I listened to the whole conference and here's my impression:
1. NASA manager Steve Stich said there's a relatively wide "band of uncertainty" in how risky a Starliner return is. Some (many?) NASA engineers are at the high end of the band and are advocating a return on Dragon instead. Boeing is obviously at the low end of the band and thinks it is a low risk.
The problem is, the data doesn't rule out either side of the band. So they are trying to get more data to narrow the uncertainty (in either or both directions). [Interestingly enough, the data from the White Sands testing made them more worried because it revealed the Teflon seal deformation.]
But my sense is that if they don't narrow the uncertainty (i.e., convince the NASA engineers) then they will very likely choose a Dragon return. That is, it sounds like if nothing changes, the astronauts are coming down on Dragon.
2. Stich said they need to decide by mid-August, in order to have time to prepare the Crew-9 launch for Sept 24th. So we'll know by then.
3. They emphasized that (a) the thruster problems are all fixable (given time), and (b) that even if Starliner returns without a crew, they will have learned enough from the test to potentially certify the capsule for regular service. This is probably the only way they'll be able to keep Boeing as a provider. A redo of this mission would cost Boeing half a billion dollars, easy. And since the contract is fixed-price, this would just add to Boeing's losses. So I expect they will certify Starliner even if it comes down without a crew.
4. In some ways, Starliner is being held to a higher standard than Dragon Crew-2. If Starliner were the only vehicle available, NASA and the astronauts would absolutely take the small risk and come down with a crew. But since Dragon is available, I think NASA is thinking, "why take the risk?"
5. There's a huge difference between how NASA engineers and lay people look at this issue. Many people (particularly on Twitter) have a binary safe/not-safe view of the situation. Either Starliner is safe or it is not. Either the astronauts are stranded or they are not. But the engineering perspective is all about dealing with uncertainty. What is the probability of a bad result? Is the risk worth the reward? Even worse, everything is a trade-off. Sometimes trying to mitigate a risk causes an unintended effect that increases risk (e.g., a bug fix that causes a bug).
I don't envy the engineers, either at NASA or at Boeing.
I think many might not be aware of Starliner's sordid history. It has failed essentially every qualification test in various ways. Their pad abort test (where you simulate a launch abort while on the launch pad) resulted in only 2 of the 3 parachutes deploying in beyond optimal conditions. NASA considered that such a resounding success that they let them completely skip the far more challenging in-flight abort test. Their first automated mission to the ISS completely failed and did not make it to the station. NASA finally required a redo from Boeing and their second one did make it to the ISS, but only after experiencing widespread leaks and thruster failures literally identical to the ones that have now left these astronauts stranded.
If SpaceX or another company had remotely similar results, they would never have been greenlit. For instance in spite of a flawless pad abort test, NASA required SpaceX also carry out an in-flight abort. And that's completely reasonable - you don't simply skip tests, even with optimal performance. Skipping tests following suboptimal performance is simply unjustifiable. And so I think we're largely looking at another Challenger type disaster caused by a disconnect between management (and likely political appointees) versus engineering staff, rather than inherent risk. But this is not a vessel that should have ever had a single human anywhere near it, and so their official comments (and even actions) on the situation are going to be heavily biased due to their own behaviors.
They also wrapped their avionics cables in flammable tape and had to redo everything. The original, approved tape was still available, not a supply issue. I think that is pretty telling.
> They also wrapped their avionics cables in flammable tape
Who approved the design, and are the Engineers still employed by Boeing? Curious minds would like to know. Any way to trace this from public documentation?
IIRC it was Kapton tape, technically what they did was fine, Kapton tape is commonly used for things like that. The problem was that they used it in places that might get hotter than the tape was rated for.
Edit: Actually, looking around a bit, doesn't seem like there's any official mention of what kind of tape it was. Kapton tape seems to be the popular assumption but there's no evidence of it.
It might not even be a fat-finger, they might legitimately use 200C rated tape where it's needed and 155C tape where the higher spec is not needed. I am not a kapton expert but maybe higher temp ratings are less flexible or less resistant to hard vacuum or something like that. This might just be a plain old engineering QA issue. These are complex machines, and these sorts of things happen.
I don't know how space-rated QA works, as I am but a lowly terrestrial engineer, but I imagine there are specs for each portion of the machine calling out electrical ratings, temperature ratings, vibration ratings, etc. If the spec definitions for that section of machine are bad it's hard to do proper QA against those specs.
"in" denotes the opposite, so "inflammable" has been used to mean not flammable due to expectations of grammatical consistency, and as a result the word is generally preferred to be avoided entirely nowadays in favor of either "flammable" (or "highly flammable"), or "nonflammable".
This interpretation is based on incorrect decomposition of the word.
In this case, the "in" prefix means "in/on". Think of it as "inflame" + "able". Similar to how "inflammation" doesn't mean "a state of not burning" and "inflamed" doesn't mean "not burning". Also see "ingress", "ingest", "inaugurate".
I'm only an armchair etymologist and this is wild speculation, but I think that the meaning of the "in" prefix might depend on whether we get the word directly from Latin, or whether it comes through French.
> I'm only an armchair etymologist and this is wild speculation, but I think that the meaning of the "in" prefix might depend on whether we get the word directly from Latin, or whether it comes through French.
French has both meanings: the negation as in interdit (forbidden) or impossible (well, impossible); or “in”, “towards”, “change” as in intérieur (interior), inflexion (inflection), or indeed inflammable (from the Latin inflammabilis).
Both meanings also exist in Latin.
What I found fascinating learning English is “inhabit”, which also sounds like the opposite of its actual meaning. Is obviously the second meaning, but then the prefix is redundant because it came from the Latin habitare, which is the verb with the same meaning.
"Flammable" is such a weird word. Folk etymology would derive it from a transitive verb "to flame" that doesn't really exist (i.e. is not used, at least not that way).
There is a transitive verb "to inflame", which is common. It derives from the noun "flame" and the prefix "in-", which when applied to nouns makes it a verb meaning "to cause [the noun]".
They also ignored the common word "inflammation", which nobody thinks means "to stop your tissues from flaring up".
None of that matters. People parsed "inflammable" differently and arrived at a new meaning. But I just find it odd that, while doing that parsing, they never considered that they never use the verb "to flame" in ordinary speech.
'Flame' as in 'to catch fire' has some rare usage in English- "The main blaze of it is past, but a small thing would make it flame again" says Shakespeare. The more common usages are metaphorical- 'flame with passion', or more modern 'flamed them online', though I don't really see that usage much anymore either.
Sounds like it might be better if Boeing dropped out if their thing doesn't work properly, costs much more and is mostly in there through political lobbying.
They said a year or two back they will refuse to take on new fixed-price contracts going forward. Apparently the only way they can be profitable is by scamming taxpayers.
If a producer of critical infrastructure cannot make profit without cutting corners, it should be nationalized so that the need to place profit ahead of anything and everything the producer does is eliminated.
I agree with you but since the government is not great at managing cost and budgets, and private industry is showing burgeoning capacity to develop orbital vehicles, maybe it would be in the national interest to steward a winding down of the business and transfer of assets to other industry participants.
Why would the government need or want to own a producer that is not capable of producing things profitably while competitors that can do so exist in the market?
I think they mean for the continued costs of correcting the issues. It's a fixed cost contract, and Boeing is currently on the hook for the runaway costs this mission is incurring.
The companies could themselves propose certification and NASA only said if it is ok, if you didnt test you had do more certification work. NASA didnt require an abort test for either company. SpaceX just decided to have one, Boeing didnt.
The parachute test had nothing to do with abort tests.
You can read the requirements (and more) here. [1]
----
In 2014, NASA awarded separate fixed-price contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to develop their respective systems and to fly astronauts to the ISS. Each contract required four successful demonstrations to achieve human rating for the system: pad abort, uncrewed orbital test, launch abort, and crewed orbital test.
----
Parachutes are an integral part of the abort tests. If those parachutes fail, which is a somewhat common problem with these designs, then even if the capsule escapes a failing rocket, they're going to head the ground like a rock.
I think shade needs thrown at NASA for taking too long to make SpaceX a part of this solution. If they are sending up an unproven vehicle, why not have SapceX already on stand by? These astronauts should have been home in June, now they are saying they might not be home until 2025? someone needs fired.
Here lies an hyperboloid argument or Catch-22. It isn't a circular argument because after dipping down to a solution we rebound into ether.
1.A: Astronauts stranded
2.B: No they are not stranded, there is an emergency evac capsule
3.A: Ok, bring them home
4.B: The emergency evac capsules are the vehicles they arrived on
Reminds me of the cause of the Apollo 13 oxygen tank explosions:
"The high temperature emptied the tank, but also resulted in serious damage to the teflon insulation on the electrical wires to the power fans within the tank. The exposed fan wires shorted and the teflon insulation caught fire in the pure oxygen environment."
There will be businesses cases written about what happens when any organization becomes completely over burdened by risk mitigation. This applies to government as well. One reason nothing can be done. (Also interestingly it correlates nicely with the average age of decision makers as they approach death).
The problem is that they have managers that don’t understand basic engineering and manufacturing practices, and that focus entirely on short-term financial engineering.
Case studies for those sorts of mistakes have already been written. For example, look at the US automotive bailout and collapse of Detroit, or read up on IBM and GE’s performance over the last decade.
AT&T is another one and you’re seeing the same thing play out in the entertainment sector with Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney and one could argue Google is on the same path.
Financial engineering is a dead end in multiple industries but will continue unabated because of how the management employee lifecycle works — the people who run companies into the ground are long retired with their huge comp packages by the time the company is defunct.
> It has failed essentially every qualification test in various ways. [...] Their first automated mission to the ISS completely failed and did not make it to the station. NASA finally required a redo from Boeing and their second one did make it to the ISS, but only after experiencing widespread leaks and thruster failures
I don't follow spaceflight news in any great depth - but doesn't SpaceX also have a rocket thingy that keeps exploding?
Isn't "just launch over and over until it stops exploding" the way rockets are made these days?
It's a different philosophy. Starship (the in-development SpaceX rocket) has taken the "test as fully as you can add often as you can" route, and no people will be getting on it until it's reached a high level of reliability.
Starliner was not developed that way at all. It was supposed to be developed with much more up-front work to make sure that it would work correctly out of the gate. All of the mentioned Starliner tests were certification tests, whereas all of the Starship tests so far have been 100% expected to fail in some way, but with a more ambitious goal about how far it gets.
It's not a difference in philosophies, it's different stages of development and testing.
