How About a Nice Game of Orbital Death Jenga?

Every butt on board the International Space Station is required to have a seat available on a docked space capsule because should the worst happen and the crew is forced to evacuate, you do not want to be playing musical chairs with your rides back to Earth.

The minuscule odds of anything like that happening, however, must be part of NASA's calculations on whether to bring home astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams on Boeing's troubled Starliner space capsule or add complexity and risk by playing a game of Orbital Death Jenga with a Dragon Crew capsule.

There is also a genuine scandal here that hardly anyone is talking about, but I'll get to that later in this column.

My apologies for coming up with "Orbital Death Jenga," but I needed something catchy to describe a complex and inherently dangerous process — and my wife and I just rewatched "Wargames" the other night so I have "How about a nice game of chess?" stuck in my head.

Docking space on board ISS is extremely limited, and the next Dragon Crew capsule to arrive needs to use the docking port currently occupied by Starliner. So if NASA decides to send Butch and Sunny home on a Dragon capsule, they'll have to play Orbital Death Jenga. To leave the smallest possible window when there aren't enough capsule seats for all the butts on board, they'll need to time the arrival of Dragon Crew as close as possible to the undocking and departure of Starliner.

Slip one capsule out; slip the next one in.

If this were a Hollywood movie, a storm of pebble-sized asteroids or orbital debris would strike the ISS in the middle of the Starliner/Dragon switch-out, forcing heroic actions to get Dragon docked just in time for everyone to be able to abandon the fatally damaged ISS. Fortunately, this is not a Hollywood movie and every step of this microgravity ballet will be orchestrated well in advance, should it prove necessary.

Now for that scandal.

NASA has delayed the next Dragon Crew mission from Aug. 18 to Sept. 24 to give Boeing the four weeks it needs to update Starliner's software. For reasons still unknown, Starliner launched with a version of the automated flight software unable to detach from the ISS without any crew on board. It is an ISS requirement that every vessel attached to the ISS be able to detach without a crew in case some freakish circumstance requires a vessel to be jettisoned.

Well, we might have reached that freakish circumstance — due to a capsule that NASA launched with known thruster issues. And they launched the damn thing without the required control software installed.

What in the actual hell? Even if Starliner returns safely to Earth with Wilmore and Williams on board, heads ought to roll for this terrible decision.

Eric Berger — who I keep telling you is the best space journalist in the business — was asked by a reader yesterday, "What’s your best guess as to how this plays out?"

UPDATE: NASA says all plans and preparations to return Butch and Sunny on the Crew-9 mission are now completed. That doesn't mean they will. It just means the plans are complete — including reducing the Crew-9 mission from four astronauts to two to free up seats for Butch and Sunny. Between the delays and the reduced crew, this unbelievable cluster-f*** is going to impact ISS functions for months.

Berger answered that he doesn't have "great insight into NASA's internal deliberations" and that "the decision has not been made" whether to ditch Starliner. Nevertheless, he thinks "it is more likely than not they fly in Dragon." He pegged the odds at 60/40 against flying Starliner back to Earth — at least with a crew on board. While I keep writing that if NASA decides to abandon the thing, they'll let it burn up during reentry, but that isn't necessarily so. Maybe Boeing will want to bring it back intact for study, like the brain of a dead serial killer.

If nothing else, Orbital Death Jenga is going to be the name of my New Wave revival band. Wait'll you hear our cover of "Major Tom."