- Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd,
The Everyday Astronaut.
Welcome to Houston, Texas,
home of NASA's Johnson Space Center,
and I'm here to show you guys something
really exciting.
Boeing actually sent me out here
to check out the Boeing CST 100 Starliner.
So this is one of America's next rides to space.
We're actually going to be sending astronauts on this thing
up to the International Space Station as early as 2019.
And I actually got to sit at the commander's seat
and pilot it to see how I do.
So, what might take some astronauts four years,
I did in about four hours.
Let's see how I did.
Let's get started.
- [Announcer] 3, 2, 1, and lift off.
(upbeat music)
- NASA recently announced who'll be flying
on the first commercial crew flight,
and both Boeing and SpaceX are racing
to get their spaceships, their launch sites,
and their spacesuits ready
to return humans to space from US soil.
Boeing's spaceship is the CST 100 Starliner.
A capsule shaped spacecraft
that can fly up to 7 astronauts to space.
For NASA missions to the International Space Station,
it'll fly up to 4 astronauts at a time
filling the rest of the capsule with cargo.
The Starliner will launch on top of perhaps
one of the most reliable rockets ever made,
ULA's Atlas 5 with two strap-on solid rocket motors
and two RL10 upper stage engines,
a configuration that an Atlas 5
has never actually flown before.
But, all the hardware has been flown
many times throughout history,
and today, I get to take you where the astronauts train,
and show you the actual hardware they use to get ready
for this next chapter of US spaceflight.
In order to get a better sense
of what it will be like to fly the Starliner,
I met up with Tony Castilleja from Boeing
somewhere deep in the middle of Johnson Space Center.
So, we've been driving around a lot,
and to be honest I kind of have no idea where I actually am,
so, where am I?
- You're on Earth. - Okay, that's good.
- In Texas. - Yes.
- In Houston, at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
- Yes.
- In the home of the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility
where every astronaut is trained to go to space,
and this is the home of astronaut training
for that next generation space capsule.
- That is so awesome, I really want to see it.
- You ready?
- Yeah, let's do it. - Let's go for it.
(upbeat music)
There she is. The Boeing Starliner,
CST 100 flying to the International Space Station
and we're training in that vehicle now.
- And rumor has it, you guys are,
for some reason, going to let me go inside it.
- Well, we're training today,
so, if you're an everyday astronaut,
we've got to train all of them.
- Let's do this.
- You ready to give it a spin?
- This is my first time
actually being an everyday astronaut,
normally it's just me in like a bathtub or something,
this is significantly, a little more sophisticated.
- Well, this is real, This is actual size,
and this is how we train.
- Oh my gosh. That's amazing.
- It'll be fun.
- Then I met Kavya Kamal Manyapu.
She's the Flight Crew Operations
and Test Engineer for the Starliner.
After swapping out my hat for a safety hat,
she taught me how to get in and out of the Starliner,
or, in other words, ingress and egress.
- Luckily, I also follow instructions
about as well as a baby goat,
floating in a pool of butter.
So, let's see how I do.
Float on over.
This will be a lot easier in zero G, I think.
- [Kavya] Yes.
- But
this isn't too bad.
- Your next to the commander, which is the pilot seat.
- So I'm commander, you're pilot?
- That's correct.
- But who does the majority of the actual flying?
- The commander.
So our vehicle is built to be autonomous.
- Right.
- You take control in an inadvertent situation,
where the crew has to jump in an take manual control.
- Well, let me tell you a little story,
so, for the first,
probably year of playing Kerbal Space Program,
I didn't even know you could do stability control.
So I was flying manually.
So if you guys need someone
who can steer this thing around willy-nilly
all manual-like, you got the right guy.
- (Tony) So, if you remember the space shuttle,
there were thousands of switches,
and the amount of switches that you see
on the console in front of you,
is the number of switches
that are going to be in the vehicle.
We really optimize and take advantage of, exactly,
the cargo vehicles and the autonomous vehicles,
which give you just the minimum amount of switches necessary
to keep this vehicle what we call "safe."