Starship and Starliner are very different things. Starship is the launch vehicle and a novel one (as in, it's not just a rebuild of an existing system, it's got new components and design elements). The failures we've seen so far were all, to some extent, expected though the particular modes of failure may not have been anticipated. They were launched with the intent of discovering the failure modes and responding to them with changes to design and manufacturing.
Starliner is now where Dragon Crew was with DM-2. Both tested with uncrewed flights and various test scenarios before their crewed flights. DM-2 and this flight are flights where nothing should go wrong. Failure, or critical failures at least, are unanticipated events. Otherwise you wouldn't be putting people in them yet (both vehicles are capable of operating autonomously, there's no reason to put a person in them if you aren't confident in the vehicle). The same philosophy applies to both Dragon Crew and Starliner at this stage.
The issue is that you don't normally let humans on them until you've proven they don't explode. If Boeing had followed each of those incidents with a re-do where everything went perfectly, it wouldn't be a problem.
Yes, SpaceX has a rocket that keeps exploding, which is their new in development rocket Starship. They don't use Starship to launch people yet though; they use their much more reliable Falcon 9 instead. Blowing up rockets while they're in development is fine; blowing up rockets that have people on them is less fine. Boeing's Starliner should not have carried people until all its developmental problems were resolved
Completely different case, though most reporting doesn't make that clear.
The first time you build a physical rocket and test sending it up, it's almost certain to fail. Seeing how and why it explodes is pretty much the purpose of launching it!
> The first time you build a physical rocket and test sending it up, it's almost certain to fail.
That's not true. Many launch vehicles have succeeded on their first flight:
Titan II: Apr 8, 1964 (Gemini 1)
Saturn I (Block 1): Oct 27, 1961 (SA-1; only 1st stage active, 2nd and 3rd stage were present but disabled)
Saturn I (Block 2): Jan 29, 1964 (SA-2; only 1st and 2nd stage active; 3rd stage was present but disabled)
Saturn IB: Feb 26, 1966 (AS-201; first Saturn 1 flight with all 3 stages active)
Saturn V: Nov 9, 1967 (Apollo 4)
Space Shuttle: Apr 12, 1981 (STS-1, Columbia)
Atlas V: Aug 21, 2002
Falcon 9: Jun 4, 2010 (Dragon Spacecraft Qualification Unit test; the first stage disintegrated on re-entry, but that's irrelevant to success of the payload)
Falcon Heavy: Feb 6, 2018 (test flight; center core recovery failed, although again that arguably doesn't count)
Vulcan Centaur: Jan 8, 2024 (Peregrine lunar lander; the lander failed, but for reasons unrelated to the launch vehicle)
Indeed, I'd even say the norm is for success on first flight. And even when they do fail, most of the time it is a partial failure not a complete RUD – e.g. Delta IV Heavy's first flight reached orbit, but a lower orbit than planned; Ariane 6 reached the desired orbit, but the second stage failed to relight a second time for its deorbit burn.
What SpaceX has been doing with Starship is very novel – deliberately flying very early in development, when failure is more likely than success. This is different from traditional launch vehicle design process, in which you spend years doing extensive on-the-ground analysis, simulation and component testing, resulting in a high probability of success on the very first flight.
I think a lot of people are being misled into thinking SpaceX's way of doing things is the industry norm, when it isn't. Conversely, many other people misunderstand that SpaceX is intentionally doing something different, and are judging Starship's (expected) failures by the standards of earlier programs in which they aren't expected (failure after years of exhaustive on-the-ground development is a sign either of incompetence or really bad luck).
> What SpaceX has been doing with Starship is very novel
It's not novel. It's just not NASA. It was the norm in the early days of ICBM-type rockets. The original V-2 had about 700 failures before they hit a target. The original Atlas booster failed about half the time. "Nearly every component in the Atlas managed to fail at some point during test flights, from the engine combustion chambers to the tank pressurization system to the flight control system, but Convair engineers noted with some pride that there had never been a repeat of the same failure more than three times."[1] The military was fine with a high rate of failure at first in exchange for faster development.
> It's not novel. It's just not NASA. It was the norm in the early days of ICBM-type rockets.
Relatively novel. But also, more than just not NASA – it is also not contemporary ULA or Arianespace. It is also not Falcon 9/Heavy-era SpaceX, given both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy completed their primary mission objectives flawlessly on their first flight.
> That's not true. Many launch vehicles have succeeded on their first flight:
> Titan II: Apr 8, 1964 (Gemini 1)
Titan II failed several times during development and there was considerable drama between the Air Force and NASA getting the Titan II man-rated because of this. The man-rated version, Titan II GLV, never failed, but by a similar token man-rated Starships have never failed (nor ever flown.). If we're comparing apples to apples, then Titan II had numerous failures if Starship has.
> Titan II failed several times during development
I was counting "Titan II the launch vehicle" separately from "Titan II the ICBM". However, if we are talking about Titan II the ICBM, here's what Wikipedia [0] has to say about its first launch: "The first Titan II launch, Missile N-2, was carried out on 16 March 1962 from LC-16 at Cape Canaveral and performed extremely well, flying 5,000 miles (8,000 km) downrange and depositing its reentry vehicle in the Ascension splash net." So, for the purpose of an ICBM, the first launch was a success.
Now, it is true that the second launch failed to reach its target due to a problem with the second stage. But I was responding to the claim that first launches normally fail, so I don't think a failure on the second launch, when the first launch was successful, is directly relevant to that claim.
> and there was considerable drama between the Air Force and NASA getting the Titan II man-rated because of this.
As Wikipedia notes, Titan II had a lot of problems with vibration. However, for the ICBM use case, these problems were not an issue – a nuclear warhead can handle a lot more vibration than a crewed space capsule can. I don't think we should classify the first launch of a rocket as a "failure" if it has issues which would interfere with planned human-rating but not with the success of its primary uncrewed use case.
That's SpaceX's philosophy, but Boeing operates on a measure-twice build-once philosophy where everything is supposed to be close to perfect in the first place.
But it's not close enough to perfect and they didn't factor a failure into the costs. So now there's pressure in not doing a second trial run that may or not be perfect because they don't want to lose money.
Not only that but it's year later than planned and has failed most of its tests. And even if everything had worked as planned it would have lost money.
It's really not a very successful philosophy anymore.
You follow the news and the public statements on the goals of the test? SpaceX isn't exactly tight lipped about their philosophy and what they hope to learn from each test.
Can you share an example of a pre-launch announcement so I know what they hope to learn? I haven't seen anything about any upcoming test's goals as they approach, but I also don't know where I would look.
The "mainstream" reporting on these tends to be pretty awful and a glaring display of Gell-Mann Amnesia, but the more popular space journalists tend to be pretty good. I provided specific examples because there are also "journalists" known for intentionally distorting the facts to prop up their biases.
The goals for the next flight test seem to be to try to catch the booster (if they can get the necessary regulatory clearances) and to try to perform a controlled reentry of Starship again, this time with an upgraded heat shield to hopefully take less damage than the previous attempts. It'll end up being mainly a control systems and shield material test since future prototypes which are already being built have changes to the fin locations which also mitigate some of the heat shield issues seen in the previous test.
There's also talk of towing it to Australia after splashdown to study (also depends on if they can get the necessary regulatory clearances).
I wouldn't be surprised if the goals change though, I feel like they might decide to do another simulated catch over water for the booster (since while it was technically successful in IFT-4, one engine did blow up), and similarly I doubt they'll have the clearances to tow the ship to Australia as fast as they'd like.
SpaceX is pretty open about optimizing for many iterations, a bit like the philosophy in software of shipping an MVP to get user feedback sooner for future iterations. Boeing has an established culture that's more like traditional waterfall development. When you watch their launches, they have tiers of objectives that get less and less likely to succeed - they plan to push even if failure is likely tlso they can learn from both their successful objectives and the eventual failure.
> I don't follow spaceflight news in any great depth - but doesn't SpaceX also have a rocket thingy that keeps exploding?
In fact even the rocket that Dragon launches on has a long history of explosions. First in the launches, then in the landings that resulted in some very spectacular booms. One time it landed perfectly upright, engines shut off, and one of the landing feet collapsed, causing it to fall over and BOOM. That was so funny :)
But now it has had a huge run of successful launches. I think it's a better approach because material science does not always behave exactly like the mathematical models. And space is one area where the margins of failure are extremely low.
> Some (many?) NASA engineers are at the high end of the band and are advocating a return on Dragon instead. Boeing is obviously at the low end of the band and thinks it is a low risk.
To me this gives a strong impression of history rhyming with itself. Back in the early 1980ies NASA engineers "close to the hardware" were raising warning, above warning about reliability issues of the shuttles, ultimately being overruled by management, leading to the Challenger disaster.
Then in 2003 again engineers were raising warnings about heat shield integrity being compromised from impacts with external tank insulation material. Again, management overruled them on the same bad reasoning, that if it did not cause problems in the past, it will not in the future. So instead of addressing the issue in a preventative action, the Columbia was lost on reentry.
Fool me once …, fool me twice …; I really hope the engineers will put their foot down on this and clearly and decisively overrule any mandate directed from management.
Given the many organizational failures that Boeing has had in recent years leading to safety problems (cough Dreamliner cough), I'm quite sure that Boeing's engineers have no way to put their feet down.
Afterwards one might come out as a whistleblower. But the fact that the last two whistleblowers wound up conveniently dead (no really, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/boeing-whistleblower-di...) is likely to have a chilling effect on people's willingness to volunteer as whistleblowers.
Scott Manley mentioned an interesting twist on this in a recent YouTube video of his: Kamala Harris, chair of the National Space Council, becoming a candidate in this year's Presidential election. The NSC is supposed to guide policy, so she wouldn't normally be involved in this kind of nitty-gritty, but there are people all up and down the hierarchy who would be well aware that this isn't how the media or her political opponents would think about it in the event of disaster.
Except in this case, according to Steve Stich, it is NASA engineers vs. Boeing engineers. And the Boeing engineers are the ones who are "closer to the hardware", while the NASA engineers are just overseeing it.
I have no idea who is right in this case. And even if the crew comes down on Starliner successfully, it doesn't mean that it was the right call. Maybe they just got lucky.
My sense from the call is that, if NASA engineers insist on a Dragon return, NASA management will support them.
I don't think this is good logic without more information about the actual calculation of risk. It should come down to who can accurately measure the risk and whether that risk is acceptable. People can roll the dice on low probability events, sometimes for an entire career without bad consequence but that shouldn't be conflated with good decision making.
