The Decision Is Made - Boeing Might Be Safe? But SpaceX Is SAFER!

hello it's Scott Manley here three months ago boing Starliner rolled out of its integration facility getting ready to carry two astronauts to the International Space Station Barry Wilmore and Sita Williams better known as B and sunny and now even better known beyond your average space flight nerd as the story of this flight has been carried by Major news channels on the account of the fact that uh but and sunny have spent the last two months on the International Space Station and aren't going home until next year and if everything is going to plan they'll be going home on a SpaceX spacecraft rather than a Bo spacecraft that is the decision which was announced yesterday after weeks of testing analysis and meetings on this subject it's decided that instead of risking the crew on the Starliner spacecraft which has a few issues NASA is only going to send up two astronauts on crew 9 and after a six-month rotation but and sunny will return home on that spacecraft initially only two test flights had been planned but on the very first Starliner flight there were software issues which led to the spacecraft almost not making it to orbit and being unable to reach the International Space Station so plans were changed a second test flight with no crew was planned and this one after many delays was ready to launch at the end of July 2021 that was when they found problems with valve positions in the spacecraft and uh they had to abort the launch take it all the way back literally tear down the propulsion system and rebuild it because there were issues with a corrosion due to the propellent interacting with moisture in the air apparently this led to basically like almost a year delay it wasn't until May of 2022 that they finally launched and made it to the space station of course carrying a little uh plushy Kerbal with them too and so that proved that the spacecraft was finally safe and so with that they proved the spacecraft was safe for flight they could move forward with the crew test right but no no they had to go and fix issues with wiring harnesses that were potentially combustible they had uh issues with the parachute harnesses and they had to fix those but eventually in may they were ready to go in May the atlas 5 Starliner rolls out to the pad uh Butch and sunny are sitting on board counting down to launch and then bizarrely the launch ends up being delayed because the booster has a problem the outlas 5 in Centaur has been an incredibly reliable booster but in this case there is a chattering oxygen relief valve that means it's opening and closing very quickly and making a you know a sound and so they have to roll the entire booster back to fix this and replacing a valve on a centor uh is Complicated by the fact that the Cent is stabilized by its own pressure so if you're going to take a pressure valve off it'll lose that pressure it needs a whole supporting structure to hold up the tank while they're performing the valve replacement that's why it took them a month before they finally launched in early June and on this flight the one that we are currently in the middle of they have problems with their thrusters there's two things first of all there's uh leaks in the helium system and look helium is a tricky bugger it will try to escape via any opportunity you give so like okay you know people solve these problems over time the the bigger problem is that the thrusters they are using to control the spacecraft are starting to perform out of spec and the systems warning them that they're having to take the thrusters offline because if the Thruster is not performing you know to it specification there's a chance that something is going wrong it's damaging itself it's potentially going to fail in some more catastrophic way but they're able to work through this and approach the space station safely and perform a docking to the ISS and so now they're safely at the space station they can uh stretch their legs get on board have some fun talk to their new friends because they're going to be hanging out these people for a little longer than they expected I mean the initial mission was supposed to be a couple of weeks but in the interest of safety um Engineers on the ground want to investigate these Thruster issues and see if there's something that they can understand they you know they look at the helium issues and it turns out that while a lot of the talk early on it's about helium leaks that's not the showstopper it's these thrusters and it's not that thrusters are necessarily performing that far out of spec but as an engineer you want to understand what is going on because if you don't understand these small out of spec me uh readings could actually be harbingers of something much more catastrophic about to happen and we see this all the time in aviation where minor issues get ignored and misunderstood and they turn into major disasters so Butch and sunny find out early on that they're going to be spending a little extra time on the International Space Station meanwhile the boing and aerojet Rocket D engineers get to work trying to replicate the problems that they have seen uh with the engines and so they're doing engine firings at white stands sand test range and I'm sure over the last 2 and a half months these Engineers have been putting in a lot of overtime trying to understand this problem because these engines are all in the service module and the service module is going to get ditched it's going to burn up so they won't be able to bring them back for testing the engines sit in these uh structures on the side of the spacecraft they're in a cluster here these are called dog houses and one of the theories is that the dog houses are allowing too much heat to be retained and so when they're doing these a lot of Thruster firings over time the heat is reaching higher temperatures than it has during the tests and the tests at White Sands have shown that the some of the Teflon seals used to drive the valves are expanding and distorting and restricting the the oxidizer valves which in turn means that the thrusters aren't turning on with as high a performance as expected and that sounds totally plausible as an explanation but you know there's a few questions still for example they subsequently did tests of the engines on in orbit and some of the engines returned to normal performance so they need to figure out how the Teflon seals are you know not getting in the way after they were getting in the way they need to quantify this risk and frankly they haven't been able to quantify the risk to the level that is required to trust it for to put crew on board and there's two concerns here one is that the spacecraft could would just fail to reach re-entry which I think is highly unlikely because they still have Reserve thrusters on the capsule itself but equally during departure from the ISS they could get into a situation where the the trajectory is going to carry it back into the ISS and cause some damage and there just really isn't the knowledge to understand this problem that's why Butch and sunny are going to be switching their return ride from a Starliner to the crew n dragon and that was originally supposed to have launched by now but it has been delayed because Starliner has been occupying its parking spot at the space station now a crew dragon has four seats and the original plan for crew 9 was going to be Zena Cardman Nick hag