Starliner will land on Earth under parachutes at dusk on September 7, without astronauts, after fully undocking from the International Space Station on the evening of September 6.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on June 5 in Crew Flight Test, the first human launch of the Boeing Starliner. They were supposed to return and land on the spacecraft, but NASA decided to switch them to SpaceX Crew Dragon for a February 2025 landing after problems with the Starliner's propulsion system during docking could not be resolved.
Starliner underwent some design changes after a problem with parachutes was discovered in 2023. Before CFT launched, Space.com spoke with NASA's Jim McMichael, a senior technical integration manager in the space mission directorate for the agency's Commercial Crew Program.
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Related: Boeing's first manned Starliner will return to Earth without astronauts on September 6The interview took place at NASA's Kennedy Space Center near Orlando, shortly before the Starliner's May 6 launch attempt, which was later canceled due to technical problems with the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. To fix the Starliner's helium leak, the launch was delayed until June 5. At the time of the interview, NASA and Boeing believed the Starliner would land with astronauts on board.
Space.com: What are your duties?This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.
McMichael: It's basically the ultimate "other tasks as assigned." These are areas that need a little bit of extra integration, a little bit of extra help. I'm kind of moving around. I'm a newbie, really. I've only been doing this program for about two years. But most of the time I've been working primarily on the parachutes.
Space.com: What makes Starliner parachutes similar and different from Dragon or Orion?My background for that is I worked a little bit on the SpaceX Dragon. In my previous jobs at NASA I worked on the [Lockheed Martin] Development of Orion parachute [for moon missions]. "Parachutes" is in my blood.
McMichael: The Boeing Starliner parachute system is basically a scaled-down version of the Orion system. It's a little bit smaller - because the capsule weighs a little bit less - but otherwise the architecture is very similar. There's a heat shield on the front on Boeing and Orion, and they're both removed by parachutes. The architecture is a little bit different in how [the removal] is done. But once you get past that, then we have two drogue parachutes on each that are fired by mortars. Those are cut loose. We have three pilot parachutes on each that pull three main parachutes on each.
The architecture [on Dragon] is a little bit different, in that they fire the drogues with mortars, and then they just hold those drogues on a single fitting. When they're ready to switch from drogues to pilots, they don't cut the drogues off and fire [...] Instead, they release the brake pads, which then lift the main parachutes themselves to open them.
Space.com: So if I could go back a year to when you discovered that the parachutes needed some modifications, I would call that Parachute 1.0. Is it a completely different parachute today? Or is it kind of a modified parachute?Related: Watch SpaceX's Crew Dragon parachutes in action in this epic video compilation
McMichael: The problem that we discovered last summer was called the "soft links." They're the connectors for the suspension lines. They're the primary connection and they carry the main load. By the time we discovered that this was an issue, we had already completed our qualification testing, if you want to call it that. So the trick was we wanted to upgrade those, make them stronger, make a change to make the soft links better.
But we didn't want to invalidate all the testing that we had done up to that point. You get your data by testing the same system over and over again. So we didn't want to start over, because we didn't want to throw away all that qualification test history.
McMichael: To be clear, the soft links that were in the system still had a positive margin. [In other words]they wouldn't be expected to fail. It's just that the margin wasn't as high as we wanted it to be, because they're such a critical element. We actually have a little bit more margin on those things, because we have people on board. The soft connections are the most important load path; if you lose soft connections, you lose the ability to carry load. On other parts of the parachute [...] You could blow up a panel, you could blow up a handful of panels, it wouldn't bother the parachute at all. It wouldn't change the performance.
So that was a change that we made. And while we were doing that - the four most expensive words in the English language - there was also another design change on the table to change the suspension line at the skirt to the parachute. But again, the trick was we wanted to make sure that we didn't invalidate all the expensive, heavy, long testing that we've done in the past with these changes.
Space.com: How are you thinking ahead to Starliner-1, the first operational crewed mission expected to launch in 2025?So, these were small changes. We then did a lot of ground testing to verify their strength. Then we also did airdrop testing ... It's the law of unintended consequences that can bite you sometimes. We wanted to make sure that there were no unintended consequences of making these small changes.
McMichael: Parachutes take a long time to manufacture. They're a long, long lead item, if you will, and they're installed on the spacecraft fairly early - so Starliner-1 parachutes are the same as what we're flying today. That said, there's a little bit of a difference in the work that we have to do between CFT and Starliner-1.
The suspension lines themselves - the material as we buy it - you buy in production lots. The production lot of suspension line material for Starliner-1 is a different lot than for CFT, so we have to check that that suspension line material is at least as strong and re-verify our margins with the new suspension line material.
Spoiler alert: We have the data [from pull testing]. We've seen that the new suspension lines for Starliner-1 are actually a little bit stronger. So we know it's going to be OK. We just haven't dotted the i's and crossed the t's on the paperwork yet.
Related: What's next for Boeing Starliner after first crewed test flight?
We'll be inspecting the CFT parachutes very carefully. That's one of the things we'll be looking at in our in-flight footage. We'll be looking at all the ground stills - we've got ground video, so we'll be looking at how the parachutes deploy. That doesn't sound very scientific, but that's a big part of looking at parachute performance: just watching them deploy is one of the most important things we do.
And when we find them in the desert, we will inspect them very carefully: every joint, every piece of clothing, every parachute. We will inspect to make sure that there are no changes or anything unexpected. Very often you end up with little tears, rips, torn things in a parachute. And that's perfectly fine. It's completely expected. So we will do all of those inspections, but [so far]we do not expect any changes.
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Space.com: Since you're part of the parachute team, you can't fully relax until it's actually over.- Here's what Boeing Starliner astronauts are doing on the ISS as NASA works on their ride home
McMichael: We joke that this whole spacecraft is just a way to put parachutes into orbit. But you're right, we're the last - way back when Apollo made a video after all their testing was over about the Apollo parachute system. And the title was "Project Apollo: The Last 5 Miles Home."
We really take that to heart because the parachutes are the last five miles home. The earth is big in the windows. We turn off the main switches at 8,000 feet [2.4 km]. In the overall scheme of space travel, 8,000 feet is pretty close to the ground. We deploy the main parachutes and it's front and center: the big beautiful picture of the crew module hanging from the main parachutes.
So yeah, we're not relaxing until we get the drugs [...] and then, once all the main lines are inflated - we have the three main lines fully inflated - we can start breathing.