Flying safely with a 10% failure risk when your acceptable risk is only 2% just means you got lucky, not that you're good.
Until management is held accountable and put into prison for their conscious unreasonable decisions against all advice, which led to the loss of life, nothing will ever change in megacorps.
Well, I'm reluctant to give him the benefit of the doubt because he also says "we don't know what's on the back side of the Moon" despite the fact that the agency he heads mapped the far side of the Moon decades ago.
> I don't envy the engineers, either at NASA or at Boeing.
When I worked at Boeing, I talked with my lead engineer about this. He said there were indeed some excellent engineers who could not live with the possiblity of making a mistake. Boeing would find jobs for them that were not safety critical, like design studies of new aircraft. There they could be productive without the stress.
Personally, I found the stress to be motivating. It meant I was doing something that mattered.
I think parent meant that some people did not want to be in a position where they could make a mistake that mattered (that is, they are uncomfortable being responsible for safety). Those people were put on projects where failure had few consequences. This is the kind of person unwilling to have a safety-critical position.
Yes, just like you also do with Airbus too, and any other plane manufacturers. You already factor in risk every time you set foot in a car, too, and a car is a far more dangerous vehicle. Danger from crashing is an inherent danger in travelling faster than on foot, and when you're on foot you're also facing the risk of being hit by those moving in those fast vehicles.
It is mind boggling just how many things need to work perfectly constantly consistently to maintain safe flight. This goes for both Boeing and Airbus (and Embraer, Cessna, et al.); all of General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, and Rolls Royce; etc.
Back when I started engineering school, we tended to add more constraints to systems than what they actually need believing that we were making them more secure and "safer".
"This will make sure we cover edge cases we're not aware of", we thought.
Later we discovered such systems are called "hyperstatic" and that they are actually more fragile and more prone to malfunction. What we should've aimed for are isostatic systems, where less constraints meant more stable systems.
I'm not saying Boeing engineering aren't aware of this. Of course they do. I just wanted to show an example of how trying to avoid mistakes *may* lead to less safe systems.
Sure, but this just assumes they don't know what they're doing (which, well, is probably true). It doesn't refute the point that you want to put people who are obsessive about safety in charge of safety.
I work for a healthcare company, and we definitely put in charge of safety people who stress about a patient coming to harm, not people who are so-so about it.
I read GP as relocating people who were paralyzed by safety.
E.g. the developers who never ship code because they always want to write the better version of the thing, that they thought up while building the current version
At some point you have to look at a less than perfect design and answer the question of whether it's good enough for the requirements at hand.
You can strive for perfection and still have a grounded outlook on tradeoffs. Those people would in fact be very good for engineering security-critical aspects IMHO. I don't think "striving for perfection" in itself implies the inability to accept a calculated risk, or some type of paralyzation.
I'd look at this the other way around, there are people who don't strive for perfection, simply delivering something when it just meets expected bars, not giving any thought beyond that. I wouldn't want those people to design my safety systems, they'd just leave possible improvements lying on the ground by not caring to think a little beyond the boundary of their "box".
Are there any layperson accessible books that explain these systems concepts? I’m curious if there’s a crossover application to organizational systems.
Not that I'm aware of. This was taught as an introductory course in mechanical systems design or something like that (it was many years ago).
But yeah, I frequently apply this concept way beyond its initial purpose, especially in matters that relate to managing human relations both professional and personal which, sometimes, closely resembles the application of the illusion of choice.
I'll do some research to see if there are any books that I can recommend.
So why do you assume that they'll be slopping and kill themselves? Why is that the only option? Couldn't someone make a mistake? Couldn't the person just be riddled with guilt and just abandon their career.
It's hard for me to imagine... I've been in a position to work on training software for some aerospace equipment and maintenance, but even that was well defined before I touched it. The closest I've come to that level of stress was working on security provisioning around financial systems. Hard to imagine being responsible directly for people's lives, not just livelihood.
Right now, I’m sure Starliner engineers are under a lot of stress. But I really believe that the program will get through this and end up being successful.
It's a bit like finals in college. I knew that without the stress from the threat of failing the finals, I wouldn't apply myself to learning the material. Stress brings out the best in people.
It's like "angle of attack" in a wing (funnily enough, given the topic).
Increasing it works up to a point (increasing lift) but at the cost of increased drag and, at a certain point, a stall. I've found myself, at different points, "coasting" (gliding) and "stalling" (pulling up too hard when I'm not in the right conditions). Long-term burnout is like being "behind the power curve" and gradually losing energy.
> This is probably the only way they'll be able to keep Boeing as a provider. A redo of this mission would cost Boeing half a billion dollars, easy. And since the contract is fixed-price, this would just add to Boeing's losses.
As much as I get that Boeing is a major launch partner for the US in general and one of the only companies competing in the crewed space in the States right now, I don't get this part.
It's not NASA's job to keep Boeing in the running. It's completely up to Boeing to produce a vehicle that can safely and reliably get crews to and from orbit, and to do the appropriate amount of testing beforehand. If they can't be bothered to do that with the understanding the cost of failure, that's on them.
It certainly is part of NASA's job to consider long term space travel needs. And supporting a competitor to SpaceX now as a long term strategic benefit has a lot of value as opposed to being held hostage to monopoly pricing in the future.
Companies invest in their supply chain and invest in not being beholden to a single supplier (unless they control that supplier) all the time.
That feels completely like an excuse used after the fact to justify keeping Boeing around rather than a principled stance, considering that NASA and Congress were pretty set on just giving Boeing the sole source contract for crew transport to the station.
It's pretty well documented by Lori Garver, one of the people involved in pushing Commercial Crew, how strong the opposition was from both NASA and Congress.
For a while it was like that, but after the ex-Honeywell CEO was replaced, and with New Glenn flight hardware becoming increasingly more common to see being moved around and tested, they do seem to be approaching being a serious space company.
Blue Origin is older than SpaceX, and is proof that infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
Better for whom? Better for the involved Congresscritters, lobbyists, and Boeing? For all Bezos' wealth, I suspect he's behind the curve on his lobbying game.
If NASA, and more importantly its budgetary oversight (congress) sufficiently values an additional supply chain, it can invest more money in additional tests to get that additional supply chain.
If the value of the additional supply chain does not justify paying more, they can let boeing pay out of their own pocket, or let them drop out. The whole reason Boeing was given a fixed price contract at the beginning was so that this option could be exercised.
Surely we can agree though, that given Boeing's recent track record and how they've handled calls for improved processes, combined with NASA's typical standard of safety and care, they aren't a good strategic long-term choice, right?
Like, I understand what you're saying here, and I agree -- if the US wants to have serious private-sector competition in the space sector, that's arguably a good thing. SpaceX's advances in reducing launch costs by implementing launch vehicle reusability to a degree that was never seriously approached before are objectively a good thing for the sector. Some of the work Firefly appears to be doing is really interesting, and could lower the cost of much of the work around launches substantially. Blue Origin also exists and may at some point be more than a billionaire's vanity project.
Boeing isn't the only competitor in this space, and some of the smaller companies are hungrier. They're actively innovating, and because their existence is on the line, they do the work to make sure their projects are beyond reproach by the time they're picking up NASA work or sending people into orbit (usually with a pretty high degree of success).
I mean, Boeing is certainly a good strategic long-term choice today for an alternative because they are one of 2 companies that have the capability to launch people into orbit. If you are saying that a different company should have been chosen 10 years ago, that's different. If you're saying that NASA should also invest in smaller companies, possibly.
> they are one of 2 companies that have the capability to launch people into orbit
This is currently, actively, under question.
I'm sticking to my guns here -- Boeing and NASA being in this position is not an excuse to go easy on them, cut corners, or otherwise lower any standards. If the US wants to use taxpayer money to prop up the crewed spaceflight sector (which I would agree with in principle despite it not being my tax dollars -- this is IMO an investment in the future and a way to stay competitive on the world stage), then they should reevaluate their approach to a public sector crewed spaceflight option where fewer parts of the process are profit driven.
SLS was a flop but that doesn't mean that the next thing has to be, and while public spaceflight projects absolutely do subcontract work out when it comes to building components, there are big, traditionally-expensive parts of the project that can be offloaded to public agencies where profit isn't a consideration.
It would probably be cheaper still for nasa to employ all of starliners engineers outright, sans management and shareholder profit making. Plus they’d have their own in house rocket design arm building stuff at cost.
NASA has been held hostage to monopoly pricing it's entire history until SpaceX came along lol. Sometimes you have to let the rot die away and let something new take its place. Boeing needs to be broken up, shaken down, and cut to a lean modern family of companies.
> It's not NASA's job to keep Boeing in the running.
In theory it is not. The reality is that a lot of NASA's budgeting and decisions are made based on the pork-barrel politics of the ones who hold the purse strings -- congress.
As a mountaineer, you play with this dichotomy safe/not-safe continuously and simultaneously.. but there comes a point sometimes where close calls add up the stammering indecision enters in, and at that point, in my opinion, you have already been defeated by the mountain. The indecision itself will consume too much of your energy and attention to perform the task even at a risk you could normally tolerate. Your judgement is too compromised to trust, and hubris and self-promising gets people killed.
Certifying a vehicle based on a test/qualification flight that was such a failure that it was considered too risky to let the crew fly back on the vehicle sounds about as reasonable as letting Boeing self-certify their airplane safety (instead of FAA oversight), or adding an automated nosedive-the-plane system with a non-redundant sensor just to avoid some training.
Sure, it is cheap, but when, not if, it results in deaths, it will be really hard to justify why someone thought it was a reasonable choice.
This is a semantic failure. There's risk to everything. But there is a qualitative difference between the risk something might malfunction and that something which has already malfunctioned might be dangerous.
A house full of fire hazards which is nevertheless not on fire can not be directly compared to a house that is currently on fire.
They're safer than the Shuttle was, though. Capsules are designed (I believe) to survive total loss of control on entry, although a purely ballistic entry can have decelerations of up to 15 gees, IIRC.
There's at least one Soviet entry that happened ballistically, IIRC, with no deaths (they had other deaths on entry, but for other reasons like loss of air or tangling of parachute lines.) The peak acceleration on ballistic entry is independent of the ballistic coefficient of the entry vehicle (but is a function of the L/D ratio during lifting entry; even small L/D can greatly reduce the peak acceleration.)
An unmanned flight back still significantly narrows the ban of what the risks are and if the return is successful, the returned craft will certainly be inspected in extreme detail.
