Imagine showing up to work for an eight-day shift—not unthinkable in industries like shipping, trucking, airlines, oil rigs, and rural medicine—and then the boss announces that actually, due to unsafe working conditions, you will be forced to work a nine-month shift instead.
Just one day on the job happens to come with a lot of risk. Your body is exposed to massive amounts of radiation, putting you at enhanced risk for cancer and blindness. Your bones begin to lose their density and by the end of the nine months might have lost up to 13.5% of their mass. Your tendons and joints become distended. You have trouble sleeping. You have no privacy. You miss your family. The food sucks.
This is what happened to Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who traveled to the International Space Station in June for an eight-day tour only to be told earlier this month that they could not return until February of next year because the ship they arrived in is too defective to safely bring them back to Earth.
Forty million people were glued to their television sets when the three Apollo 13 astronauts—Jim Lovell, John Swigert, and Fred Haise—landed safely in 1969 after their failed mission to land on the moon. This drama echoed into 1995, when the Ron Howard film Apollo 13 grossed more than $350 million at the box office as Americans relived the nail-biting 1969 rescue. Today, the plight of Williams and Wilmore is relegated to page A19 of the New York Times.
The U.S. space program, once a source of pride and excitement for much of the American public, has faded in tandem with its gradual privatization, though 70% of us still believe it’s important. Initially conceived to compete with the Soviet space program, at its height, NASA directly employed 25,600 people and was a powerful economic engine for Florida’s Space Coast and southeast Houston, with nearly a half-million workers employed in related industries.
After the destruction of the USSR in the early 1990s, the U.S. accelerated a privatization process that had begun in the 1970s. By the turn of the century, billionaires began to open their own space companies: Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.
But there are other, more familiar names in the mix, namely Boeing and Northrop Grumman, whose combined revenue of $120 billion situates them as monopolistic competitors in the aerospace industry. Boeing, the larger of the two, built the Starship meant to bring Williams and Wilmore home but was deemed by NASA (over objections from Boeing) as being too risky to survive reentry.
There have been 58 incidents, accidents and occurrences on Boeing-made planes in 2024. A Boeing-made door was ripped off in mid-flight, a Boeing-made engine cover dropped off on take-off, and a plane landed with Boeing-made panels missing. Yet the problem runs deeper than Boeing’s 2024 track record of scandal-ridden disaster.
Whistleblowers, two of whom suddenly died in 2024, have warned that Boeing’s cost-cutting measures on the assembly line are putting everyone from vacationers to astronauts at risk. With a company of Boeing’s size, profit becomes more and more difficult to chase, and so penny-pinching becomes necessary, even at the expense of the company’s efficacy. Due to a number of scandals and technical failures, Boeing stock has fallen more than 50% in the past 5 years.
Regardless, in May, shareholders voted to reward Boeing’s scandal-ridden safety record and tumbling stock price by hiking the pay of outgoing CEO David Calhoun by 45%, setting a company record with his $32.8 million payout. Since Calhoun joined the company in 2020, 346 people have died in Boeing plane crashes. Incoming Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg is slated to make a bargain $22 million for his first year on the job, roughly $1.8 million every month that Williams and Wilmore (who earn a relatively more modest $15,300 per month) are in space.
In July, Boeing pled guilty to defrauding the government and walked away with a quarter-billion dollar fine. Felony records would generally disqualify a company from continuing to take government contracts, but since Boeing holds monopoly power over the aerospace industry, experts seem skeptical that taxpayer money will stop flowing to the troubled company.
Indeed, when NASA announced that Williams and Wilmore would not return until next year at Monday’s press conference, they were eager to stress their close working relationship with Boeing.
“It’s very important to NASA” to continue working with Boeing, said former Florida Senator and now NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We are committed to continuing to work with Boeing,” added Ken Bauersox, associate administrator for NASA Space Operations.
While Boeing certainly has a legion of lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians to represent them, astronauts Williams and Wilmore are without the safety of union membership. Some astronauts do belong to the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP), whose president works for Boeing.
People’s World was told that SETP is simply a professional organization and “certainly not a union.” Members pay a fee to join, but do not receive representation. The only resources available from their Critical Incident Response Committee webpage was a guide for bereaved families. They otherwise declined comment.
There is no doubt that it takes a special sort of personality to become an astronaut. Beyond the training and dedication, there is undoubtedly a perhaps unhealthy amount of risk-seeking involved. Regardless, other professionals engaging in risky behavior, such as performing dangerous stunts for films and asbestos removal, are often represented by unions for precisely that reason.
Astronauts have traditionally been portrayed as heroes and patriotic icons, some of the most honored professionals in our society. But as the privatization of space exploration continues, they are being increasingly left at the mercy of the rich and powerful who are determined to see their profits continue soaring skyward.
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