How About a Nice Game of Orbital Death Jenga?

You do n’t want to be playing musical chairs on your journey back to Earth because every passenger on board the International Space Station must have a seat available on a docked space capsule. &nbsp,

Nevertheless, NASA must consider whether to take home pilots Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams from Boeing’s troubled Starliner space capsules or increase complexity and risk by playing Orbital Death Jenga with a Dragon Crew capsules. &nbsp,

I’ll get to that afterward in this paragraph because there’s also a real incident below that hardly anyone is discussing.

I apologize for suggesting” Orbital Death Jenga,” but I needed something to sum up a complicated and dangerous method because my wife and I recently rewatched” Wargames” to ask,” How about a good game of chess?” stuck in my mind.

The Dragon Crew spacecraft that will land on ISS needs to use the Starliner dock port because it is so limited in space. But they’ll have to perform Orbital Death Jenga if NASA decides to send Butch and Sunny back home on a Dragon capsules. When there are n’t enough capsule seats for all the butts on board, they’ll need to time the arrival of Dragon Crew as closely as possible to Starliner’s arrival and departure to allow the smallest window to pass.

Bounce one capsule out, slide the next one in.

In the middle of the Starliner/Dragon switch-out, a storm of pebble-sized comets or orbital debris would reach the ISS, requiring noble deeds to get Dragon docked only in time for everyone to leave the seriously damaged ISS. Fortunately, this is not a Hollywood movie and every step of this microgravity ballet will be orchestrated well in advance, should it prove necessary. &nbsp,

Now for that scandal.

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NASA has delayed the next Dragon Crew mission from Aug. 18 to Sept. 24 to give Boeing the four weeks it needs to update Starliner’s software. Starliner launched with an automated flight software program that could n’t detach from the ISS without the crew aboard, for reasons that are still undetermined. In the event that a vessel is required to be jettisoned due to a freakish circumstance, the ISS requires that every vessel attached to the ISS be able to detach without a crew.

We might have been in that freakish situation, though, because a NASA capsule launched with known thruster problems. And they did n’t have the necessary control software installed when they launched the damn thing.

What in the actual hell? Heads should turn to Starliner for this terrible decision, even if Wilmore and Williams are aboard safely.

What’s your best guess as to how this plays out, asked a reader yesterday, who I keep telling you is the best space journalist in the industry.

UPDATE: &nbsp, NASA says all plans and preparations to return Butch and Sunny on the Crew-9 mission are now completed. That does n’t mean they will. It simply means that the plans have been completed, including reducing the Crew-9 mission’s number from four to two in order to make room for Butch and Sunny. Between the delays and the reduced crew, this unbelievable cluster-f*** is going to impact ISS functions for months.

Berger answered that he does n’t have “great insight into NASA’s internal deliberations” and that” the decision has not been made” whether to ditch Starliner. Nevertheless, he thinks “it is more likely than not they fly in Dragon”. He predicted that if a Starliner was brought back to Earth, at least with a crew aboard, the odds were 60/40. While I keep writing that if NASA decides to abandon the thing, they’ll let it burn up during reentry, but that is n’t necessarily so. Perhaps Boeing wants to reunite it with its original brains for study, similar to that of a dead serial killer. &nbsp,

Orbital Death Jenga will be my New Wave revival band’s last name if nothing else. Wait’ll you hear our cover of” Major Tom”.

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