William Swan believes that there are secrets in the stars. It is this hopefulness that brings him high above the sandy shore of sleepy Boca Chica, Texas, with a rocket strapped to his back. As a biplane climbs to 8,500 feet, on a gloomy afternoon in April 1933, Swan’s daredevil plan is to leap from the metal hopper beneath the lower wing, drop through the clouds, and, at the precise moment the rocket in his backpack ignites, explode up into space.
Only it is a disaster. Despite a loud bang, the rocket pack fails to ignite. Swan spirals rapidly downward, toward the deep, dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
A festive crowd had massed like gulls along the dusky strip of beach, 1,500 or so strong, their heads raised toward the sky. Just moments ago, they had been tingling with anticipation. Now they are largely silent.
Then a sudden heartening cheer erupts: Swan’s parachute has opened!
But it is a false hope. The winds above the gulf are brutal. Swan is tossed about like a twig in a tempest, until one fierce gust pitches him maliciously through the clouds above the spectral gulf waters. Just like that, he disappears into the distance, never to be seen again. The only certainty is that his interment is far below the shining stars he had so coveted.
This remote stretch of South Texas shoreline had its opportunity to engage with history, but in a ruinous instant its destiny had been exorcised. Never again would it stand boldly at the threshold of tomorrow.
But destiny is relentless. Today, not even a century later, the future has returned to the Boca Chica beachfront. In fact, Swan’s modern counterparts possess an energy and a vision that the ill-fated adventurer could never have imagined. For Boca Chica is the sprawling launch site and manufacturing hub of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, whose engineers, technicians, and scientists—if all goes according to plan—will be the guiding force in the most ambitious rescue mission in history.
And even while lives hang in the balance, this daring undertaking has, like so much of American life these days, become politicized.
“The @POTUS has asked @SPACEX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @SpaceStation as soon as possible. We will do so,” Musk promised on X just a week after Donald Trump’s inauguration. “Terrible that the Biden Administration left them there so long.”
And—presto!—the rescue mission has been suddenly accelerated. Instead of sending a new capsule to the space station, a previously flown SpaceX capsule, the Crew Dragon Endurance, will be refurbished. Its flight is now scheduled to launch on March 13, “pending mission readiness,” it was announced with some fanfare this week.
Enter the Dragon
On June 5 of last year, two career astronauts, both gung-ho former U.S. Navy test pilots, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, headed off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a quick 10-day round trip to the International Space Station. It was designed to be the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft capsule. One last kick of the tires before the craft would be commissioned by NASA, the federal agency that rides herd over the U.S. civil space program, to ferry astronauts to and from the outpost 250 miles above Earth.
The Boeing test flight flunked the exam. The wary NASA administrators reviewed the results after the Starliner linked up (albeit on its second try) with the space station and effectively graded it a D, as in dangerous. The prospect of Wilmore and Williams’s being crammed nearly shoulder-to-shoulder in the problematic capsule as it blasted back down to Earth at a body-rattling 17,500 miles an hour—well, the techies at NASA decided they wouldn’t want to be in their space boots. Space travel is always a gamble, but they didn’t like the odds for this return trip. And so the flight back home was scrubbed.
Even while lives hang in the balance, this daring undertaking has, like so much of American life these days, become politicized.
Which left the two astronauts stranded in space. The understandably touchy (and chagrined) NASA and Boeing flight-program managers, however, reject that description, arguing with a feeble defensiveness that it’s not as if Wilmore and Williams are alone on the space station; there are, in fact, at the latest count five other astronauts hunkering down uncomfortably with them in the settlement’s woefully cramped quarters. Also, two supply ships have arrived in recent months bringing necessities as well as all the traditional holiday comforts of home—if one is generous enough to view packets of dehydrated turkey and a sad, plastic Christmas tree as festive.
But a more objective sizing up of Wilmore and Williams’s circumstances, an 10-day mission that has now stretched to nine months and counting—well, stranded or even marooned sure would seem to sum things up nicely. You’re all the way out there, in the deep, dark endless emptiness and solitude of space, circling—16 times in a single day!—the faraway sphere that had been your home, not knowing when—or if!—you’ll get back. From that disconcerting perspective, exegesis is a NASA deskman’s luxury.
