My Aged Uncle Has Finally Gotten out of His Chair. Now We’ll See If He Can Find the Kitchen

According to Reuters, the reusable gumdrop-shaped Boeing Starliner capsule (playing the part of my aged uncle in this melodrama) and its crew have a rendezvous with the International Space Station. It is scheduled sometime today to dock autonomously with the ISS, which orbits some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. But then, you know how schedules go with Boeing, and I’m glad my fanny isn’t one of the two on board.

I’ll type as quickly as my two fingers can to complete this first chapter before finding out there is no second.

Uncle had tried and tried to get out of his chair, but mostly to no avail

God knows it hasn’t been for lack of resources. So far, our government has coughed up $4.2 billion and Starliner is more than $1.5 billion over budget, as well as several years behind its delivery date. My aging uncle has couch-sores on his backside and his memory of the kitchen is fading.

While uncle’s mission is far from over, he and his caregiver need to eventually make it back to Earth (or the kitchen, take your pick) in one piece, it's quite a relief to see the United Launch Alliance's effort soar off the sofa, carrying the Starliner astronauts to the International Space Station. That alliance, being a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, has had a hard time even finding the bathroom for the past 4 ½ years.

It seems that Boeing’s problems with killing people while producing aircraft may have begun with the Lockheed Martin merger

Boeing was pretty much the last man standing in American commercial aircraft and European Airbus was their only real competition. But that wasn’t good enough, the lure of dipping their toe into the coffers of the military-industrial-complex was simply too strong. William E. Boeing, the company’s founder, was an engineer and, while he was alive, flight was an engineering problem.

The same cannot be said of military contracts, which are highly political, subject to vast cost increases and willing to accept the infamous $250 half-vast hammer.

So, here we have Boeing, 33% over budget and way behind delivery on what has otherwise become a rather mundane assignment. While Boeing struggled with Starliner, Elon Musk’s SpaceX soared, now launching a rocket once every few days. Not only that, but Space X recovers the main rocket, a hugely expensive component, as lightly and gracefully as a Fred Astaire dance routine.

A per-seat cost for SpaceX's Crew Dragon is estimated at $55 million, while Starliner's is $90 million, according to NASA's inspector general and presuming they can get it off the ground. Starliner’s current two passengers are currently billed at about $3 billion per seat.

Well, they finally did get it off the ground today

It hasn’t yet docked, perhaps having forgotten its way to the kitchen, but we are hopeful it gets my uncle inside the kitchen without incident. Hope is a great thing, but it’s been tough on Unc, sitting there for all these years watching launches every few days while he gets older.

If only he had had Elon’s phone number.