Wilmore and Williams will stay on the International Space Station until February 2025, when they’ll return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

The Conversation U.S. asked former commander of the International Space Station Michael Fossum about NASA’s decision to return the craft uncrewed, the future of the Starliner program and its crew’s extended stay at the space station.

What does this decision mean for NASA?

NASA awarded contracts to both Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to provide crew transport vehicles to the International Space Station via the Commercial Crew Program. At the start of the program, most bets were on Boeing to take the lead, because of its extensive aerospace experience.

However, SpaceX moved very quickly with its new rocket, the Falcon 9, and its cargo ship, Dragon. While they suffered some early failures during testing, they aggressively built, tested and learned from each failure. In 2020, SpaceX successfully launched its first test crew to the International Space Station.

Meanwhile, Boeing struggled through some development setbacks. The outcome of this first test flight is a huge disappointment for Boeing and NASA. But NASA leadership has expressed its support for Boeing, and many experts, including me, believe it remains in the agency’s best interest to have more than one American crew launch system to support continued human space operations.

NASA is also continuing its exchange partnership with Russia. This partnership provides the agency with multiple ways to get crew members to and from the space station.

As space station operations continue, NASA and its partners have enough options to get people to and from the station that they’ll always have the essential crew on the station – even if there are launch disruptions for any one of the capable crewed vehicles. Having Starliner as an option will help with that redundancy.

What does this decision mean for Boeing?

I do think Boeing’s reputation is going to ultimately suffer. The company is going head-to-head with SpaceX. Now, the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft has several flights under its belt. It has proven a reliable way to get to and from the space station.

It’s important to remember that this was a test flight for Starliner. Of course, the program managers want each test flight to run perfectly, but you can’t anticipate every potential problem through ground testing. Unsurprisingly, some problems cropped up – you expect them in a test flight.

The space environment is unforgiving. A small problem can become catastrophic in zero gravity. It’s hard to replicate these situations on the ground.

The technology SpaceX and Boeing use is also radically different from the kind of capsule technology used in the early days of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

NASA has evolved and made strategic moves to advance its mission over the past two decades. The agency has leaned into its legacy of thinking outside the box. It was an innovative move to break from tradition and leverage commercial competitors to advance the program. NASA gave the companies a set of requirements and left it up to them to figure out how they would meet them.

What does this decision mean for Starliner’s crew?

I know Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams as rock-solid professionals, and I believe their first thoughts are about completing their mission safely. They are both highly experienced astronauts with previous long-duration space station experience. I’m sure they are taking this in stride.

Prior to joining NASA, Williams was a Naval aviator and Wilmore a combat veteran, so these two know how to face risk and accomplish their missions. This kind of unfavourable outcome is always a possibility in a test mission. I am sure they are leaning forward with a positive attitude and using their bonus time in space to advance science, technology and space exploration.

Their families shoulder the bigger impact. They were prepared to welcome the crew home in less than two weeks and now must adjust to unexpectedly being apart for eight months.

Right now, NASA is dealing with a ripple effect, with more astronauts than expected on the space station. More people means more consumables – like food and clothing – required. The space station has supported a large crew for short periods in the past, but with nine crew members on board today, the systems have to work harder to purify recycled drinking water, generate oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from their atmosphere.

Wilmore and Williams are also consuming food, and they didn’t arrive with the clothes and other personal supplies they needed for an eight-month stay, so NASA has already started increasing those deliveries on cargo ships.

What does this decision mean for the future?

Human spaceflight is excruciatingly hard and relentlessly unforgiving. A million things must go right to have a successful mission. It’s impossible to fully understand the performance of systems in a microgravity environment until they’re tested in space.

NASA has had numerous failures and near-misses in the quest to put Americans on the Moon. They lost the Apollo 1 crew in a fire during a preflight test. They launched the first space shuttle in 1981, and dealt with problems throughout that program’s 30-year life, including the terrible losses of Challenger and Columbia.

Read More: Boeing Starliner astronauts: what six months stuck in space may do to their perception of time

After having no other U.S. options for over 30 years, three different human spacecraft programs are now underway. In addition to the SpaceX Crew Dragon and the Boeing Starliner, NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II mission, is planned to fly four astronauts around the Moon in the next couple of years.

These programs have had setbacks and bumps along the way – and there will be more – but I haven’t been this excited about human spaceflight since I was an 11-year-old cheering for Apollo and dreaming about putting the first human footprints on Mars.

• Michael E. Fossum is a Vice President, Texas A&M University
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

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Loeb is linking his finding with the passage of a fireball in January 2014. The meteor was observed by sensors of the US Department of Defense that track all objects entering the Earth’s atmosphere. It was recorded as travelling faster than most meteors and eventually broke up over the South Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea.

Data on the object is held by Nasa’s Centre for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The meteor’s official name is CNEOS 20140108, and is also referred to as IM1 (for interstellar meteor).

There is a very large scientific leap from observing a fireball to claiming it is an alien spaceship. What is the evidence on which Loeb bases the claim? And how likely is it to be true?

‘Oumuamua, an interstellar comet

We have already had at least one visitor from interstellar space – the comet ‘Oumuamua. The appearance of 1I/2017U1, the official name for ‘Oumuamua, was certainly an unusual event. The object was observed in 2017 as it was leaving the Solar System. Its trajectory is different from the near-circular orbits of the planets and elliptical orbits of comets.

