Starliner Finally Got Off the Ground, and Now Everyone's Watching the Thrusters

I've been a space nerd since I was about nine years old, sitting cross-legged in front of a TV watching a shuttle launch on a Saturday morning rerun, so when Boeing's Starliner actually left the pad on Wednesday morning I had the NASA livestream open in a tab all day, half-ignoring my actual work. Launch was 10:52 am Eastern out of Cape Canaveral, an Atlas V doing the heavy lifting, and on board were Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two astronauts who between them have been to space enough times that this is basically a commute for them.

It's worth saying up front: this thing was supposed to fly years ago. Boeing's been trying to get a crew into this capsule since roughly 2019, and it kept getting bumped, scrubbed, sent back for parachute redesigns, valve fixes, you name it. There was a scrub back in early May over a bad valve on the rocket itself, and then another delay after that for a helium leak they found in the service module. So by the time Wednesday actually happened, I think a lot of people who follow this stuff had stopped holding their breath. I certainly had. I didn't even tell my wife it was happening until it was already in the air, because I've been burned by "today's the day" headlines on this program more than once.

And then it just... went. Clean launch, no last-second aborts, no drama on ascent. I actually cheered a little, alone, at my desk, which is a slightly embarrassing thing to admit but there it is.

The part nobody's cheering about

Here's the thing though, and this is the part I keep coming back to: that helium leak they patched up before launch wasn't the only one. Once Starliner was actually flying, they found more small leaks in the thruster system, and NASA and Boeing have both been pretty open that they're keeping an eye on it rather than treating it as some emergency. Docking with the station happened Thursday evening instead of the original earlier target, in part because they had to work around some thruster issues during the approach.

Officially the line is that helium is inert, the leak rate is small, and there's more than enough margin in the tanks to get the crew home safely whenever they're ready to come back. I believe that, mostly. NASA doesn't have a great track record of hiding bad news about crew safety after Columbia, they tend to overcorrect toward caution now. But I'd be lying if I said a leaking spacecraft with people in it doesn't make my stomach do a little flip regardless of what the margins say. Small leaks that "aren't a problem" have a way of becoming the opening paragraph of an incident report a few years later. I'm not predicting disaster here, I just don't love the vibe of "it's fine, we're monitoring it" on a brand new crewed vehicle's very first flight with astronauts strapped in.

Also, and I say this as someone who wants Boeing to succeed here because more options for getting people to orbit is good for everyone, the company has had a genuinely rough few years of headlines about quality control on the commercial airplane side. That's a totally different division, different engineers, different everything, I know that intellectually. But when you're reading "unexpected leak discovered in flight" about a Boeing vehicle in 2024, your brain doesn't really care that it's a different org chart. It just goes there.

Watching NASA TV is still a weird experience

Small tangent because I can't help myself: NASA's public stream still has this charmingly dated quality to it, the graphics look like they haven't been touched since maybe 2015, and the commentary alternates between extremely technical acronym soup and oddly folksy small talk from the hosts. I mean that as a compliment, mostly. There's something nice about a livestream that isn't optimized within an inch of its life for engagement metrics. It buffered twice on me during the approach to station, which on a Wednesday afternoon on a decent home connection is kind of funny for an agency that lands rovers on Mars.

Anyway. Wilmore and Williams are up there now, Starliner's docked, and the plan as of today is they'll spend a bit over a week on station before undocking and doing the return flight, which is really the part of this mission everyone actually cares about, since getting a new capsule back through reentry and down to a parachute landing in the New Mexico desert is the whole point of the test. I'll be watching that one too, tab open, half-ignoring my inbox again.