Can You Call HR From Space?

There is a certain point where every work trip stops being fun — if it ever was to begin with. The novelty of being in a new place wears away and you miss your bed, you want a home-cooked meal, and if you have to keep socializing with your co-worker, you feel as though you might die right there in a hotel bar in Kenosha. Now, imagine you’re on a work trip, and your boss calls you and says that you actually have to stay where you are for six more months. Except where you are isn’t Wisconsin, it’s outer space. Which is worse? Who’s to say.

This is the corporate clusterfuck that Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams have found themselves in. On June 5, the veteran NASA astronauts were tasked with taking Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on a test flight, its first manned mission to the International Space Station. Upon its approach, NASA and Boeing noticed helium leaks and thruster issues — problems that would make a return flight with Wilmore and Williams aboard very risky. “The uncertainty and lack of expert concurrence does not meet the agency’s safety and performance requirements for human spaceflight,” NASA announced in a statement on August 24, nearly two months after Starliner initially docked on the ISS. The astronauts would remain in space, the agency said, until February 2025, when they would hitch a ride on a SpaceX flight back to Earth. I’ll save you the brain power: That’s nine months in space.

Since Wilmore and Williams are safe, we can all have some fun imagining how this would play out as a movie. Would it be a triumphant docudrama in the vein of Apollo 13? Or maybe it’s a rom-com in which two stranded astronauts fall in love? (Both real-life astronauts are married, but any screenwriter worth their salt would omit that detail or use it for narrative tension.) Briefly, it looked like the story might actually play out like a true sci-fi thriller. On August 31, Wilmore called mission control in Houston and reported that he was hearing a “strange noise” coming from the Starliner.

“I’ve got a question about Starliner,” Wilmore said, with the kind of nonchalance that would suggest he’s about to ask if there’s any gum in the glove compartment. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it.” The sound was described as “pulsing” by the NASA engineer on the ground, “almost like a sonar ping.” You say sonar ping, I say heartbeat. But whose? An alien stowed away in the bowels of the 15-foot-wide spacecraft? Was the ship itself alive?

Three days after Wilmore called in about the noise, NASA announced that it had stopped. According to the organization, the sound was just speaker feedback due to “an audio configuration between the space station and Starliner.” Sounds like something James Woods would have said in Contact, no? Or how HAL, the humanlike computer, might have explained away a suspicious problem in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So, instead of sci-fi this is really just sci. And at the heart of this story is Boeing, a company that has already spent most of the year fighting off bad press. As New York has previously reported, in January, the wall blew out on one of the company’s 737 Max airplanes, ripping the shirt clean off a young man sitting nearby. Later that month, flames were seen coming out of a Boeing 747 flying out of Miami. In March, 50 people were injured when a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner nose-dived on a flight from Australia to New Zealand. That same month, it was reported that Boeing whistleblower John Barnett had been found dead in his truck, having suffered what the police said “appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” Barnett was in the process of giving a deposition for his defamation lawsuit against the company at the time of his death. Also in March, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun announced that he would be leaving the company at the end of the year. He was replaced by Kelly Ortberg in August.

As you can imagine, the June Starliner launch was important for the company. It had endured six months of bad press — including two scrubbed Starliner launches, due to a “chattering” oxygen-relief valve the first time and a faulty power-supply unit the second — and this was its chance for a modicum of redemption. Plus, it had spent more than a billion of its own dollars on Starliner, and it really needed it to work. It was getting embarrassing.

As part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program following the retirement of the Space Shuttle, in 2014, Boeing and SpaceX each received fixed-price NASA contracts to develop crew-transportation service programs. The legacy aerospace company received $4.2 billion, while the Elon Musk–owned company only received $2.6 billion. Since 2020, SpaceX has successfully sent seven crewed flights to the ISS on its Crew Dragon spacecraft. Boeing has successfully sent zero, gone $1.5 billion over budget, and is now known as the company that stranded those astronauts up in space.

For what it’s worth, Wilmore and Williams appear to be in relatively good spirits about this whole thing. They’re not alone up there — in fact, it’s close quarters. There are only six sleep chambers on the ISS, and there are currently nine people aboard. Williams is sleeping in a spare chamber called a CASA (Crew Alternate Sleep Accommodation) with one of the other astronauts, while Wilmore is free floating in a sleeping bag in the Japanese Space Agency’s Kibo module. There will be more room for everyone in late September, when the four-person SpaceX Crew-8 leaves and the two-person SpaceX Crew-9 arrives.

Back in July, about a month into their mission and when it was still uncertain whether they’d get to come home anytime soon, Williams sounded downright chipper. “We are having a great time here on ISS,” she said in a press conference. “Butch and I have been up here before and it feels like coming home. So yeah, it’s great to be here.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two astronauts were not quoted in NASA’s August announcement that they would be spending Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s 250 miles away from Earth’s surface.

Personally, I hope those two are ticked off. I know they “love space” or whatever, but at the end of the day, their employer outsourced a crucial aspect of their organization’s functioning — and their safety — to a company that, by launch, had become synonymous with planes falling apart in the sky. I hate to sound like a Republican, but we used to build things in this country. Namely, the Space Shuttle. The reason we don’t do that anymore is long and boring and has to do with bureaucracy and money — but it’s hard to watch The Right Stuff and not get swept up in the nostalgia of it all.

Perhaps the movie this most reminds me of is actually Alien. In the 1979 Ridley Scott film, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and her crew operate what is basically a space tugboat, slowly making its way back home. They’re instructed to go investigate a distress signal, and all hell breaks loose. The crew soon learn that they are totally expendable to their employer — that the prospect of innovation is more important than their lives.

The fact that two astronauts have been stranded in outer space should be an incredible blow to Boeing, one that results in change. But it’s hard to see that happening. In July, the company pleaded guilty to a criminal-fraud charge stemming from two fatal 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019. As a result, it agreed to pay a $243.6 million fine and submit to independent monitoring for three years on top of the $2.5 billion settlement the company agreed to pay in 2021. Erin Applebaum, a lawyer representing families of the crash victims, called the deal “wholly inadequate.”

“While we’re encouraged that Boeing will not be able to choose its own monitor, the deal is still nothing more than a slap on the wrist and will do nothing to effectuate meaningful change within the company,” she told Bloomberg.

Over the weekend, Starliner returned to Earth unmanned. The spacecraft landed without incident in New Mexico, and probably could have carried the astronauts home. Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said that it would have been “a safe, successful landing” with Wilmore and Williams aboard. I’m sure they were thrilled to hear that.

Next February, the astronauts will come home — a little bit taller thanks to all that time spent in low gravity. They’ll probably get invited to meet whoever our new president is, and they’ll smile for the cameras. But if I were writing this movie, their return would be the start of Act One, and what would unfold would be an Erin Brockovich–esque tale of sticking it to Boeing and the regulators and NASA. In a perfect movie world, they’d be getting a massive settlement while also changing the whole damn system.