And for a while, things did seem despairing. For nearly two anxious months last summer, as the NASA brain trust and Boeing executives struggled with obvious discomfort in press conferences to articulate a firm plan to bring the two astronauts back from space, the gloom surrounding the very future of the U.S. space program seemed to have settled into their haggard faces. NASA, after all, had historically demonstrated a helter-skelter approach to the crewed exploration of the universe.
Consider: way back in 1969, America takes a giant step for mankind and walks on the moon. But over the subsequent half-century, astronaut travel is largely confined to the low Earth orbit of the International Space Station, which became operational in 1998. And then, in the catastrophic aftermath of the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters, which cost the lives of 14 astronauts, a reeling, suddenly play-it-safe NASA pretty much limited space travel for years to come. If anything happened to Wilmore and Williams, two celebrated heroes, that would be the agency’s death knell. The last beat of its once adventurous heart.
But then in the final days of summer, after months of indecisiveness, NASA announced a dramatic change of plans: Boeing’s spacecraft would ignominiously slink back to Earth with no one on board. In its place, a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule would be sent to link up to the space station. Then, expertly commanded by a U.S. Space Force Guardian (as the members of this uniformed military command created during the first Trump administration are formally known), the more dependable SpaceX craft would carry Wilmore and Williams safely back home.
The Space Bros and the Rocket Ma’ams of SpaceX would be coming to the rescue! The old-world industrial aviation companies such as Boeing and Lockheed had been bluntly shoved aside, and a risk-averse NASA was settling into a more passive role. And with that announcement, the hard-charging era of commercial space exploration—and exploitation—would now, as the Vulcans on Star Trek might put it, “live long and prosper.” It was an operational decision announcing that the epoch of “NewSpace”—the portmanteau noun favored by the Space Bros—had at last come into its propitious own.
Throughout Starbase, as the thousands of SpaceX employees scattered about the engineering centers, vehicle-assembly hangars, and launch sites of Boca Chica were already calling their new hometown, a spontaneous cheer went up. It might not have been as loud as the heart-pounding, body-tingling blast of the 33 gigantic Raptor engines on the SpaceX Starship “Super Heavy” when it lifted off from its pad along the Gulf Coast, but, employees will tell you with a mirthful smile, it was mighty damn close.
Then came a more sobering thought: SpaceX now had to get Wilmore and Williams back home. Safe and sound.
Space Race 2.0
Yet even as the plans for the Great Rescue Mission proceeded, a spirited debate broke out over when this operation truly had its genesis. In Boca Chica watering holes such as the good-time SpaceX Tiki Bar as well as in the corridors of the buttoned-down Commercial Space Federation on Eye Street in Washington, D.C., opinions circulate at an impressive rate.
To some old hands, it is necessary to go all the way back to 1984, when Ronald Reagan signed the Commercial Space Launch Act (C.S.L.A.). Previously, any private company wanting to push the boundaries of exploration (and maybe earn a buck in the process) by, say, shooting a rocket carrying a communications satellite into space had to jump through a series of regulatory hoops.
It had even been necessary, for example, to obtain a license from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—the (small) logic being that a rocket and its fuel were munitions, and blasting them out of the Earth’s atmosphere should be viewed as the exportation of munitions from the U.S. And that prerequisite triggered the need for the Department of State to sign off, too; there was, it seemed, the Arms Export Control Act to deal with. And on and mind-numbingly on.
Now, with the C.S.L.A., which cleared many of the federal obstacles that had discouraged private space entrepreneurs, Reagan planted the seeds that would blossom into the present era of symbiotic cooperation between the dusty government agencies and the more audacious private space companies. Viz, the Great Rescue Mission.
To less legalistic minds, though, it all began with the legendary flight of SpaceShipOne in 2004. It was an event that encapsulated all of what space travel is vitally about: science, derring-do, and ingenuity. It started out, though, as simply a contest.
Taking its lead from the Orteig Prize that, back in 1919, offered $25,000 to any aviator who could fly from New York to Paris (or vice versa) across the Atlantic, the X Prize Foundation set out in 1996 to find another generation’s Lindbergh. With a respectful nod to inflation, and then some, it offered $10 million for “the first non-government organization to launch a reusable crewed spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.” Peter Diamandis, the Renaissance NewSpace mind—medical doctor, engineer, and entrepreneur—who dropped this gauntlet, wanted “to jump-start a commercial space industry.”