Where we're "safing" ability at any point in the flight.
- Okay. Let's pause here for a second.
See those screens, or, where there's normally a screen
and for now there's just that blue cover?
Despite having large screens to display
a lot of useful information,
they are not touchscreens.
Inputs happen via the buttons on the edges of the screen.
Every button pushed has a visual cue, an audio cue,
and the actual physical tactile cue as well.
The Starliner features a large window
directly above the commander's head.
They definitely get the best view in the house.
There's another smaller window on the side hatch
and one on the docking port,
but, the commander's window is certainly the best.
While we're talking about features of the Starliner,
perhaps one the most unique features
is the fact that the Starliner will land on land
using parachutes and giant airbags,
as opposed to landing in water like most capsule designs.
This is similar to the Russian Soyuz capsule,
which lands on land in the middle of Kazakhstan.
The Starliner will be the first orbital capsule
to land on land in the US.
And notice I said it will be the first orbital capsule,
since Blue Origin sub-orbital New Shepard capsule
lands on land too.
There are five landing sites
proposed in the Western United States
but the two prime sites will be
the US Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico,
and the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
Landing on land definitely gives a leg up in reusability,
considering the capsule won't land in corrosive salt water.
This will help allow the Starliner
to be reused up to ten times.
That's impressive.
Of course, The Starliner is capable of landing in water too.
But, that most likely would only be the case
if the Starliner had to perform a launch abort.
- And the nice thing about our system,
you talked of the abort system on Apollo,
being, we call it the tractor, or the puller,
what we have is the pusher.
So our abort system is on the bottom of ours,
on the service modules, so in an inadvertent situation,
you'd have to evacuate from the launch pad
or the launch vehicle,
those four engines fire up
and take you about a mile up and a mile out.
- To land you in the water, if your on the launch pad.
- Before we left the egress/ingress trainer,
Kavya and Tony challenged me to complete a certification.
Astronauts are required to be able
to put on their spacesuits all by themselves,
inside the capsule, in under seven minutes.
Alright, so, I think it's my turn now
to actually see if I can suit up.
I mean, I've done this,
I've done this a couple times,
a time or two, but, this is actually the first time
I've done it with any real intention, so...
This actually, when you first said,
it honestly sounded a little scary
like I didn't know if it was going to be hard or not,
but sitting here now, this is no problem.
- And think about it, you'll be in zero G
if you have to put on the suit for cabin leak scenario,
and so you can actually use up all the volume up there.
- Right, you could just be hanging out,
right up here, yeah trying to,
I feel like I'd be clumsy enough
that I'd probably be kicking people's faces and things.
So I'd probably opt for this,
but yeah, this is significantly
roomier than I imagined it would be.
Let's fast forward here 10 times.
I've put the suit on so many times,
I should have no problem getting it on
in under the seven minutes that's required.
Don't forget the binoculars, those are important.
Undo this.
Once I was fully suited up,
I got strapped in for a quick photo op.
So now that I've been trained
in how to actually get in and out of the Starliner,
why don't I see what it's like to fly one?
For that, we're going to head over
to the Mission Simulator and Training Facility.
Here, I would get to go check out
the two different training simulators,
as well as Boeing's spacesuit.
So, before I tried flying the Starliner,
I first suited up in a real spacesuit.
If you didn't catch what it's like for me
to actually put one of these on and wear it,
be sure and check out this video.
- So, left seat's yours, commander Dodd.
- Commander Dodd, I like the way that sounds.
- Just pop over here.
- Now it's time for Boeing's software engineer,
Jim May, to teach me how to actually fly a Starliner.
[Jim May] Okay, and just hop on up.
Watch the helmet behind you, alright?
Is the helmet comfortable?
You're going to have to lean a little bit forward
because that is a very hard seat.
There we go.
- Oh yeah.
- Now do you hear noise in the headset?
- Um, yeah, I do.
I know that a lot of this stuff
we can't actually show on screen,
so I apologize to you guys, but, this is amazing.
