NASA Should Ditch the Spin

Before Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams took off for the International Space Station in early June, NASA removed some of their suitcases from their Boeing-made spacecraft. The ISS was in urgent need of a new pump for the system that recycles urine into water, so the personal items had to go. There’s no laundry on the ISS, but no matter. For their inaugural mission on Boeing’s Starliner, Butch and Suni, as the astronauts are known, were planning to stay on the space station for only about a week.

But one week turned into another, and then another, and then seven. Before Starliner launched, NASA had set a 45-day deadline for keeping the spacecraft in orbit for the sake of the capsule’s batteries, which hadn’t been tested in space yet. Today is day 48. According to NASA officials, the batteries are still performing well, and Starliner could remain docked to the space station as late as mid-August while the agency and its aerospace contractor troubleshoot issues with the spacecraft. SpaceX has been successfully shuttling astronauts to ISS for four years, and NASA badly wants a second option. But this historic mission—the first time Boeing has ever flown NASA astronauts—has turned into a debacle.

Officials at the agency and the aerospace company have insisted that Wilmore and Williams are not in any danger, but the public narrative—that the astronauts are stranded on the ISS—has not been flattering. Boeing has taken the brunt of the bad reviews, perhaps because public perception of the aerospace company is already suffering from well-publicized issues with its airplanes, including a door falling out mid-flight. But NASA, which hired Boeing to transport its astronauts, bears significant responsibility too: for its uneven supervision of Starliner’s development leading up to launch and its overly guarded communications to the public since, which have done more to fan rumors about the state of the mission than dispel them.

NASA itself has previously acknowledged that it could have handled the Starliner program better. In an uncrewed 2019 test flight, in which Starliner failed to reach the ISS, engineers had to hurriedly patch a flight-software glitch that would otherwise have caused the destruction of the spacecraft and—if any astronauts had been on board—the loss of human lives. A NASA official later said that its oversight of the program had been “insufficient.” NASA personnel have since worked more closely with Boeing employees, looking over the aerospace giant’s shoulder as it has addressed software errors, corroded valves, and parachute concerns. By May of this year, in the lead-up to the long-awaited crewed flight, a Boeing official said the Starliner team was operating at “peak performance.”

Then fresh problems appeared—a helium leak, a “design vulnerability” in the propulsion system—delaying the launch by a month. When Wilmore and Williams finally reached orbit, Starliner sprouted more helium leaks and some of its thrusters conked out, forcing the astronauts to delay their docking with the ISS. Nine days after the astronauts arrived, NASA announced the first of several postponements of their departure; the malfunctioning thrusters are on a part of Starliner that is discarded before reentry, and officials said they wanted to collect as much data as they can before it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere. Eventually, NASA stopped setting new return dates altogether and began conducting tests of a Starliner thruster at a facility in New Mexico to better understand how the thrusters might perform during a return journey.

[Read: Boeing was this close to launching astronauts]

None of this, officials have said, means the astronauts are in dire straits. And to be fair, the “stranded” narrative is certainly exaggerated. (NASA maintains that it has no plans to retrieve Wilmore and Williams with SpaceX’s trusty Crew Dragon.) And yet the agency’s attempts to refute any stuck-ness narrative have been both ineffective and baffling. For weeks, officials have repeatedly claimed that, in an emergency, Starliner could whisk the astronauts away from the ISS and deliver them to the ground. But clearly a normal return is being held up, for reasons significant enough that NASA is willing to change certain mission parameters, as well as make time for running tests at home and reviewing the results.

Recently, I asked Steve Stich, the manager of NASA's commercial-crew program, whether Wilmore and Williams’s journey home is directly contingent on the testing, which involves engineers disassembling a thruster and inspecting every bit for flaws. Stich didn’t give a firm yes or no. Instead, he said that NASA wants to finish the testing first, to “make sure we’re not missing anything before we commit to undocking and landing.” NASA did not respond to a request for more information on Stich’s reply, and Boeing did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

That sort of obfuscation forces observers to read between the lines. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that NASA believes bringing the astronauts home before they’ve raked Starliner with a fine-tooth comb is simply too risky right now. “Of course they don’t feel comfortable putting them in the vehicle,” a retired NASA astronaut told me, speaking on condition of anonymity so that he could be candid. “Otherwise they would have put them in it already.”

[Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA]

Maybe officials worry that admitting outright that a return journey is currently too risky would fuel more sensationalist coverage. Or perhaps NASA leaders want to protect Boeing. After all, they plan to fly more crews on Starliner, and any hint of frustration from the space agency could erode public trust in its already troubled contractor.

NASA would fare better if it leaned into uncertainty instead of avoiding the very mention of it. To borrow the agency’s own mantra, Starliner’s first crewed flight is a test mission. Anomalies are to be expected, and NASA is well equipped to handle them. This is the agency that rescued the Apollo 13 crew with a roomful of engineers, cardboard, and duct tape. It’s no stranger to improvising solutions to unexpected problems. Even more important, NASA owes the public as much transparency as possible: It is a taxpayer-funded agency, and a few billion dollars of its budget have gone directly into the Starliner program. “It is discouraging that NASA appears more focused on shaping the story than on their mandate to provide unfettered information to taxpayers,” Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator and the author of the memoir Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age, told me.

Engineers completed the testing campaign in New Mexico last week, and a public update on Starliner is expected tomorrow. Meanwhile, on the ISS, Wilmore and Williams have slotted into the rhythm of living in space, contributing to scientific research and station maintenance. Their lives may depend on Starliner working properly, so no one can fault NASA for taking an extremely cautious approach. But few, I believe, would fault the space agency for being more direct about it.