The returned craft is going to be hard to reassemble from the pieces scattered across the surface of the planet, whether there were people in it or not.
Clearly NASA should wait until Starship is available to return the entire thing to Earth in once piece (I'm assuming it will fit or could be made to fit.) :)
Apollo 6 was an uncrewed test flight of the Saturn V. It was almost a disaster. Pogo oscillations almost tore the vehicle apart. And after staging, two engines shut down early and the rocket had to go into a lower orbit than planned.
But that flight was enough to certify the Saturn V for human use and they launched 3 astronauts to the moon on the next Saturn V flight, Apollo 8.
One of the interesting things about testing is how you interpret the results.
e.g., you have to run three test cases with passing results to pass the overall test and certify the system.
So, you run the test. All three test cases pass with flying colors, but during test #3, something that you hadn't thought of came up and it could be a problem.
What do you do now? You've reached your stated qualification for passing the test but now there's this wrinkle. Which one should take precedence in certifying the system for use?
As it turns out, the official that admitted this was the same Steve Stich.
Dragon was held to a higher standard, they were the newcomers and the corrupt snakes in Congress were looking for any excuse to justify canceling commercial crew and just giving Boeing a blank check again.
For development, you're right. I think NASA considered Boeing a known quantity and trusted them to develop Starliner, while they scrutinized SpaceX because they were worried that they were too cavalier.
But I meant a higher standard for how much risk NASA is willing to take in this instance. If something had gone wrong with Dragon Demo-2, there was no other way to bring down the astronauts. They would have accepted relatively high risk because they had no choice.
But with Starliner, because they have Dragon, they don't need to accept that risk. The risk NASA will tolerate is lower now, because they have an alternative. That's what I meant by a higher standard.
> A redo of this mission would cost Boeing half a billion dollars, easy.
I imagine so indeed, not in the least because all Atlas V launch vehicles are already assigned to missions. The booster for another non-operational flight would thus have to come from either their operational missions, or they'd have to pay someone else to give up their scheduled Atlas V payload. If they fail to buy someone else's Atlas V, they'd have to integrate Starliner onto a new (i.e. non-Atlas V) human-rated launch vehicle, or they would fail to deliver the contracted 6 operational missions.
Even if Boeing thinks that the chance of a catastrophic failure is infinitesimally small, they probably still can't ignore what a failure would mean for their already bad reputation. So returning the capsule without a crew is probably the safer option overall: if it's ok, it can still be certified; in the unlikely chance of a failure, NASA and Boeing can at least say that they were cautious and didn't succumb to the same wishful thinking that led to the Columbia disaster - and the damage for Boeing in the public opinion would be far smaller than if human lives were lost.
You are ignoring the probabilities though. Risk is probability*potential damage amount, so the lower the probability of damage, the lower the risk. This can result in a low risk even if the potential amount of potential damage is high (when the probability is sufficiently small).
All predictions have a margin of error. Both "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns". Given they don't really understand the cause, we're nearer the "unknown unknowns" area.
It's better to analyze this in terms of the incentive of the particular project managers at Boeing making this decision, since Boeing itself isn't a person making decisions. They might rationally conclude that it might go well and get them promoted but if it goes badly the worst they're looking at is early retirement.
> In some ways, Starliner is being held to a higher standard than Dragon Crew-2
Maybe. I don't believe that's true, but let's assume it is.
They SHOULD be held to a higher standard. Of the 16 US astronauts that have died in the space program, 14 died on the shuttle which was Boeing. That, coupled with Boeings recent deterioration and demonstrated disregard for human life, makes it clear that Boeing needs to be kept on a short leash.
Boeing did largely design build the orbiter, which is the reusable spacecraft that's commonly referred to as the space shuttle, although it was only a part of the entire space shuttle program. Both disasters though were not the fault of the orbiter but caused by failures of the boosters and tank, neither of which were built by Boeing, but these projects are supposed to be designed holistically and so I'd say all the companies involved in that project share responsibility for the shortcomings of the design.
In the early 1970s, NASA had three contractors helping it to design the Space Shuttle: Rockwell, Lockheed, and a Boeing-Grumman joint venture. So Boeing definitely played a role in designing it, although exactly how big its role was in the design, as opposed to the other contractors, I don’t know.
However, Boeing was not originally one of the main contractors for the actual construction/operation/maintenance of the Space Shuttle. It later became one by buying Rockwell’s space division
Yeah, Rockwell was broken up and that part of the company is now Boeing Defense, although i do think Boeing was directly involved in designing of the shuttle back then. Now you've got me wondering if I'm mistaken about that.
In the case of the Challenger accident, the actual orbiter wasn't the problem. The seals on the solid rocket boosters were. That said, I don't know who was responsible for their design/manufacture.
The teams responsible for their design and manufacture were sounding the alarm about the o-rings being out of their operational envelope. It was management at the manufacturer and NASA that decided to proceed.
No, they actually have made them go through more rigor than Starliner has been subject to.
What I'm saying is that Dragon was built upon an existing proven platform. The effort needed to convert the cargo module for human spaceflight is less than the effort Boeing needed to create a module from scratch. AND SpaceX still had to go through more rigor with Crew Dragon than what Boeing has had to do with Starliner.
The certification standards for Starliner have been reduced compared to Dragon, and Boeing is asking for them to be reduced further still.
If you count the ones from before certification was complete, then there was one more than I counted. A baker's dozen instead of an even dozen launches.
“The Crew Dragon, including the Falcon 9 rocket and associated ground systems, is the first new, crew spacecraft to be NASA-certified for regular flights with astronauts since the space shuttle nearly 40 years ago. Several critical events paved the way for this achievement, including grounds tests, simulations, uncrewed flight tests and NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 test flight with astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley earlier this year.” [from 2020]
Dragon did test flights demonstrating that the systems worked, Starliner has so far only done test flights demonstrating that the systems do not, plus a pinky promise that it'll work the next time. We do not know if, say, the abort system works, because the only time it was subjected to a full test, it failed. This is not a matter of SpaceX not having experience building human-rated craft and trying to get unearned credit for competence, this is a matter of Boeing trying to use their history to get unearned credit.
In the context of standards used for certification, I would count only flights from before certification was complete.
There was one flight with two crew to the ISS: the same test Starliner is currently attempting.
I agree with your analysis that Boeing does not deserve to have lowered standards. I'm suggesting that neither did Crew Dragon before certification. I'm not suggesting their systems or records are comparable, I'm simply arguing that unproven systems should be tested rigorously before being certified for human-rated spaceflight.
> 4. In some ways, Starliner is being held to a higher standard than Dragon Crew-2.
Wat? Have any Dragon missions encountered the number and severity of issues experienced by Starliner?
Maybe they have and are not public knowledge because NASA is less than transparency about its safety predictions and findings. But until the same confidence sapping mission performance is established it is not honest to say that Starliner is held to a higher standard.
I also picked up on the potential to at least payout Boeing if starliner comes down in good order (which seemed likely). I think that solves Boeings issue and would make them relax on forcing crew.
The problem here is they have a seemingly somewhat safer option going up and down regularly. That is making taking risk MUCH much harder because the downside risk (2 crew trapped in space potentially for a long and slow death) is pretty disastrous especially if a safer option was sitting right there and it turns out the decision to send them down was contract driven.
Given the history of thruster issues that go way back (and keep on repeating despite "fixes") I feel like they'll collect about as much data sending starliner back uncrewed, and then they'll need to be doing fixes for things like the helium issues etc that are compounding the risks. Be great if they could do ONE uncrewed flight more trouble free before putting astro's back on, but their solution is a more expensive with longer lead times than crew dragon (the entire service module is dumped on every launch I think, the rocket is also totally dumped etc)
I think it’s very unlikely that Starliner will ever fly again, regardless of the ultimate outcome of this mission. In its three flights, Starliner has had so many serious problems, it’s obvious that it hasn’t been sufficiently engineered. Why take the risk when there’s an alternative that has been essentially trouble free?
> So I expect they will certify Starliner even if it comes down without a crew.
Considering the 'optics' of this, I imagine they will/should certify Starliner not with or without a crew, and at least not after 'enough' time has passed for any audit to be meaningful and for Boeing to prove that they are getting things right. Imagine 'ok-ing' the Starliner, and on the very next mission, the same (or different) critical error happens. Then I bid the NASA folks who ok-ed the Starliner a good start on their next jobs.
If there is one profession with zero tolerance for errors it's the 'space-stuff' because 1) good luck repairing things in space, 2) "in space no one can hear you scream" (profanities because you ended up staying x10 or x100 the time planned)(and I do understand that capacity planning, food, toilets, etc. etc. have been calculated to ensure that they won't be running out of food, toilet paper, etc.)
It would be fun to have a Season 3 of Space Force, and this time instead of Malkovich yelling at Microsoft, to be yelling at Boeing!
> In some ways, Starliner is being held to a higher standard than Dragon Crew-2.
That's pretty contrived. Dragon has a 'standard' of multiple successful flights.
> A redo of this mission would cost Boeing half a billion dollars, easy. And since the contract is fixed-price, this would just add to Boeing's losses. So I expect they will certify Starliner even if it comes down without a crew.
This is the problem with old space. SpaceX blows stuff up on the regular just to see what went boom. And they absorb the cost themselves. They don't fly something that has proven itself fully before. It's clear this approach works. If they can do it while not wasting billions, why can't Boeing?
And "it will cost the vendor money" should really not factor into safety decisions.
Boeing has burned enough of its reputation at this point that I wouldn't trust their assessment one bit. Bringing back Starliner without the crew seems like a no-brainer, and is the only way to restore some of Boeing's credibility.
So many weeks of anti-Musk cope on Twitter about this issue. People really can't think clearly even about factual issues anymore.
>And since the contract is fixed-price, this would just add to Boeing's losses. So I expect they will certify Starliner even if it comes down without a crew.
IMHO summarising it like the title is a little unfair; yes they're making provision for use of Dragon; but they haven't made any decision yet.
The thing that seems to have confused them is that all the Starliner thrusters are working in their tests - given their idea of some teflon deformation somewhere, I think they thought they'd still be problematic, which is making them wonder if the teflon thing is the full story?
Interesting tidbit:
Talking about the upcoming Crew Dragon flight being moved around: "We will let SpaceX use our first stage booster, they'll go fly a starlink flight, ahead of our flight to get a little shakedown of that booster. It had some moisture intrusion and we want to go ahead and get that booster flown. And so there's a win win there - flying our booster on a starlink flight before our crew flight."
