Starliner Commander: "I Knew We Weren't Coming Home"

A NASA astronaut describes losing half the aft thrusters on Starliner while flying manually toward the International Space Station — and why he knew they weren't coming home before they ever docked.

This is the inside account of the Starliner test flight: the moment control degraded, the sound of the thrusters "like a machine gun," the failsafe software they had to cancel to keep flying, and the case for manual control in every spacecraft we build.

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Full episode here

In this conversation: how 28 thrusters give a spacecraft six degrees of freedom, what it means to lose one of them in orbit for the first time in the history of human spaceflight, the three thoughts that went through his head on the controls, why the decision not to return on Starliner was made in late August and why he calls it the right call, how the ground teams test-fired failed thrusters to recover all but one, why Dragon isn't built with the same manual capability, and why time-lag to Mars makes human control non-negotiable.

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