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Starliner, which sets off without astronauts, will separate completely from the International Space Station on the evening of September 6, then land on Earth by parachute at dusk on September 7.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams participated in the first crewed launch, the Crew Flight Test, aboard the Boeing Starliner on June 5. They were supposed to re-enter and land the spacecraft, but NASA decided to transfer them to the SpaceX Crew Dragon for a landing in February 2025 after unresolved issues arose with the Starliner’s propulsion system during deployment.
Starliner underwent some design changes after an issue with the parachutes was discovered in 2023. Ahead of the CFT launch, Space.com spoke with NASA’s Jim McMichael, who is a senior technical integration manager in the space operations mission directorate for the agency’s commercial crew program.
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The interview took place at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center near Orlando shortly before the Starliner launch attempt scheduled for May 6 was canceled due to technical issues with the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket; fixing a Starliner helium leak delayed the launch until June 5. At the time of the interview, NASA and Boeing expected the Starliner to land with astronauts.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Space.com: What are your duties in your job?
McMichael: Basically, it’s the ultimate in “other duties as assigned work.” It’s areas that need a little more integration, a little more help. I’m kind of moving. I’m new, actually. I’ve only been in this program for about two years. But for most of that time, I’ve been working primarily on parachutes.
My background before that is that I worked a little bit on the SpaceX Dragon. I spent about 10 years at my previous job at NASA. [Lockheed Martin] Orion parachute development [for moon missions]So “parachute” is in my blood.
Space.com: What makes Starliner parachutes different and similar to Dragon or Orion?
McMichael: The Boeing Starliner parachute system is essentially a scaled-up version of the Orion system. It’s a bit smaller — because the capsule weighs a bit less — but otherwise, the architecture is pretty similar. The Boeing and Orion have a forward heat shield, and both are lifted by parachutes. The architecture is how [the removal] is done. But once you get past that, we have two drogue parachutes, each of which is fired by mortar fire. These are free. We have three pilot parachutes, each of which releases three main parachutes.
Architectural [on Dragon] It’s a little bit different because they fire the drogues with mortars and then they attach those drogues to a single mount. When they’re ready to switch from drogues to pilots, they don’t cut the drogues and fire them. […] Instead, they release the parachutes, which then lift the main parachute and deploy the parachutes.
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Space.com: So if I go back a year, when you discovered that parachutes needed a little more adjustment, I would call that Parachute 1.0. So today, is it a completely different parachute? Or is it kind of an adjusted parachute?
McMichael: The problem that we found last summer was called the “soft links.” These are the things that connect the suspension lines. They are the primary link and carry the main load. By the time we knew these were a problem, we had completed all of our qualification testing, if you will. So the trick was, we had to upgrade these, make them stronger, and 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 proficiency testing history.
McMichael: To be clear, the soft links that were in the system — they still had a positive margin. [In other words]they were not expected to fail. It’s just that the margin wasn’t as high as we wanted because it’s a very critical element. We actually carry a little bit more margin on these because we have people on board. The soft links are the main payload; if you lose the soft links, you lose your ability to carry the payload. The other parts of the parachute […] You can blow off one panel, you can blow off a handful of panels, you don’t damage the parachute at all. You don’t change its performance.
So, that was one change we made. Then, while we were doing that, there was also a new design change on the table to change the suspension line from the skirt to the parachute — the four most expensive words in the English language. But again, the trick was to make sure that we didn’t invalidate all the expensive, difficult, long testing that we had done in the past with these changes.
So, these were small changes. Then we did a lot of ground testing to verify their strength. Then we did airdrop testing as well… It’s the law of unexpected consequences that can sometimes bite you. We wanted to make sure that there were no unexpected consequences from making these small changes.
Space.com: How did you begin to think about the future for Starliner-1, the first crewed operational mission expected in 2025?
McMichael: Parachutes take a long time to make. They’re a long, long piece of lead, call it that, and then they’re attached to the spacecraft pretty early on — so the Starliner-1 parachutes are the same as the ones we fly today. Having said that, we have a very small delta of work to do between the CFT and Starliner-1.
The suspension lines themselves — the material we buy — you buy in production batches. The production batch of the suspension line material for the Starliner-1 is different than the one for the CFT, so we have to check and re-verify our margins with the new suspension line material to make sure that the suspension line material is at least as strong.
Spoiler alert: We have data [from pull testing]. We found that the new suspension lines for Starliner-1 are actually a little bit stronger. So we know we’re going to be fine. We just haven’t put the dots and T’s on the paperwork yet.
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We’re going to look at the CFT parachutes very carefully. That’s one of the things we’re going to look at in our flight footage. We’re going to look at all the footage from the ground — we have ground video, so we’re going to look at how the parachutes open. It doesn’t sound very scientific, but that’s a big part of looking at parachute performance: just watching them open is one of the big things we do.
Then when we rescue them in the desert, we will examine them carefully: every joint, every piece of clothing, every parachute. We will examine them to make sure there are no changes or unexpected things. Very often, you will find small tears, ruptures, torn things in a parachute. And that is completely normal. It is completely expected. So, we will do all these examinations, but [so far]We do not expect any changes.
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Space.com: So since you’re on the parachute team, you can’t relax until the very end.
McMichael: We jokingly say that this whole spacecraft is a way to get parachutes into orbit. But you’re right, we’re the last one — way back when, after Apollo was all done testing, Apollo did a video on the parachute system. And the title of the video was “Project Apollo: The Last 5 Miles Home.”
We take this really seriously because parachutes are the last five miles home. The world is big in the windows. We put the grids at 8,000 feet. [2.4 km]In the grand scheme of things being in space, 8,000 feet is pretty close to the ground. We deploy the main parachutes, and front and center: a big, beautiful picture of the crew module hanging from the main parachutes.
So, yeah, we don’t relax until we take the drugs […] and then once all the main lines are inflated – once we’ve achieved full inflation in the three main lines – then we can start breathing.