Retired NASA Engineer Warns Boeing's Starliner Could Lose Control During Return and Crash in Populated Area

Later today, NASA will attempt to autonomously undock Boeing's much-maligned Starliner spacecraft from the International Space Station and deorbit it for a soft landing in the New Mexico desert.

Glaring technical issues plaguing the spacecraft's propulsion systems led to NASA abandoning plans for it to bring the two astronauts it carried to space back home on its return journey, instead scheduling the pair to come back to Earth on a SpaceX mission in February.

But even without any crew on board, retired NASA Johnson Space Center engineer Don Nelson warns that there could still be risk.

"There is a high probability that the Boeing Starliner service modules thrusters will exceed their design temperature limits and fail during the deorbit burn," he wrote in an email to NASA's Commercial Crew Program leadership, and "therefore there is also a high probability that the service module debris and command module will impact in a populated area... downtown Houston?"

"The only safe way to handle the Starliner is to put it in a death dive deorbit trajectory into the Pacific," the email continued. "The NASA safety panel remains silent on this catastrophic issue. Will your silence get someone killed?"

In an interview with Futurism, Nelson cautioned that an imperfect deorbit burn for the troubled Starliner capsule could result in disaster. A reentry at the wrong altitude could cause it to break up into pieces, which he worries could come crashing down over populated areas.

"If this thing is not safe enough to bring the crew back, why is it safe enough to bring the vehicle back and risk having it impact in a populated area?" Nelson said. "That logic just doesn't doesn't make sense."

"Protect and save Boeing's money, but to heck with people on the ground," he added. "Let them duck and run."

Nelson was an aeronautical engineer at NASA who contributed to missions ranging from Mercury and Gemini to Apollo and the International Space Station before retiring in 1999.

More recently, he's emerged as a critic of the space agency's safety practices — sometimes with ominous foresight. As detailed in his 2017 book "The NASA Letters," Nelson warned the White House in the early 2000s that there were too many crew assignments on NASA's Columbia Space Shuttle, noting a "high probability of a failure of the system," as he told Futurism.

The Columbia shuttle ended up disintegrating in February 2003 as it reentered the atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board.

"The vehicle was just screaming that it had a lot of problems that needed to be corrected," he added. "That was really a very poor decision on NASA to file those people on that vehicle. We lost people we shouldn't have."

Starliner's service module, which houses the malfunctioning thrusters, was always designed to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. However, its empty crew module is still scheduled to land in White Sands, New Mexico, slowed down by a number of parachutes.

Earlier this summer, NASA engineers found that a Teflon seal in a valve known as a "poppet" expanded while Starliner's thrusters were firing, greatly degrading their performance.

In response, NASA says it's playing it safe by planning to perform a "breakout burn" maneuver to get the spacecraft away from the ISS rapidly, in case it loses control and endangers the station.

Nelson, however, worries that the deorbit burn could still generate enough heat to cause the seals to swell up.

"And if that's the case, then you've got a situation where, if that happens, you don't know where in the world the command module or the service module is gonna go," he told Futurism. "Anybody's guess what happens to them if we don't get a complete burn."

Alternately, according to Nelson, Starliner could become trapped in orbit and circle the Earth for years before causing more potential problems down the road.

"If it does stay in orbit, then you've got this thing up there going around in low altitude, which eventually will deorbit, and again, it will break up, and you don't know where it's going," he said. "This could happen a year, two years, even five years from now. It's anybody's guess when they might come in if they don't get this burn completed."

Instead of touching down in New Mexico, Nelson argues that Starliner should be dumped in one of the largest unpopulated areas on Earth: the Pacific Ocean.

"In the past, we've always targeted our landings out in the Pacific because the service module has components that have been known to survive reentry," he said. Flight control should "apply short duration burns" to slowly lower Starliner to the point where "atmospheric drag would bring it in."

"That would be my fingers crossed way of trying to get the dadgum thing down," he argued.

"The only reason for doing this is to save Boeing money," Nelson added. "They could dump that thing in the Pacific and still have a possibility of recovering it."

Space junk falling on populated areas isn't a theoretical concern. Discarded batteries from the ISS crashed into a Florida home earlier this year, and SpaceX debris has fallen in New South Wales, Australia, Saskatchewan, Canada, and North Carolina over the last two years alone. In June, NASA and SpaceX announced they were examining new ways to prevent similar incidents.

According to Nelson, Starliner's disastrous crewed test flight is the result of a toxic "buddy-buddy" relationship between NASA and Boeing, as well as "incompetent" leadership.

Meanwhile, SpaceX's well-established Crew Dragon spacecraft is the "only viable option" NASA has right now, he argued. The spacecraft was developed under the same Commercial Crew program as Boeing's Starliner, but has completed just shy of a dozen crewed journeys to the ISS with no comparable drama to Boeing's woebegone Starliner.

Beyond Starliner, Boeing's other contributions to NASA are also quickly turning into a billion-dollar headache for the agency. In a damning report by NASA's inspector general last month, the watchdog discovered "an array of issues" with Boeing's Space Launch System (SLS). NASA is hoping to use the massive rocket to get astronauts to the Moon before the end of the decade.

The report outlined "Boeing's inadequate quality management system, escalating costs and schedules, and inadequate visibility into the Block 1B’s projected costs."

"I think finally, people in Congress have realized that they're throwing money down a rat hole, and they'll cancel it, hopefully before we kill the crew," Nelson told Futurism, referring to the SLS' soaring costs. "This thing's a monster disaster waiting to happen."

In response to questions, NASA had no reply, and Boeing offered the same statement it's been sending to reporters across the media about Starliner.

"Boeing continues to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft," it read. "We are executing the mission as determined by NASA, and we are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return."

NASA will attempt to undock Starliner from the space station this evening — and there'll likely be many crossed fingers in the room at ground control.

More on Starliner: NASA Admits “Tension in the Room” as It Told Boeing Starliner Couldn’t Return Astronauts to Earth