and Stephanie Wilson along with Ros Cosmos Cosmonaut Alexander gorinov but of course if they're going to have two extra passengers on the way down they need to get rid of two people and it's not clear who is actually going to fly on crew n now you might think that Zena Cardman and Nick hag would be the two because they were in the center seats and they were training for that role she was the mission Commander but Zena is a rookie she's never been to the ISS and NASA wants any spacecraft going to the ISS to have crew on board that has that experience the Ross Cosmos Cosa Alexander coronov he has no ISS experience either so uh if Ros Cosmos requ Rees him to be on board that means that Zena can't go and so that would suggest then that Nick ha has to become the commander so I would bet if Ros Cosmos does their thing that it'll be Nick and Alexander but that's all up in the air right now they could pick somebody completely different now because the Dave Clark's suits used on the boing are not compatible with spacex's suits they'll have to bring up a pair of suits for the crew there there is a SpaceX suit on orbit but that is the the contingency suit for Tracy Caldwell dieson who flew up in a soyu and they want to make sure that she has an alternate way home as well but before crew n can get to the space station Starliner is going to have to undock and free up its parking spot that'll mean software updates which you know we've heard about I'm sure the undock and the return to Earth will probably not be a big deal but you know in the interests of safety this is what they've decided and look I think we should pause for a second and realize what a unique situation this is this this is the first time the US has had two different active crew spacecraft we have the luxury of being able to choose between one or the other if this had happened 5 years ago when the other return option was Su I'm not sure NASA would be quite as eager to switch the crew off of a Starliner which has some minor issues over to soyu because soyu has its issues too indeed in the last couple of years we had soyu's ms23 losing its cooling circuit and the crew had to remain on station for a whole year as a a replacement spacecraft or replacement so use was sent up and don't be under the impression that Starliner is some ridiculously dangerous death trap because as of right now it is still the preferred return option in a contingency scenario if there was a disaster on the space station right now but and sunny would fly back to Earth on the Starliner because that is their best option but yes uh when Starliner undocks to make room for Dra crew 9 that means there's going to be a few days where they don't have a dedicated return spacecraft and the current contingency plans there is they basically strap themselves to the cargo underneath the seats in uh an emergency scenario now this highly unlikely this is going to happen but that's it yeah they're just going to lay down there and uh their suits aren't going to be useful so we'd better hope that the the dragon doesn't have any issues but presumably soon after that crew 9 will get there with SpaceX suits for them and everything will be fine you know but and sunny will spend another 6 months on the space station and their 8-day flight to space will turn into 8 months in space and I'm pretty sure at this point the this will be career capping uh you trip for these guys now I did wonder if they would send anything back in Starliner some cargo like I I think the spacecraft might actually need a bit of mass some ballast but I'm sure that they'll look around the station look for some low profile things that can be sent back as cargo maybe they'll find something small you know something that could fit inside Starline or something which may be even inexorably linked to Starliner like a Bo's reputation but before Starliner is going to leave there's going to be a suu crew change over so we're going to have an extra crew come up in the soyu and for as a space nerd I noticed right away that's going to be 12 people on the International Space Station which is more than they've had for a very long time the last time they had that many people people would be in the shuttle era towards the end they had two soos launched and they would La docked and they would have a shuttle come up and uh the most they actually had in that scenario was 13 people seven people from the shuttle and six from the two soos the last time we had 13 people in the space station one of the soyu's crew was Tracy Caldwell Dyson who is currently on the ISS as a member of a soyu's crew so while 12 isn't a record for the International Space Station it's a big number also in the next week we have a Polaris Dawn and uh a blue origin suborbital flight with six people on board there's a chance if these things line up that we will have 22 humans in space at the same time for you a very short amount of time but people have also been asking um you know is this the first time that we've had crew go up in one spacecraft and come down on another and no it's not we've actually had this quite a lot people going up on the shuttle and then coming back and so things like that in the early days of the International Space Station the plan was that the crews would be flowing up uh on the space shuttle and they would perform their crew rotation and the soyu would be kept as a sort of emergency spacecraft right so you would have a soyu crew come up and then they would switch over to the soyu that was there and bring it back and so that's how they would refresh the station like uh Escape system and these short flights to change the soyu over this is how rosos MOS got started with the whole Space tourism thing they would send people up on one and they would come back this would be just basically a a refresh of the spacecraft and back in 2002 Lance Bass a singer with nyn he was training to go on one of these tourist flights and ultimately that didn't work they didn't get the funding it fell through so he didn't fly instead an experienced crew did the change over and we got like an Issa astronaut getting a small time and then early 20 23 the Colombia disaster happened and that meant the Expedition 6 crew who had flown to the ISS on the space shuttle now had to return to Earth on the soyu instead and that crew was Nikolai badarin Ken Bowersox who you might have seen the last few weeks because he is on all those press conferences with NASA about talking about Starliner I'm not sure what his official title is but he's you know in charge of a lot of this stuff so he knows about uh you know the potential problems with switching crew between return vehicles and the third crew member is Don pit and you might know him he's made some great little videos showing effects in zero gravity he's done fantastic photography and he's going back to space next month on a soyu what are the odds of that huh but it gets better because you see that so that they had to use as a return vehicle that was the first of the so Ed TMA series that's basically they'd extended the size of the couches a little they'd made a few other modifications so it was technically a test flight of a new version of a Space Capsule and on return they actually had some issues with the spacecraft and it performed a ballistic re-entry so yes they had problems with their re-entry as well and that is a story I will tell in a different video I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music]