After a two-and-a-half-year delay, Boeing’s Starliner capsule has successfully docked at the International Space Station. It was a major milestone for a company that, at least in the popular imagination, is struggling to catch up with SpaceX. So it’s fitting how Boeing decided it would celebrate a successful mission.
When the crew of the ISS opened the hatch to Starliner, they found a surprise inside the spacecraft. Floating next to the seated dummy of Orbital Flight Test-2 was a plush toy that represented Jebediah Kerman, one of the four original “Kerbonauts” featured in the Kerbal Space Program. Jeb, as he is better known to the KSP community, served as the zero-g indicator of the flight. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took a tiny doll on the first-ever human spaceflight, and since then it has become a tradition for most space crews to carry plush toys with them to make it easy to see when they’ve entered a microgravity environment.
If you’ve ever played Kerbal Space Program, you know why it was so fitting that Boeing decided to send Jeb into space. In KSP, it is not an easy task to design spacecraft that will take your Kerbonauts to orbit and beyond. Often your first designs will fall and crash as they struggle to fly free from Kerbin’s gravity. But you go back to the drawing board and tweak your designs until you find one that works. In a way, that was exactly what Boeing engineers had to do after Starliner’s first test flight in 2019 failed due to a software glitch, and the second was delayed by an unexpected valve problem.
Boeing kept Jeb’s presence on OFT-2 a secret until the spacecraft docked with the ISS. A company spokesperson told collectSPACE that Starliner’s engineering team chose the mascot, in part because of the science, technology, engineering and math lessons KSP has to teach players. Jeb will spend the next few days with the crew of the ISS before they put him back in the spacecraft for his return journey to Earth.
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