The complete 180 here is great to see. For the crewed demo flight of Crew Dragon, they used a brand new booster. It seems NASA didn't like the idea of flying on reused boosters, thinking they had an increased risk. Now they're liking the idea of a booster being flown an extra time.
I worked at SpaceX for almost 8 years, starting before we'd ever landed a Falcon, and I cannot tell you how good it feels, deeply in my soul, to have watched this turnaround. The culture we were fighting against early on was so entrenched. This is great.
It seems it'd be a massive reputational risk to NASA to bring them back on Starliner, just in case anything does go wrong. Given all the deliberations, NASA is going to be seen as at least 50% to blame if they make the wrong decision.
Everyone closely involved with making the decision will be well aware that the subsequent inquiry, and quite a bit of the public's reaction, will be personally brutal if they opt for Starliner and it fails catastrophically, no matter how small the odds seemed at the time.
Sure, it's inherently risky, so managing that risk becomes key to success.
The thing here is that NASA has a choice.
1) Use Starliner with it's dodgy development history, no track record of reliability, and with the problems experienced with this specific unit.
2) Use Dragon, tried and tested, with an excellent history of reliability
This should be a no-brainer.
If Starliner can't safely autonomously undock at the moment (and anyways needs a month for software reload/verification apparently - not sure why verification takes so long), then leave it there until there's a solution to do it safely. In the meantime the ISS has 6 docking ports, currently all in use with 3 supply vessels and 3 crew (Starliner+Dragon+Soyuz), so presumably there is some flexibility there.
Sure, and NASA are also nurturing Blue Origin who may be a good option in the future.
I don't think anyone looks bad here if NASA go with Dragon and Starliner flies home autonomously and without incident. It makes Boeing look good, and everyone in the room look like adults. OTOH given the poor Boeing performance to date, killing a crew would probably take them out of the NASA program for a very long time, if not forever, and even having a non-fatal failure on way back would make the judgement of both Boeing and NASA look very poor.
What about the port currently used by the Northrup Grumman supply ship - is that not compatible with Dragon ? Is there no adaptor to make the Russian Soyuz/Progress ports usable by Dragon ?
Googling more about this, it seems the Russian portion of the ISS has 4 docking ports, but US portion has 2 docking + 2 berthing ports, and the Russian ports are not compatible with the US ones.
There is also apparently a US "pressurized mating adaptor" (PMA) that adapts a "common berthing mechanism" (CBM) port to a docking one, which sounds as if it might (if one were available, and could be installed) be able to adapt one of the US berthing ports for use by Dragon.
If the space program is not willing to kill some astronauts, there shouldn't be a space program.
From a purely economic point of view, the cost of killing an astronaut is small compared to the cost of these missions. The statistical value of a human life is around $12 M. Astronauts may be a bit more expensive, due to cost of training, but not enormously so.
Making space flight much cheaper will shift the economics, making safety relatively more important. It will also enable that safety by enabling many more launches to reduce risks.
People anguish over the 14 astronauts killed in the Shuttle, but the economic value destroyed by that program was in the end a much greater loss.
There's a massive difference between astronauts dying in the process of testing something innovative and risky that pushes the envelope, and astronauts dying because a company has let its engineering deteriorate.
In the latter case, we might as well just shoot those astronauts instead, it'd give about the same meaning to their deaths.
If what they are doing is not enough to give meaning to their deaths, then to a much greater extent it's not enough to give meaning to the very large amount of money being spent on the mission.
That makes no sense. The meaning of the very large amount of money being spent on the mission is of accomplishing the mission.
Starliner is doing nothing innovative, and dying with it would not be accomplishing the mission or adding anything new towards accomplishing it past this point (that is, all the testing past this point can be done without putting people onboard, with just the comparatively small cost of a software swap), there is no meaning to dying on it.
You might as well be arguing that SpaceX should put crew on IFT-5.
So, the meaning of the deaths is the accomplishment of the mission. Why does the mission give meaning to money, but not to the deaths? Meaning is meaning.
Starliner may indeed not be worth deaths involved in its testing, but that would be because Starliner would not be worthwhile as a program at all.
Starliner serves the purpose of NASA not being dependent on a single launch provider.
If Starliner needs additional testing, as it appears to do, then it makes no sense, and serves no purpose, to test it in a way that endangers human lives when that is completely unnecessary.
If NASA/Boeing need to test if Starliner can fly back home (whether this unit, or future ones, until they get it reliable) then have it fly back home autonomously.
Your argument makes zero sense - it's exactly like saying that cars would only be worthwhile if we used humans for crash tests rather than crash test dummies. It's a bit like some ancient culture thinking that human sacrifice is needed to placate the gods.
This is a silly take. There are two options, Starliner with X units of risk, Dragon with Y units of risk. Given what we know, X is greater than Y. The only reason to choose Starliner at this point is because in the event of it not killing them, some mid level managers at Boeing don't look as bad.
Is that a good enough reason to gamble with someones life? I don't think reasonable people can come to different conclusions here.
If we're pushing the envelope of technology and humankind's ability to do cool shit and people die in the process, you can argue that it's worth it, and that's fine, reasonable people can disagree. But that's just not what is happening here.
The value of an astronaut is at least 10x the value of the “statistical human life”. Probably closer to 100x. Maybe even more.
The statistical human life is meant to represent the average person. The average person is not qualified to become an astronaut. Selection alone, nevermind training, is stringent enough that maybe 1 in 100,000 people meets the bar. And the difference between a qualified astronaut and the average person here isn’t small; it’s a power law relationship.
Interesting! Since it doesn't cost that anywhere close to that much to create an astronaut, clearly we can make the nation incredibly wealthy by simply training more of them. By the magical transmutation of astronaut creation, this increases their value enormously. What a brilliant free wealth concept you have created! It's the greatest idea since Beanie Babies.
It’s a selection effect. If you trained all of the people qualified to become astronauts into becoming astronauts you would incur the opportunity costs of those people not applying their talents and ambitions elsewhere.
So, you're saying we're actually losing value by training an astronaut, since their talents are not available or elsewhere? Or that astronauts should be chosen from the otherwise useless? Trying to understand here.
I'm sure we can find plenty of low value people to transmute into incredibly valuable secular saints of space. No need to waste the otherwise useful.
> So, you're saying we're actually losing value by training an astronaut, since their talents are not available or elsewhere?
This is called “opportunity cost” and it’s a basic concept.
> Or that astronauts should be chosen from the otherwise useless?
That wouldn’t work because those people couldn’t become useful astronauts.
> I'm sure we can find plenty of low value people to transmute into incredibly valuable secular saints of space. No need to waste the otherwise useful.
The smug, superior attitude here doesn’t really work when you’re mocking basic concepts like opportunity cost or being qualified for a job. It just makes you come across as an anti-intellectual clown. If you tried engaging in good faith you might learn something.
"Not enormously so". In particular, it doesn't counter the argument I was making. For the Shuttle, for example, the value of the astronaut lives, even including $15 M in training costs, was an order of magnitude less than the cost of the orbiter itself.
Most of the science results from the space program are from proves. The experiments that the astronaut run in space are fully automated, because they are not experts in all topics, so they get a box that they have to plug, turn on and off later. The value of astronauts is to get some data about the human body in space and mostly to get support from the public. (It's almost like pilots in F1. Nobody would go to see a robot version of F1.)
I would very much pay to see F1 cars being controlled by computers beyond the limits of humans. Especially if they removed many of the limitations intended to keep the drivers safe.
this is a really sad and disappointing perspective for someone to have. if you are putting people's lives at risk for the sake of economic value when they have trusted you with their lives then you don't deserve that trust.
The money spent on making astronauts safer could save more lives if spent elsewhere. That's how the statistical value of a life is set: it's the marginal cost of saving a (age adjusted) life used to justify government actions, say in worker safety, pollution control, road improvements, medical spending, etc.
Why do you think astronauts are so much more important than the common persons saved by these other efforts? Why do you advocate spending patterns that increase the body count for a given expenditure?
We all know that society applies almost arbitrary values to all these things.
42,000 road deaths annually? Meh. 3,000 people die in the terror attacks of 9/11? Multi-trillion-dollar, 20 year war.
Politicians only fund NASA manned launches because the average voter thinks it's kinda cool and maybe it inspires some kids to work hard at school. Too many high profile, fear-inducing deaths and politicians are liable to decide the money spent on NASA could be better spent elsewhere.
Yes, the point I'm working toward is the manned space program is not worth the money spent on it. The willingness to suspend the thing for years when a few astronauts die is a tell. If what they were doing was actually important this would not be allowed to happen.
Just because something is important (although I'm not saying that manned space exploration is), doesn't mean it has to be done tomorrow.
e.g. It's important you save for your kids college, but you don't need to have all the money saved up by time they are 10 years old.
Rushing an important task can also cause it to fail. Being overly aggressive with college savings by putting it in high-risk investments would not be conducive to meeting goals, and NASA losing public support by getting crew killed unnecessarily would not be conducive to them getting funding for future manned missions.
> Why do you think astronauts are so much more important than the common persons saved by these other efforts?
Because they're being asked to do something extraordinarily dangerous. I think it makes sense that the higher the risk, the more accountability (and expenditure) there should be for reducing said risk
> if you are putting people's lives at risk for the sake of economic value when they have trusted you with their lives then you don't deserve that trust.
That happens all the time. If you drive your car to work, you are putting your lives and those of others at risk for economic value. There's no way around it.
You could argue that landing on the Moon and even Mars is an unnecessary risk, or human spaceflight as a whole.
The whole moon programme and the space shuttle were extremely high risk by today's standards, but the moon programme was to prove that the US could beat the USSR, and the space shuttle was to transport spy satellites and build the ISS.
But Starliner should really be nearly zero risk with that small goal of docking and drop back home.
The Apolla era was a completely different animal. I don't think cars at seat belts in those days, society was much more accepting of danger. Also, nuclear annihilation was very real and anything required to beat the Soviet Union was on the table. That level of existential crisis and acceptance of danger in the public mind doesn't exist today.
First off, the Apollo program was part of the space race - an actual race to show supremacy during the cold war, and even then safety was taken seriously enough that there was the Apollo 10 "dress rehearsal". Cool fact is that the Apollo 10 astronauts were so gung-ho to land that NASA made sure to only provide enough fuel for the lander for them to execute the mission - not enough for an unsanctioned landing!
