete the launch abort system, since there won’t be a launch to abort.
The development time would be extremely short and the capsules are already very well tested.
In many respects, Starliner is irrelevant. We’ve gotten this far without it and there seems no real reason, other than keeping up appearances to continue with it. Is there any real possibility of enough flights to let Boeing break even?
On the other hand, the ability to produce large aircraft in large numbers at competitive prices in America does seem important. Boeing seems on the verge of failure there as well.
Starship will not come on line at the level described for at least another 10 – 12 years. This is more politics than anything else, and maybe never unless there’s enough bloody, radioactive war to wake up the Citizens of the West (boobularity, where is thy sting?). By 2035, the Dragons and any Starliners fabricated will be wearing out, unless someone makes a decision to keep them in production (presumably after Musk “doesn’t commit suicide in prison”) and Starship is cancelled/handed over to the you-know-whos (sh! sh!), in which case it will never fly.