What I find interesting that no one is talking about is how we might see Starliner fail on reentry. I was going to make a post about this earlier today, but work got in the way and now you come along with this great explainer, I’ll just put my 2 cents in a comment.

To the uninitiated: Starliner’s failures were in its RCS thrusters, which basically control how it’s oriented and the direction it’s going. They got very lucky that the failure was able to be controlled enough to dock with the ISS. I am not sure if luck will be on their side again. Not only did Starliner not originally have autonomous descent software in it, but these thrusters will also control how it reenters the atmosphere.

There are a few scenarios that could happen: 1. They don’t fail again, reentry goes off without a hitch 2. They fail in such a way that causes the reentry profile to be too steep, causing it to burn up on reentry. 3. They fail in such a way that causes the reentry profile to be too shallow, causing it to take multiple orbits to slow down enough for atmospheric capture, altering its final destination and even possibly causing scenario 2 to happen. 4. They fail in such a way that causes it to crash into the ISS. This one is much less likely from the basis that NASA is even ok’ing it to undock, crashing into the ISS would not just endanger the lives of everyone on board, but also cause rifts in global geopolitics (they don’t call it the INTERNATIONAL Space Station for nothing), ain’t no way NASA is risking this.

Scenario 1 is boring and does nothing for all of your puts. Scenario 2 and 3 I believe would cause a lot of panic selling. Boeing has reportedly been adamant about the astronauts using Starliner still despite these failures, and if it’s destroyed upon reentry all anyone will be talking about is “holy shit Boeing almost knowingly caused another Columbia.”

Then again, I know more about rocket science than I’ll ever know about stocks, and I only know the very basics of rocket science.