And it did—sorta. For a vexing period, there were plenty of intrepid but ultimately unsuccessful civilian competitors whose jump-starts ended in crash landings. But in 2004 (with the contest now renamed the Ansari X Prize after the Iranian tech family who helped finance the reward), a spaceplane designed by Burt Rutan and bankrolled by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen took home the $10 million. SpaceShipOne, as they called the craft, came in for a perfect landing in the Mojave Desert after having accomplished what never had been done before: it was the first privately sponsored craft to reach space and successfully return. Twice.
After months of indecisiveness, NASA announced a dramatic change of plans: Boeing’s spacecraft would ignominiously slink back to Earth with no one on board. In its place, a SpaceX Dragon capsule would be sent.
More importantly, SpaceShipOne’s triumph had established the two principles that would be the cornerstones of NewSpace. For starters, the commercial space business was an idea whose time had come. And for closers, NASA was, for all practical purposes, dead. It had not flown a single crewed flight in 2004. The future no longer had to be held back by the old-world caution of faint-hearted government pencil pushers. There was a new game afoot.
But so much for adventuresome prizes, argues a third contingent. That’s not what makes the real world turn on its axis. There would never be a private rescue operation in the making today, these practical voices insist, if SpaceX hadn’t found a way to make significant money, the sort that accrues from service contracts, not contests. And so they identify September 16, 2014, as the true prelude to Wilmore and Williams’s having a chance at a safe return. On that auspicious day, NASA awarded $6.8 billion in Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts to develop spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station. And with that, Space Race 2.0 began in earnest.
The first Space Race was a Cold War rivalry, the U.S. and the Soviet Union vying to trump each other’s pioneering accomplishments in the heavens. More recently, NASA had been hitching costly rides on Russian-made Soyuz spacecraft to ferry its astronauts to the space station. But a little more than a decade ago, NASA decided that rather than continue to shell out taxpayer money to the Russians, they’d work with American companies instead.
Following a long competitive bidding process, NASA selected the two winners who, they hoped, would be able to get the job done by 2017. Aerospace-industry stalwart Boeing, which since its founding, in 1916, had had a hand in nearly all of NASA’s historic accomplishments, and which, along with Lockheed originally, had since 1996 managed the space-shuttle program as well as the American portion of the International Space Station, received the lion’s share of the money: $4.2 billion.
The other recipient, though, was a surprise. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s barely 12-year-old start-up, received a more modest (relatively) sum to get basically the identical job done: $2.6 billion.
Yet several members of Congress wondered out loud why SpaceX had gotten even a penny. Boeing, they barked, had generations of experience. As an internal NASA report signed by William Gerstenmaier, the agency’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, haughtily put it (it became public months after the awards were announced): “I consider Boeing’s superior proposal, with regard to both its technical and management approach and its past performance, to be worth the additional price.”
As for SpaceX, Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator, summed up the disdainful D.C. party line to a Washington Post reporter: “The Hill and big industry and most of the leadership at NASA thought the answer was give the money to Boeing and let them do it.” And she continued: “One industry veteran told me, ‘You know their [SpaceX] rockets are put together with rubber bands and sealing wax. It’s not real. It won’t fly.’”
But Musk, whose customary reaction was to snap back when poked, responded to the criticism with uncharacteristic grace, even humility. “SpaceX,” he said, “is deeply honored by the trust NASA has placed in us.” Then he and his engineers rolled up their sleeves and went to work.
And as the two competitors in Space Race 2.0 burst out of the starting blocks with the smart money betting on Boeing, what went largely unnoticed was that CCtCap awards were fixed-price contracts. Typically, NASA had entered into cost-plus contracts, in which the government would pay the company’s expenses plus a premium, even when they went over budget or didn’t keep to the agreed-upon schedule. Fixed-price contracts were a sterner sort of instrument entirely, one that said, in effect, a deal is a deal; the cost overruns are your problem.
“One industry veteran told me, ‘You know their [SpaceX] rockets are put together with rubber bands and sealing wax. It’s not real. It won’t fly.’”