This is going to be really exciting.
- Okay, watch your right arm here.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, we're going to need that.
Since I can't show you what's on the screens,
I'll describe it.
Basically, Boeing developed a way
to show your position relative to your target
and shows where you're about to be.
It is surprisingly easy to understand
but, now, Jim actually gave me the controls.
It's my time to show him just what I've got.
- So you've played a little bit of Kerbal Space Program,
so it's looking, I mean, these screens look normal?
- Yeah. Yeah, this actually looks pretty familiar to me
and I think you mispronounced the word little
an obsessive amount, so to speak.
- I mean, your basically an Aerospace Engineer, so.
So down also in front of you,
you've got your distance to the station over here,
okay, six meters, you've got your relative velocity,
Right now you're sitting pretty still.
The vehicle's in autopilot, holding you up ten meters away.
When we get going,
you're going to want to make this about -.04.
- -.04.
- Correct. Each pulse will be a .01 pulse for this part.
- So, four little pulses, will get me underway.
Oh, wow, Everything changed.
- So we're in run.
We need to do a couple of things first.
- Right now the joysticks are turned off,
the autopilot's in control,
so right above your left hand there's a manual control,
flip the flight control button up.
- Flight control button is up.
- Okay, flight control is now on.
Okay, primary control,
we want to turn the pulse control on for trans
so there's a panel, primary control right in the middle.
- Find my control right in the middle.
- Okay, trans is the translation hand controller
from the bottom pull the cover up on the pulse button
and push that.
So now you are in manual pulse control,
go ahead and grab the joystick
and give yourself a forward thrust.
- Forward thrust, of one.
- There we go. You see how the pointers move?
So give about three more.
- .02,
.03,
and here we come up on the .04.
Looking good.
Gotcha, so what you're saying go up at like,
I could blast my way up to like .2 meters per second
and then scrub off that velocity right before we get there
and just really impress everyone
down at Mission Control, right?
- I mean, they'd be a little worried,
and you'd be firing a bunch of thruster gas in stationary,
but, you know, that, that's annoying, yeah.
- And here it comes.
- Five one contact captured.
- Contact captured.
- Successful Doc.
Houston, we're here.
- We made it to the International Space Station.
I did it. Guys, I didn't ruin anything.
Oh, I didn't even notice up there.
Was that running the whole time too?
- It was. You were seeing the station and not even looking.
- I wasn't even looking. I could've been looking
out at space this whole time, dang it.
- One meter. Contact, and capture.
Look at that, successful docking.
- Yes, thank you, I actually did it.
I did a thing, I did a thing.
That was pretty hard, actually,
that took a good amount of concentration.
- It did.
- After a few more successful dockings,
it was time to change back into my normal clothes
so I could see where astronauts can train
in a more casual environment.
In the room next door is a more mobile set up.
I did a few more dockings with even less help from Jim,
which was actually kind of scary.
But, had I known he was just watching
replays of me playing Kerbal Space Program,
and shopping on my website,
I don't think I would've been as nervous.
Man, so crazy, it's so cool though,
it's really fun looking at the future here,
and realizing that we're very, very, very close
to seeing people actually flying in this,
and this'll be going to space,
returning our crews to the international space station,
flying from the US soil, it's really exciting,
and yeah, I can't wait, I'll be there,
I'll bring you guys there, we're gonna watch it,
and we are going to cheer it on the whole way,
and we're gonna tell you every square second about it,
it's going to be amazing.
Man, that was awesome.
I'm more excited than ever for the Commercial Crew Program.
I can't thank Boeing enough for flying me and my crew
out to Houston to see the Starliner and their spacesuit.
So, thank you for showing me your world.
And I also owe a special thanks to Space Center Houston,
for showing me around their amazing museum
that's just outside of Johnson Space Center.
Be sure and let me know in the comments below,
if you have any questions about the starliner,
Boeing, the Commercial Crew Program, The Atlas V,
or anything else space related.
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Thanks everybody, that does it for me,
I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut,
bringing space down to Earth for everyday people.