Second, there is no goal, nor way, to prevent China building a moon base, and given NASA's ridiculous Artemis program that's just as well, since American astronauts will probably be eating moon-cooked Chinese takeout by the time they get there.
Choosing the Dragon capsule option in this case would be neither risk-free nor mean the end of a space program, though it might lead to significant changes (quite possibly for the better) to NASA's current version.
It's not unfair given the information provided in this conference that was new. The dialog on conferences has shifted such that the main piece of news is that they may fly home on the Dragon.
Yeah this announcement sounds like the type of thing bad bosses do to look like their decisions till now were sound (they were not). Accepting star liner as a mistake will ask the question what NASA did anyway.
This is not NASAs first time dealing with this type of scenario. The crew of Skylab 3 had thruster issues in their Apollo command module. NASA actually redesigned an Apollo capsule to seat 5 in a return to earth. It went so far as the rescue crew starting to seriously train for a launch. In the end they found workarounds for the issue and brought them home normally.
The rescue kit built for Apollo during Skylab, while a precedent, is not a complete one. Apollo was the only vehicle available in that situation, so if the CSM already at Skylab couldn't be used, the rescue CSM had to launch. There are alternatives to (say) squeezing in more than four people into Crew Dragon.
In case of a true emergency, would squeezing two people into one seat be that dangerous? (As in, is the safety envelope of the vehicle tied to weight in each seat?)
There was an AI picture someone made of a typical person from Huntsville, Alabama. It showed an ~60 yo guy with glasses and a NASA shirt. Someone on the local subReddit said, “You’re looking at the world expert on the maximum bend radii of avionics wiring harnesses and conduits and he’d be happy to talk to you about it.”
Funny, but it made me think that the engineering shops around here are full of people like that with similar, hard earned, expertise in aerospace engineering and design and they’re all retiring or retired. What percentage of this expertise did they pass along to the younger engineers? I’m sure they tried, but maybe 50-60%?
We know that everything doesn’t get written down (hence the reverse engineering of the Apollo systems). And the stuff that does get written down doesn’t have the experience that created the document. Remembering a failed vacuum experiment with some adhesive which led to “You must use <some different adhesive>” isn’t going to prevent some bean counter in the future saying, “Why don’t you use <failed adhesive>? It’s cheaper and seems to have the same specs.” Or, for avionics harnesses, “There’s enough room. Just make it fit!”
All of that to say, Boeing ain’t what it used to be. And I know people who have worked there in recent years and they say the same.
I think loss of institutional knowledge is a huge problem across all sectors of the economy. In my niche of specialty construction engineering I saw it get exacerbated by the Great Recession, companies froze hiring and laid folks off from the bottom up, while retaining senior people. Who are now or have already retired, without a younger cadre to have absorbed their knowledge and carry it on.
Yes, we see that, too, in the natural gas industry. The old engineering guys are retiring and being replaced by technicians who can implement a design, but not design something new. One of the reasons our firm provides engineering services through contracts to smaller utilities. But even the larger utilities are losing institutional knowledge, largely due to replacing engineers with techs, many of whom are field guys with no engineering training.
I still find it hard to believe that the current Starliner doesn't have the ability to undock automatically without humans on board. The first test flight was able to do that.
Is it a hardware feature that's missing, or software? If the latter, can't it be restored? If the former, or if the latter but it can't be restored, is the docking station where Starliner is berthed going to remain unavailable forever? There are only TWO NASA docking stations. There are a bunch of Russian docking stations.
There's a hard rule for ISS that no astronaut may be on board the ISS without a corresponding return vehicle being docked at all times. This rule is effectively being violated for the two Starliner astronauts because they can't return on Starliner. And now no new Crew Dragons may berth without the current crew returning on the currently berthed Crew Dragon.
According to the arstechnica article linked by bell-cot it's a software issue:
"Well-placed sources said the current flight software on board Starliner, as configured, cannot perform an automated undocking from the space station and entry into Earth’s atmosphere. It will take about four weeks to update and validate the software for an autonomous return, should NASA decide it would be safer to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Earth inside a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Is that comforting? That the capsule made it this far through “rigorous tests” overseen by a buddy system, without being able to perform a core function in the mission? I know that undocking is not easy, but it’s also the most steady-state part of the whole mission?
It seems to me like one more blatant shortcut9 that regulators permitted, and Boeing leadership check the box on a form saying “capability complete”
It's a software configuration as I understand it. The software itself is capable of the automated undocking, but it will need to be reconfigured to allow it.
ISS operations have very strict requirements about safety and especially about avoiding collisions with the station under any circumstance. There are also differences in requirements for crewed and uncrewed flights. For these reasons it makes sense that the configurations are different and would need to be updated if they switch to fully automated.
NASA has been pretty clear that Starliner could be used as an emergency escape if necessary. That leads me to think the concern is more about collision with the ISS that with the ability to re-enter safely.
> That leads me to think the concern is more about collision with the ISS that with the ability to re-enter safely.
I don't end up thinking that. To completely make up a number, if there was a capsule with a 5% chance of failure to reenter it would still be a valid emergency escape.
They said on the call that the software though but it's a 'flight data' load which is all setup for normal crew use; who knows where the line is between data/code.
I wonder if NASA were aware, or is it possible that they just assumed the demonstrated capability was there, and Boeing never told them this Starliner didn't have it ?!
I'd like to think NASA would consider all contingencies, but the Challenger O-ring disaster showed they can be as incompetent as Boeing themselves.
NASA would be fully aware of the capabilities and would not have made assumptions, especially for flight to the ISS. They are very strict about approaches to the ISS, and would have gone through it with a fine comb before the flight.
I can’t help but feel this is part of a game being played.
“The capsule needs the crew!”
Some pressure to nasa to fly the crew back on this and also some ass covering if the really embarrassing occurs: the unmanned capsule does fail - “hey everyone it just failed because it had no crew! Nothing to worry about!”
Sure, but I've also never worked on any software directly responsible for the lives of human beings (as far as I know, anyway). I would like to think I'd operate a little differently if I were.
What's fascinating to me is how they're going to call this a success when the mission is over.
I get that there are things that you can only test in space, and so they are testing. But if these astronauts get back, does Boeing then get certified to carry astronauts into space regularly from a successful test?
I should listen to the conference but how would they define the whole mission successful?
Imagine going to space for what you think is 8 days and Boeing messes up so bad you get stuck there for like 8 months instead. Maybe really cool, but maybe a nightmare?
Even if up for 8 months – and returning to a US with a different President, perhaps even a different party-of-the-President, they'll not match the experience of Sergei Krikalev – who traveled to the space station Mir for the USSR, & was for a while stuck there when the USSR dissolved, only returning 311 days later:
"Because I like solitude and find space and weightlessness fascinating" is also a fine response (my response to why I would also find 8 months in space something I could embrace).
The "why" of the GP was a personal question, and can just be answered with the thoughts and feelings that led you to say what you did.
Still very unlikely that they'd come back to a, say, Independent Republic of Florida instead of the USA they left from, but hey, it's been a crazy couple of years.
What a terrible comparison; I believe that the current state of America has not yet fallen to the level it was at before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And not to forget, they traveled up without their personal clothing or handpicked hygiene items. They had to give those up for parts to repair the toilet on the ISS and are using the station's stocked contingency supplies.
NG-21 just arrived with extra supplies for the extended crew stay. There is a domino effect though. Other payload must be removed to add additional mass. My company has two missions scheduled for SpX-31 - currently on the calendar for 24 SEP - but NYT is reporting crew dragon is moving from 18 AUG to this date.
The schedule is always fluid with rocket launches. Awaiting confirmation.
They are astronauts... There is some amount of expectation that the rocket will blow up before they get in to space. Nobody wants it, but they are the best of us and they are courageous as heck.
To be completely honest, the news cycle this summer has been so wild; I kind of forgot they were up there until today. That is something that it seems like they might not have trained the astronauts for, and that's really scary. That and there might be some sort of business politics involved in the plan to get home.
We're all sort of engineers here, given the choice, suppose Boeing thought they could land you next week or you would wait until 2025 and ride a Dragon down. Which would you pick?
But also that willingness to face the risks goes with the expectation that the people on the ground did everything they could to minimize the risks. If that trust is broken, because someone cut corners to save on costs and schedule, it's less likely that astronauts would want to sign up for such a job in the future.
This gets said a lot, so I'll bite. Are they really? Many are just people able to go through the years of soul crushing things like being in the military. There are some straight up scientists on board, sure, I'll give that to them. But a lot are science people that are also fine doing things like flying bombing missions over the middle east. Killing tons of people isn't really a thing I respect.
It's awfully uncharitable to assume that someone is a bad person just from serving in the military. The military has done some reprehensible things at times, but it has also done a lot of good and the unfortunate reality is that in the world as it currently exists a strong military is a requirement for a free society.
I don't agree with the fetishizing of the service that goes on in some circles, but taking the opposite extreme is not any better. People should be judged on their individual actions.
I don't think they said they were "bad people". But it's a fair objection that anyone who is content to sign away their personal autonomy to a violent organization may not represent "the best" of us, in some philosophically meaningful sense. Insofar that it's true that "a strong military is a requirement for a free society", it's because people like that exist.
Right, we all have a responsibility to act ethically in all parts of our lives. Refuse to work for organizations that do unethical things; if you are in an organization, refuse to do unethical things even if it gets you fired. Do not facilitate the doing of unethical things in any way.
The difference with the military is you can be put in prison for behaving this way.
Not at all. If enough people refuse to compromise their principles, the labor supply will shrink for that org, and therefore their hiring costs will increase, leaving them fewer resources to achieve their unethical deeds. "I'll change it from the inside" is a lie people tell themselves, but in reality they get steamrollered by the internal processes. If you don't have a backbone at hiring time, why would you grow one down the line when you're already dependent on them for your livelihood? No - do your part and refuse to play.
>Insofar that it's true that "a strong military is a requirement for a free society", it's because people like that exist.
Yes, but there's no way to change that; it's human nature. Without a military, other countries with strong militaries will happily impose themselves on you: Nazi Germany, Russia/SU, etc. History is full of accounts of what happens when people don't have enough military power to resist invasion by a country of evildoers with their own powerful military.
Similarly, police frequently suck, but the alternative is even worse. There's no shortage of people who would be happy to ignore laws and prey on others if they didn't have to worry about police enforcement.
> Yes, but there's no way to change that; it's human nature.
