There is a scene from a really bad space movie in which a bunch of astronauts are rocketed off to destroy an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Just before blast-off, one of the crew turns to a fellow guinea pig and says something like “How does it feel to be riding on top of 800,000 pounds of rocket fuel in a device built of components supplied by the lowest bidder?”
It’s something to ponder as four astronauts head back to Earth this week from the International Space Station (ISS). Two — Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — have been there for nine months.
Jokes aside about apparent pronatalist Elon Musk welcoming another child, SpaceX gives Nasa and the Russians sleepless nights because, as it turns out, it is the cheapest of them all. Put another way: where the Russians reportedly charge upwards of $86m for an astronaut’s seat in a Soyuz capsule heading to the ISS, SpaceX does it for about $50m.
While SpaceX’s recent and well-publicised rocket failures make for good schadenfreude, the company is doing a lot better at space travel than Boeing, whose faulty Starliner is the reason Suni and Butch spent nearly a year at the ISS instead of a week.
It is a very public humiliation for Boeing, which is regularly in the news for the wrong reasons. Production delays at its aircraft plants have left airlines scrambling for alternatives as delivery times for new aircraft stretch out by years, while a slew of incidents, including two fatal crashes, keep two words front of mind for Boeing hawks: “quality” and “control”.
The Seattle plane maker has already lost nearly $2bn on Starliner as it grapples with the vehicle’s glitches and flaws.
Still, the humiliation could be worse: at least Suni and Butch aren’t being fetched by a rocket made by upstart Chinese plane maker Comac or something built by Airbus.
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