Boeing, it quickly became apparent, had a hard time working effectively under such resolute fiscal restraints. As Musk smirked, “Look, Boeing doesn’t get out of bed for less than $1 billion.”According to an interim NASA inspector general’s report a few years ago, a seat on Boeing’s Starliner to the space station would cost $90 million per astronaut; SpaceX’s Dragon would make the identical trip for $55 million a seat. And both offered only economy class, no in-flight entertainment or open bar.
Today, more than a decade after the CCtCaps billions were awarded, the scorecard for this David-versus-Goliath space race can be quickly tallied:
Boeing: 0
It has yet to be certified to fly crewed flights to the space station. And despite the billions in taxpayer funds it burned through, Boeing, according to the aerospace trade publication SpaceNews, lost an additional $1.85 billion from its own corporate coffers in its so far futile attempt to develop a reliable craft.
SpaceX: 15
In November 2020, NASA signed the Human Rating Certification Plan for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. They were officially good to go. To date, the start-up has flown a total of 15 crewed trips to the space station. And in the continual process, Starbase has been coining money. While it is a privately held company and the exact figures remain undisclosed, industry sources have estimated that the company makes approximately $300 or so million for each fully crewed mission to the I.S.S.
And now the finish line is in sight. The final stretch in Space Race 2.0 will be run when the Crew Dragon spacecraft carries Wilmore and Williams safely back home. Then the legacy aerospace kings will be dethroned. And long live the Space Bro usurpers.
Warning Lights
Yet rather than looking backward, other students of NewSpace suggest a more recent date as the most accurate operational start of the rescue mission: August 24, 2024. On that day, in the media conference room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, six stone-faced members of the NASA brass sat in a shoulder-to-shoulder row across a dais that seemed as long as a city block and, with a battered air of mutual bereavement, announced that what they’d long insisted would never happen was indeed happening: the Boeing Starliner capsule would be returning to Earth empty.
The officials gamely did their best to convey that this previously unthinkable decision was just business as usual. “Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine. And a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine,” offered Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator. And afterward, Boeing’s manager for its Commercial Crew Program, Mark Nappi, whose absence at the press event had been conspicuous, sent an e-mail assuring the Boeing employees who had worked on the flawed capsule that he had “the utmost confidence in this team to prepare Starliner for a safe and successful uncrewed return with the same level of professionalism and determination as you did the first half of the mission.”
The same level of professionalism and determination? After a decade and $7 billion, the Starliner’s mission accomplishments remained elusive. Its operational timeline charts a litany of glitches, problems, and near disasters. Aerospace insiders grouse that they never knew what was going to happen next to the beleaguered Starliner, but they always expected something.
Go back to May 6, 2024, then, when—already seven meandering years behind schedule—Boeing was at last given the thumbs-up: the crewed test flight was set to go. Wilmore and Williams, packed into their hulking space suits, trundled their way toward the capsule, as the countdown approached. Then, at the two-hour-from-liftoff moment, the launch was abruptly called off. Apparently, someone scurrying by the Starliner heard a discordant buzzing sound. Just a leaky pressure valve, NASA explained. But a valve expert who worked with the agency swiftly issued a hair-raising public warning: “NASA needs to re-double safety checks … before something catastrophic happens to the astronauts.”
Three weeks later, though, Boeing and NASA tried again. The party line is that a helium leak is no big deal; the chemical is neither combustible nor toxic. This time it’s the computers that are wonky. The countdown’s stopped and the mission was once again put on hold.
But the third time’s the charm. On June 5, the Starliner lifted off on an Atlas V rocket and went into orbit with Wilmore and Williams on board. “I can’t tell you how good that feels for our Starliner team,” a relieved Nappi, the Boeing executive, told the press.
The feel-good mood, though, was short-lived. After 24 hours, it was as if red warning lights were flashing at mission control. The craft’s single helium leak detected earlier had mysteriously grown to three. And now the capsule was approaching the space station.
Docking is always a bit of a feat. Fitting the spacecraft into the nearly circular docking port is basically—very basically—the same as screwing a light bulb into a socket. Only you’re doing it 250 miles above the Earth while zooming around at about 17,000 miles per hour. So how many people does it take to screw the Starliner into the space station? The answer, as Boeing was about to learn, was two harried astronauts as well as a nearly football-field-size roomful of NASA technicians and controllers on Earth.