I think this is a dangerous idea, that humans are just violent and abusive by nature and it's impossible to change. It's something that is learned and taught and passed down, like anything else, which means it can be changed. I'll just quote Thay because he does it so well:
"We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds- our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women. To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come." Thich Nhat Hanh from Living Buddha, Living Christ
>I think this is a dangerous idea, that humans are just violent and abusive by nature and it's impossible to change.
All evidence points to this being the case. We have many millennia of history showing it to be true, over and over.
>It's something that is learned and taught and passed down, like anything else, which means it can be changed.
How and what to eat is also something that is learned and taught and passed down, but it's not something that can be changed without radically changing human physiology.
>and sooner or later we will make new bombs.
Of course, because if you don't, someone else will. Just look at Russia and North Korea.
>To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women.
Good luck with that. As long as people enjoy dominating and exploiting others, it can't change.
Just to ensure both of us get severely downvoted and not just you, I have a parallel way of looking at it. Most people appear to be more... let's say, optimistic than I am. I tend to take a very conservative engineer or economist way of assessing the risks.
About 3% of American astronauts have died in space, and about 4.5% have died during missions (which includes takeoffs).
"Only" 15% of smokers get lung cancer.
These numbers don't work for me. Yet plenty of smart people are willing to take those odds. I can only conclude that if people smarter than I am are good to go with those stats, then it means they have some kind of built-in optimism that I lack.
Your notion of the military being "soul crushing" is not shared by all people in the military. Starting around the sergeant level there are tons of very interesting problems to solve. Some find it super fulfilling, and certainly many dudes who have been in combat felt it was the only time in their experience to feel really alive.
So for different reasons I come to the same conclusion as you. They aren't really heroes, just people doing something they find compelling. And they measure risk and reward very differently from me.
> Killing tons of people isn't really a thing I respect.
Well, context matters, doesn't it? Sometimes violence is required to solve problems. The US had to kill 700,000 of its own to eliminate slavery. And while Europe lost tens of millions, the US sacrificed over 400,000 helping them out in WWII. Once the Germans attacked Poland and the Japanese attacked us, how would you have solve these problems without violence? Ask Neville Chamberlain how that worked out.
Thing is, once you're in the military, you don't get to choose who to kill. You are not permitted to say "I do not think violence is required to solve this particular problem". You are not afforded the privilege of conscience. You are required to switch that part of your brain off.
Yes, because a military would not be effective at all if every soldier got to question every tactical or strategic decision. That's why it's your job as a citizen to pick better leaders, because those leaders are in charge of the military.
>Once the Germans attacked Poland and the Japanese attacked us, how would you have solve these problems without violence? Ask Neville Chamberlain how that worked out.
To be fair to Neville, there's an argument that he did the best he could, and was really just buying time because the UK was in no position to go to war with Germany at that point in time.
I'm not sure, aren't the most powerful typically bullies? The UK had probably the strongest Navy in the world for a long while and used it to colonize and extract wealth from a large part of the world. There's a controversial calculation that they took about $45 trillion from south asian alone, but even if it was only a fraction of that it's certainly an example of the powerful bullying the "weak".
History is littered with these examples. We're seeing it happen in Israel/Palestine as we speak. It's not like the US spent all our money on the military and became a chill, benevolent international partner.
Those two things don't seem connected at all. Blame Germany for emboldening Putin. Russia accumulated a huge war chest due to energy exports, mostly to the rest of Europe. A large part of that was gas for Germany. That could have been avoided with some timely nuclear power. It also made Germany (and other parts of Europe) quite vulnerable because gas pipelines are hard to replace (and LNG is expensive).
Putin's justification essay[0] was before the Afghanistan withdrawal.
"It was published on Kremlin.ru shortly after the end of the first of two buildups of Russian forces preceding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022."
If you think Biden's behavior encourages Putin's aggression, then surely you think Trump's is worse?
"You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?” Trump recounted saying. “No I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want."
Putin's essay was a test for Biden. Biden failed it.
We had no wars under Trump. Plenty of wars under Biden.
As for Trump's quote, expecting allies to pay the share they agreed to is not weakness, it's strength. And they paid.
If you and I were buddies in combat, that doesn't mean I carry you on my back. It means we watch each other's back. And if either of us didn't, we wouldn't be buddies anymore.
Remember Gaddafi and Reagan? Gadaffi FAFO. Reagan fixed his wagon and there was lasting peace with Gaddafi after that.
It really depends on who is in charge. I'm reading Kissinger's "On China" at the moment, and Mao, who led the most populous country on Earth for a significant time, was way more motivated by ideology and the notion that "struggle" was the highest priority, than he was by the comparative military strength of who China engaged in wars with.
That being said, he wasn't single minded either (e.g. he also mostly followed Chinese principles of not being overly interventionist, unlike the US), and his views did seem to gradually change over time.
But he also said things like: "We have a very large territory and a big population. Atomic bombs could not kill all of us."
Repeatedly.
===
Nazi Germany and Japan weren't deterred at all by military strength either, I don't think? Again ideology overrode every other consideration with WW2? So I'm not sure if "deterrence" really helps prevent major conflicts at all...
> Nazi Germany and Japan weren't deterred at all by military strength either
Oh, yes they were! Hitler thought the Soviet Army was rotten from top to bottom, thought the British were weak and could be defeated by the Luftwaffe, and thought the US would never fight.
He was right on all three counts, but the Soviets, British, and the US turned themselves into powerhouses.
The Japanese were afraid of the US, and thought they could get the US to stay on the sidelines by knockout out the carriers in Pearl. How wrong they were.
Would that put them in a better or worse position to improve what they see as shortcomings of the military? Where does the instinct to suggest the cowardly approach of running away from a problem come from?
According to the audio: https://www.youtube.com/live/DYPL6bx87yM they are helping with standard ISS tasks, like operational maintenance and it is greatly appreciated.
I don't follow Space Stuff as much as I'd like to, but one impression that I have always had is that there is _never_ a lack of stuff for astronauts to do up there. An astronaut's time and resources are just too damn expensive to have them up there just hanging out. Outside of their fairly limited personal leisure time, they have a strict down-to-the-minute schedule handed down to them by mission planners that they must follow if they want to keep their jobs past the next landing. Including when to sleep and when to eat.
(Of course, I assume the astronauts are allowed to request a change to their schedule if it's for a good reason.)
Common tasks include running tests and maintenance on the station itself and monitoring/performing various science experiments. Perhaps doing a few NASA PR bits, media interviews and short chats with school children over the radio.
I once read an article that said the vast majority of the actual work NASA does is "contingency" work that is never actually ends up being used. The problem is that while a mission is under development (or even well underway), you don't always know how things are going to shake out. So you hedge your bets by doing as much preparation and exploration of alternatives as you can, and try to pick the right one at the right time, or as the situation evolves.
I guarantee there are entire teams on the ground working _right this second_ on a draft schedule for keeping the two "extra" astronauts gainfully contributing to ISS activities, even though it's not certain that they will be there.
> There is some amount of expectation that the rocket will blow up before they get in to space. Nobody wants it, but they are the best of us and they are courageous as heck.
The B-17 aircrews in WW2 knew they had only a 20% chance of surviving their mission count intact. (not killed, crippled, or POW'd)
Neil Armstrong figured he only had a 50% chance of surviving Apollo 11. Personally, I think he was optimistic.
Astronauts historically work closely with the people that build their spacecraft. I wonder how much they knew going in and how confident they really were. They decided to go through with the mission, but there was surely an immense amount of pressure on them to do so. Can you imagine the political firestorm if one of them refused? It would ground them for sure.
Going out on a limb here but astronaut training involves being prepared (physically, mentally and otherwise) for all eventualities, including delays like this probably.
> On the other hand, astronauts' telomeres lengthen during spaceflight
I wonder if this is partially the reason (along with great healthcare benefits) why so many Apollo astronauts have live passed the average life expectancy in the US.
> why so many Apollo astronauts have live passed the average life expectancy in the US
The effect reverses within days of return to Earth. The reason astronauts live longer is their physical training more than compensates for the damage done to their bodies in space.
Astronauts should not be compared with normal people. They should be compared with other exceptional people. The Apollo astronauts were quite intelligent (which correlates nicely with lifespan and health) and accomplished... and selected to be healthier than most.
Their physical training as astronauts was likely irrelevant to their lifespan.
The same thing can happen to any traveler. Sometimes you plan to stay for a few months and end up staying for 30 years. So, as cliché as it sounds, enjoy the journey, not the destination!
I remember the episode where a space capsule flew over the island. They wrote SOS in big letters, but somehow Gilligan managed to mess things up and it became SOL. Of course one of the astronauts was named Sol and saw his name on the island as a tribute...
I think you're grossly underestimating how many bribes, er, excuse me, campaign contributions, lobbying efforts, and wine and dines Boeing has done. They could kill everyone on board ISS and crash six more planes and the US government would continue to bank roll them for years to come.
After all this, even in the best case (Starliner returns successfully with Butch and Suni), it’s hard to see that NASA would consider it vetted and ready for an operational (non-test) flight.
They still haven’t figured out a root cause for the thruster failures, and they won’t be getting the faulty flight hardware back to examine it. Is Boeing willing to put substantial engineering time into fixing/re-designing the thrusters, and then flying another 2-person test flight? I guess we’ll find out soon…
I suspect that NASA may want to keep Starliner around, given that SpaceX is owned by a man who seems to be getting ever more unhinged by the day and has a history of making highly questionable business decisions.
> has a history of making highly questionable business decisions.
I get people don't like Musk, fine. But pretending that he has a history of making bad business decisions is ludicrous. He is by far the most successful business man alive (and maybe in history). This is just a fact. You can point out plenty of his faults, but his business acumen is clearly not one of them.
Just as an example: I'm old enough to remember when everyone said Twitter was going to completely break in a week after he fired >50% of the engineers to cut costs. How long ago was that? Also, whether you like the changes or not, there seems to be far more productivity and new features since Musk bought Twitter than the previous years with the old management and far larger headcount.
He’s currently suing his own customers for alleged antitrust violations after they stopped doing business with him because they judged that being associated with his platform was bad PR.
Twitter also triggered race riots in the UK and instead of being halfway apologetic about this, he has been spreading conspiracy theories on his personal account. This is likely to lead to a significantly more hostile legal environment in the future.
He is also being sued by the EU for changing blue checkmarks from a badge of verification to a paid feature, confusing users.
He's suing an NGO-like agency (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) that includes a lot of advertisers who coordinated to prevent the purchasing of buying ad space on the platform. So not exactly his customers but someone that should have been representing the interests of potential customers.