The comet’s path was traced back, with scientists discovering that it had come from well beyond the outermost fringes of the Solar System. Scientists were excited but also intrigued – although its shape was not captured on camera, the way that light reflected from it as it rotated suggested that it had an odd shape like a cigar when viewed side-on or a plate when viewed from the top.

In a thoughtful article written in 2018, Loeb speculated that ‘Oumuamua might be artificial, rather than natural in origin – the product of an alien civilisation. He suggested that we should keep searching for interstellar debris in the Solar System.

In pursuit of such debris, Loeb’s team interrogated the CNEOS database, looking for objects with unusual orbital characteristics. That’s when they found CNEOS 20140108 and, based on its high velocity, suggested it was an interstellar meteor – giving it the more manageable name of IM1.

Modelling the path of the fireball, Loeb identified a specific area of the South Pacific where he believed debris from IM1 would be deposited. Following a dredging operation in the area with a powerful magnet, he now claims to have found material from IM1.

But what are the chances that he has found genuine interstellar debris at all, never mind a spaceship?

Cosmic spherules?

The metallic spherules that have been recovered are each about half a millimetre in diameter. It isn’t impossible for them to be of extraterrestrial origin: several previous expeditions have recovered spherules from space from the seabed.

The first expedition to find such samples was HMS Challenger in 1872-76. Material dredged from the ocean floor contained many metallic droplets, described at the time, quite accurately, as “cosmic spherules”. Droplets from space are spherical because they solidify from molten material torn from the surface of meteorites as they traverse the atmosphere.

Read More: An element essential to life discovered on one of Saturn’s moons, raising hopes of finding alien microbes

Subsequent expeditions throughout the 20th century have also found cosmic spherules at the bottom of the ocean, but it has become harder to identify them. This is because, in the 150 years since the Challenger expedition, the amount of pollution has increased on Earth.

In 1872, the industrial revolution was in its infancy in Europe and practically non-existent in the southern hemisphere. Hence pollution such as “fly ash” (waste from burning coal) and particles from vehicles was minimal. Many of these pollutants are also spherical in appearance and metallic in composition.

Today, products from industrial processes and vehicles are everywhere. So, without an actual analysis of the composition of the spherules and a comparison with analyses of meteorites (and common terrestrial pollutants), it is not possible to identify any as extraterrestrial.

Interstellar?

But Loeb doesn’t just think the material is from space, he thinks it is from interstellar space – arguing “this could be the first time humans put their hands on interstellar material”.

This is simply not true. We have an abundance of interstellar material on Earth. Some of it is almost certainly on the ocean floor, but not in the form collected by Loeb.

The interstellar material to which I am referring comes in several different varieties. It is well known by astronomers that the interstellar medium – the space between stars – is not empty, but contains several different molecules, many of which are organic (made up of chains or rings of carbon). A portion of these molecules got mixed into the region of space where the Solar System was starting to form.

Stars themselves have also contributed material to the interstellar medium, as they evolved or exploded as supernovas. Some of this material comes as tiny diamonds or sapphires – rare mementoes of stars that lived and died before the Sun was born. These grains became part of the dust cloud that collapsed to form the Solar System, and were eventually carried to Earth in meteorites.

Alien spacecraft?

Loeb’s evidence for an extraterrestrial source for the material – never mind an interstellar origin – is rather shaky. He has found metallic spherules. For me (and many others) to accept that these spherules are extraterrestrial, I’d need firm analytical evidence. What is their composition? What is their age? Can we rule out terrestrial pollutants? Can we rule out debris from extraterrestrial material from within the Solar System?

The first question, about composition, has been answered: analysis of the spherules shows them to be mainly iron with a few trace metals.

We know meteors from our Solar System contain iron and nickel, echoing the relative abundances of these metals in the Sun. But the spherules apparently contain “negligible” amounts of nickel – thus indicating that they are almost certainly not from meteors within the Solar System. This does not, however, prove they are interstellar – it merely makes it more likely that they’re terrestrial pollutants.

The most convincing evidence would be to measure an age for the spherules greater than that of the Sun – which would identify them as interstellar.

And that would be amazing, but it would not necessarily identify them as having an artificial, rather than natural origin. I am not sure what evidence would be sufficiently convincing for this – maybe the autograph of the alien engineer who built the spacecraft?

• Monica Grady is a Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University
• This article first appeared on The Conversation

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And in case you thought it has abandoned its ambitions, the company just revealed what the cabin of its Spaceship craft will look like. If you’re paying $250,000 for a ticket to space, you kinda want to see where your money’s going. And that money is paying for a whole lot of windows.

Take a look around

A whole lot of windows, and chairs that wouldn’t look out of place in a video game live stream. They’re made from aluminium and carbon-fibre, by UK firm Seymourpowell, and each seat will be individually sized for passengers. Can’t have you being uncomfortable while you’re rocketed out to the edge of space at a little under 3Gs, after all.  Each seat includes a digital display at its rear, so every passenger can see what’s going on as they slip the bonds of Earth.

Under Armour is responsible for the fabric in the seats, which incorporate “…a 3D knit featuring constructions that map breathability and function into the fabric encasing each cabin seat to provide comfort and mobility during spaceflight.” The clothing company is also making the spacesuits for Virgin Galactic passengers, as it happens.

The video above goes into a lot of detail about the design of the Spaceship but if you’re only keen on checking out the interior, jump right to 21:55. Everything from the seating choices to the inclusion of sixteen cameras (so you don’t waste your time trying to record stuff for Insta) is covered, with a soothing soundtrack that is perhaps a little less exciting than actually going to space. There will probably be a little more screaming on the day. Hopefully the good kind.

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