“We are convinced”: The Boeing Starliner parachute team prepares for the manned test landing without astronauts on September 7
The Starliner, without its astronauts, will land on Earth by parachute at dusk on September 7, after being fully undocked from the International Space Station on the evening of September 6.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on June 5 for the Crew Flight Test, the first manned launch on a Boeing Starliner. They were originally scheduled to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and land on the spacecraft, but NASA decided to rebook them on SpaceX Crew Dragon for a landing in February 2025 after problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system arose during docking that could not be resolved.
Starliner underwent some design changes after a parachute issue was uncovered in 2023. Ahead of CFT’s launch, Space.com spoke with NASA’s Jim McMichael. McMichael is senior technical integration manager in the Space Operations Mission Directorate for the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
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Related: Boeing’s first manned Starliner returns to Earth without astronauts on September 6
The interview took place at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center near Orlando, shortly before a Starliner launch attempt was aborted on May 6 because of technical problems with United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket. Fixing the helium leak in the Starliner delayed the launch until June 5. At the time of the interview, NASA and Boeing expected the Starliner to land with astronauts on board.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Space.com: What are your duties?
McMichael: It’s basically the ultimate “other duties as assigned job.” It’s areas that need a little more integration, a little more help. I’m kind of moving around. I’m actually a newbie. I’ve only been in this program for about two years. But most of that time I’ve been working primarily on the parachutes.
Before that, I worked a little bit on the SpaceX Dragon. In my previous jobs at NASA, I spent about 10 years developing the (Lockheed Martin) Orion parachute (for lunar missions), so “parachutes” are kind of in my blood.
Space.com: What makes the Starliner parachutes different from those of Dragon or Orion, and what are they similar to?
McMichael: The Boeing Starliner parachute system is actually a scaled-down version of the Orion system. It’s a little smaller — because the capsule weighs a little less — but otherwise the architecture is very similar. Boeing and Orion have a forward heat shield, and both are removed with parachutes. The architecture is a little different in the way (the removal) is done. But once you get past that, we have two drogue parachutes on each that are fired with mortars. Those are cut free. We have three pilot parachutes on each that each pull out three main parachutes.
The architecture (on Dragon) is a little different in that they fire the drag chutes with mortars and then they just hold them on a single mount. When they’re ready to transfer from the drag chutes to the pilots, they don’t cut the drag chutes and fire (…) they release the drag chutes and then the drag chutes themselves lift the main parachutes to deploy.
Related: See SpaceX’s Crew Dragon parachutes in action in this epic video compilation
Space.com: So if I could go back a year or so, when you realized that the parachutes still needed some adjustments, I would call that Parachute 1.0. So is it a completely different parachute today? Or is it kind of an adapted parachute?
McMichael: The problem we discovered last summer was what we call the “soft links.” They’re what the suspension lines connect to. They’re a primary link and they bear the brunt of the load. By the time we discovered this was a problem, we had already done all of our qualification testing, so to speak. So the trick here was we had to improve those, make them stronger, and make a change to make the soft links better.
But we didn’t want to invalidate all the tests 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 the qualification test history.
McMichael: To be clear, the soft links in the system still had a positive margin. (In other words), they were not expected to fail. The margin was just not as high as we wanted it to be because they are such a critical element. We actually have a slightly higher margin here because we have people on board. The soft links are the main load path; if soft links are lost, you lose the ability to carry loads. With other parts of the parachute (…) you could blow up a panel or a handful of panels, it would not affect the parachute at all. Its performance would not change.
So that was a change we made. And while we were at it – the four most expensive words in the English language – a new design change was also on the table, which was to replace the suspension line on the skirt with a parachute. But again, the trick here was that we wanted to make sure that with these changes we didn’t invalidate all the expensive, hard, long tests that we had done in the past.
So these were just small changes. We then did a lot of ground testing to check their strength. Then we did airdrop testing as well… It’s the law of unintended consequences that can sometimes be your undoing. We wanted to make sure that these small changes didn’t have unintended consequences.
Space.com: How do you begin to think ahead for Starliner-1, the first operational manned mission expected in 2025?
McMichael: Parachutes take a lot of time to make. They’re a very, very lengthy process, so to speak, and then they’re installed quite early on in the spacecraft – so the Starliner-1 parachutes are the same ones we fly today. However, there’s still a little bit of work difference between CFT and Starliner-1 that we need to do.
The suspension lines themselves – the material as we buy it – you buy in manufacturing batches. The manufacturing batch of suspension line material for Starliner-1 is a different batch than the one for CFT, so we need to make sure that this suspension line material is at least as strong and re-examine our margins with the new suspension line material.
Spoiler alert: We have the data (from the pull test). We saw that the new suspension lines for Starliner-1 are actually a bit stronger. So we know everything will go well. We just haven’t finished all the details in the paperwork yet.
Related: What’s next for the Boeing Starliner after its first manned flight test?
We’re going to be looking very closely at the CFT parachutes. That’s one of the things we’re going to look at in our flight images. We’re going to look at all the still images from the ground – we have ground video as well, so we’re going to look at how the parachutes open. This doesn’t sound very scientific, but that’s a big part of looking at parachute performance: just watching them open is one of the most important things we do.
Then when we recover them in the desert, we’ll examine them carefully: every connection, every piece of clothing, every single parachute. We’ll examine them to make sure there are no changes or anything unexpected. Very often you’ll have little tears, breaks or shreds in a parachute. And that’s perfectly fine. That’s perfectly expected. So we’ll do all these examinations, but (so far) we don’t expect any changes.
Space.com: Since you’re part of the skydiving team, you won’t relax until the very end.
McMichael: We joke that this whole spacecraft is just for putting parachutes into orbit. But you’re right, we’re the last ones – back in the day, Apollo made a video about the Apollo parachute system after all the tests were completed. And the title was “Project Apollo: The Last Five Miles Home.”
We really take that to heart, because the last five miles home are the parachutes. The Earth is big in the windows. We open the main parachutes at 1.5 miles. In the big picture of being in space, 1.5 miles is pretty close to the ground. We open the main parachutes, and it’s front and center: the big, pretty picture of the crew module hanging from the main parachutes.
So, yes, we don’t relax until we have the brake parachutes (…) and then when all the main parachutes are inflated – we have all three main parachutes fully inflated – we can start breathing.