What happened was this: as the craft moved in to dock, two more valve leaks became apparent.
And then things got worse.
Five of the thrusters abruptly shut down; the onboard computers had capriciously disengaged the system. That meant hooking up with the space station would now be like trying to park a car with its steering disabled. As a result, the maneuver was called off.
Fitting the spacecraft into the nearly circular docking port is basically the same as screwing a light bulb into a socket. Only you’re doing it 250 miles above the Earth while zooming around at about 17,000 miles per hour.
Wilmore and Williams, meanwhile, were still strapped into their capsule as it floated in the darkness 200 meters above the space station. They had traveled high up into the heavens, but they still had no assurance as to whether they’d ever arrive at their destination. Would they need instead to return to Earth? And how perilous a trip would that be? No thrusters to position the craft for re-entry, and valve leaks proliferating willy-nilly. The prospect of a wild free-fall descent loomed terrifyingly large.
And all the while, NASA was barking commands up to the capsule. In a flurry of activity on the ground, they kept trying to reboot the craft’s computers. Williams, working the onboard display panels, was, at the same time, rapidly hot-firing the thruster jets to see if they’d now engage.
They didn’t.
And with the computers offline, Wilmore needed to steer the craft manually. Without the thrusters, the capsule seesawed through space. He grasped the controls with all his might, trying to steady the spaceship. The bucking Starliner, though, seemed to have a will of its own.
Williams, at the same time, kept trying to get the thrusters powered up. She hot-fired the first one again. It didn’t engage. The capsule continued to rock wildly.
With a calm that must have been all disguise, she tried the next one. This thruster engaged. And so did the next two.
A cheer went up at NASA. Three thrusters might be sufficient. It was worth a try. The order to approach the docking station was given once again.
There are moments in space travel when everything hangs in the balance. Safety and disaster are separated by only the thinnest of barriers. Years of research and development come down to a single, small instant. A million things can go wrong, and if just one does, nothing else will matter. The crews of the Columbia and Challenger shuttle flights learned that lesson.
Yet the Starliner capsule docked successfully. “A big-time approach,” Wilmore radioed to mission control with a longtime test pilot’s glib tone of icy understatement.
Once the two astronauts were on board the orbiting space laboratory, though, the problems with the capsule continued to escalate. Their return trip home on the Starliner was delayed and then postponed. Until nearly three months after their arrival for a quick eight-day visit, despite all the previous official pronouncements that such an event would never come to pass, NASA finally announced that a SpaceX Dragon capsule would, at a date still to be determined, fly up to retrieve them.
Which left Wilmore and Williams stranded. And so they spend their days living in limbo, a long, long way from home. They exercise for hours at a stretch to ensure that the absence of gravity doesn’t result in ruinous bone and muscle loss. They eat prodigious amounts of dehydrated calories to fuel such demanding exertions, but judging by the videos being broadcast back to Earth, Williams appears to be growing thinner with each passing week, her face increasingly gaunt. They diligently work to install a new urine-recycling system. (“Your pee today is tomorrow’s coffee,” veteran astronauts concede with a philosophical shrug.)
They sleep in hammocks that, by necessity, have spread to the narrow far wings of the overcrowded space station. And they don’t complain. “This is my happy place,” Williams said with convincing good cheer in a news conference beamed from space. Wilmore is similarly positive, insisting that the unanticipated open-ended stay in space is not taking any toll; astronauts, he lectures with pride, are trained to be resilient.
Then on the morning of September 6, both astronauts made a point of getting up around five a.m. to watch the empty Starliner take off from the space station. There are seven windows wrapping around the cupola that serves as the orbiting laboratory’s observation deck. The view of the Starliner, engines roaring, blasting a bright, fiery red-and-orange trail across the immense blackness, the capsule receding farther and farther into the long distance, was magnificent.
It was on its way home. Without them.
“You don’t want to see it go off without you,” Wilmore admitted in another news conference.” But that’s where we wound up.”
“That’s how things go in this business,” Williams added with valiant resolve.
But at the moment it seemed as if the full weight of their predicament had finally come to bear down on them, and any notions of what might come next were as troubling as they were perplexing. And who could blame them if they suddenly feared they might never return home?
Howard Blum is the author of several best-selling books, including the Edgar Award–winning American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century. His latest, When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders, is available now
