After a two-and-a-half-year delay, Boeing’s Starliner capsule has successfully docked with the International Space Station. This was a crucial step for the company, which was thought to be struggling to keep up with SpaceX. Maybe that’s why Boeing’s way of celebrating this successful mission has been quite unusual.
The crew of the ISS encountered a surprise inside the spacecraft when they opened the hatch of the Starliner. Floating next to the seated test dummy of Orbital Flight Test-2, a plush toy representing Jebediah Kerman, one of the four original “Kerbonauts” in the Kerbal Space Program, awaited them.
Jeb, as it is known by the KSP community, served as the zero-g indicator of flight. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took a small doll with him on his first manned space flight, and since then it has become a tradition for most space crews to carry plush toys with them so they can sense it when they enter the environment of microgravity.
If you’ve played Kerbal Space Program before, you can guess why it was so fitting for Boeing to send Jeb into space. At KSP, designing spacecraft that will take your Kerbonauts into orbit and beyond is no easy task. Often your first designs will fall and disappear as you try to escape Kerbin’s gravity. But you go back to the drawing board and keep making changes until you find a design that works. In a way, that’s exactly what Boeing engineers had to do after the Starliner’s first test flight in 2019 failed due to a software issue and the second was delayed following an unexpected valve problem.
Boeing kept Jeb’s presence on OFT-2 a secret until the spacecraft docked with the ISS. A spokesperson for the company told collectionSPACE that Starliner’s engineering team chose the mascot in part because of the science, technology, engineering and math lessons KSP teaches players. Jeb will spend the next few days with the ISS crew before docking back in the spacecraft for the return journey to Earth.
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