People are getting thrown in prison for years for things like throwing a trash can at a police officer. Like thrown directly in prison: arrest->trial->sentencing->appeal->incarceration is all happening in the span of a few days and the UK is actually attempting to make it illegal to talk about on social media! This is in addition to giving actual rape and murder perpetrators slow-walked trials, house arrest or just non-investigations.
The EU lawsuit just seems weird. I'm not sure why they would care so much about that one. The checkmark change was highly publicized and I don't think it mattered to anyone but celebrities and attention-seeking figures anyways. Government officials and other critically important people/organizations still get a verification.
That's not why he is suing them. It is an anti trust suit where he is alleging illegal conspiracy.
The man runs 3 multibillion dollar businesses that are being sued all the time. I don't think any of these will have large or even noticeable impacts on the companies.
Hopefully that doesn't factor into their calculus at all. I'd like space programs to be run by practical people who value merit over noise, and I personally don't care if a space transport system is owned by Ronald McDonald as long as it works right. Boeing is a very respectable company or so I've heard. I'm sure their executives watch what they say in public and wear the proper in fashion business suits as expected. I would still rather hop on a spacex vehicle right about now. If you're right and they care about Musk owning Twitter and saying inappropriate shit out loud, I'd say that would reduce my trust in NASA.
How wouldn't that be a part of a perfectly rational risk analysis though?
It's like saying (of course on a very different scale) that NASA should be buying rockets from Russian/Chinese/etc. companies/government as long as they offer a good price/quality ratio etc. Which would be an immensely stupid thing to do regardless of how good the actual rockets were.
> Twitter and saying inappropriate shit out loud
Or possibly more importantly doing inappropriate shit both publicly and not.
In general companies that are purely driven by their management's desire to maximize profits/shareholder value/their bonuses are fairly predictable and can be expected to behave rationally under most circumstances. However you might not want to rely too much on company owned by someone (hard to tell which ones are correct so pick any):
- willing to burn billions to either to prove some bizarre point
- makes impulsive decisions worth billions under the influence of drugs
- is willing to spend large amounts of money to manipulate public opinion (and/or undermine democracy and the rule of law)
Why? It would just seem silly not to take include the fact the CEO of the company you are relying on continuously behaves in an erratic and unpredictable manner (and is also trying to undermine democratic institutions but that's besides the point...) into your risk estimates.
I agree in that his shitposting isn't indicative of any change. Musk has always been a wildcard. That's part of the reason how he's made it to the position he's in now to begin with.
> and if this is part of a pattern of unpredictable behaviour
This is just re-asserting the opinion that he's unhinged rather than shitposting for entertainment. Nothing you've presented suggests anything "unhinged", and investors can decide for themselves if his "risky behaviour" warrants their money.
> from the man who can decide whether your astronauts get home or not
If you seriously think Musk would decide to not assist, you're deluded. Not only would he not do this for personal ethical reasons and his interest in space exploration, he knows most of his staff would resign in protest, and that would also be the end of SpaceX's government contracts, and thus basically the end of SpaceX.
If he's truly unhinged as you claim, then you can expect that this will happen sometime soon. I won't hold my breath.
> he knows most of his staff would resign in protest, and that would also be the end of SpaceX's government contracts, and thus basically the end of SpaceX.
I agree - it would be completely irrational.
I just think Musk does irrational things from time to time.
There's nothing wrong with that, it's his right as a private individual. I do irrational things myself sometimes.
But if I was at NASA in charge of manned space flight
and you gave me a choice of staking my crew's safety on Musk alone, or Musk but with Starliner as a backup option
I'd feel pretty upset. A few days in space is no big deal. Months in space is hard on the body, plus you're missing out on months of life on Earth -- maybe you're going to miss the birth of a child or grandchild, or a loved one's death and funeral, or some other big event. And are you getting paid while up there? Are there enough supplies? What if NASA and Boeing finally decide it's OK to return on Starliner, and as you know you basically must then, so now you're risking your life on a vehicle that you have much reason to think is not safe.
It'd be hard not to be hopping mad in private. I'd make the best of it, since there's no other choice, but I would not be happy about it.
The counterpoint to this is these are people who have dedicated their lives to becoming astronauts. They want to go to space and they want to do things in space, and they have sacrificed a lot of the comforts of a normal life to reach that goal. I suspect most astronauts feel like they don't spend enough time in space.
These are people who are driven by a passion to do the thing that they're (involuntarily) having to do more of than originally planned. I don't know if "how would you feel" is a good yardstick here; I would probably get sick of it pretty quick, but I'm not the kind of person who would make a good astronaut.
Yes, flying in space is cool. No, most people don't want to do this indefinitely. Astronauts retire all the time even when they are 100% guaranteed more flight time if they didn't retire; a whole bunch did that in the 1960s and 1970s (some, like Frank Borman, 100% guaranteed to walk on the moon), and more during the shuttle era.
It's one thing to have a mission extended by a day, as happened to the shuttle routinely because of bad weather at the landing site. Skylab 4's mission I believe got extended by 28 days, but that was a known possibility before launch. To have an eight-day mission be possibly extended to eight months is in no way shape or form OK.
I imagine they vastly prefer returning on a flight-proven Crew Dragon over being the first crew ever to return on Starliner. Especially with all the Starliner issues so far.
If you're genuinely interested, PBS and Apple+ have the documentary series "A Year In Space", which details Scott Kelly's experiences.
As with most other things in life, it seems to be a mix of excitement, fun, awe, tedium, homesickness, etc. Missed some stuff from Earth; misses being in space for some reasons now.
We continue to study the impact versus his identical twin. Some impacts, but the man isn't exactly "withered".
I wonder if any astronaut is ever going to say "no" if offered/asked to go back to space, regardless of past experiences? It's a massive privilege, and they are all highly disciplined pros.
Yes, I suppose - if you don't want to go then quit.
In the case of Oleg Kononenko (5 trips to space) that the parent mentioned, while one assumes he could quit if he wanted to, I doubt he keeps getting sent because he's the one begging hardest to go back ... more likely the Russians want to be able to claim space achievements, and "most time in space" is one they can at least achieve, as long as they have a place to send him.
By every account I've heard, keeping the ISS going is seriously laborious for its crew. And both astronauts have previously done regular ISS missions, to quickly get back up to speed.
There has to be a lot of egos tied up in this thing for them to still be stuck there. NASA delayed SpaceX’s next mission to give them more time to try to fix Starliner - and then use SpaceX as a backup to bring the astronauts home.
After the first month they should’ve had SpaceX go and get them. Elon would’ve probably done it for free to publicly humiliate Boeing for fun.
SpaceX’s craft is far cheaper and does the same thing except it actually works and has worked fine and time again.
I know it is a privilege and a rare opportunity to go into space, but it strikes me as something that should be compensated for at higher than the going rate of astronaut salaries of $100-$150K/year. They overpay for every bolt but count the pennies when it comes to the salaries.
The opportunity to go to space is worth so much that I think they would get qualified people to do it for free, maybe even pay to have the job. So I don't think there is a need to pay more than a regular "good salary".
Your average astronaut can easily walk into a $300k/year management job in some aerospace or technology related industry a short time after "retiring", on the other hand. Higher profile ones even more so.
Government salaries are more about politics and bureaucracy. And they often intentionally ignore supply and demand, paying the same amount for similar jobs, regardless of the field.
Glad that we finally got confirmation of the speculation that I saw on Ars last week that they are exploring using SpaceX.
I honestly can't imagine the conversations happening privately with the Astronauts. You know the problems this thing is happening but apparently you may still fly on it.
Like I get that space travel is still risky, even if SpaceX seems to make it look trivial at times, but it seems like an unecessary risk.
Assuming the Starliner can be on autopilot and bring itself home, let it do that to confirm if things are indeed working. Worst case you loose a vehical, but 2 people were not killed in the process.
The only thing that really surprised me is the 2025 timeline. I figured they would prefer to move some things around than wait that long?
Apparently it can't. Idk if it's missing software, or missing hardware, though I'm gleaning from other comments here that it's software (thus presumably fixable).
After all of their technical failures, and known cultural problems leading to them, I am astonished Boeing has the nerve to insist it is safe. Seems like they are betting the whole space business farm on astronauts not dying on the way down.
Because law & PR 101 says you should never make a statement to the effect of "so um we may have sent some people into space on a rocket we knew wasn't safe and it's going to be a bit hard to get them down safely". A statement like that can end your career Micheal.
That lists SpaceX, Orbital Sciences (since merged into Northrup Grumman), Blue Origin (which remains suborbital, though the orbital New Glenn is due for launch this year and Blue Moon is in development), Bigelow Aerospace (defunct), SpaceDev/Sierra Nevada Corporation (active, but struggling?), and Virgin Galactic (suborbital space tourism).
Wikipedia has a maintained list of current private spaceflight ventures, principally SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab*, Virgin Galactic, Axiom Space*, and Sierra Space. (Starred are additions to the space.com article's list).
Boeing has a decision to make: keep investing in Starliner, or cut the program now, and avoid having to do a bunch of rework to fix it plus at least one more test flight (and possibly two?) on their own dime.
It's not really clear (to me) how likely either of those outcomes is right now.
IF they drop it, then I would expect NASA to run a new commercial crew program. They need redundancy, and they don't want to be running the development process themselves.
Dream Chaser Space System (their crewed variant) is almost certainly the best-placed candidate to win an award from that program: they have an almost-flying cargo variant that was originally designed to be human rated, and existing plans to complete the crewed variant.
SpaceX might get some money for Starship, although I would expect NASA to try to write the rules such that they're not eligible. While having two options from a single company is better than just one, a fully-independent option would be better.
Blue Origin has some experience with the New Shepard capsule, and is working on their Blue Moon lander: I expect that they would cobble together a proposal, and perhaps between their previous experience in losing bids due to over-pricing, and NASA's experience with Starliner's fixed-price failure, the price might end up somewhere in the middle?
Maybe Northrop-Grumman would propose a Cygnus-derived vehicle? It'd need a human-rated launcher -- Dream Chaser would likely be using Vulcan, and Falcon9 is a dependency on SpaceX. NG would probably like to use its own Antares 330 booster, but then they'd be running both a crew vehicle and a booster program which is a lot of money and risk.
It's not entirely implausible that someone buys Starliner from Boeing, and attempts to complete the development (if Boeing gives up). Blue Origin is possibly the most likely candidate? They have Jeff's cash mountain, and a kinda compatible "old space" culture -- if Boeing is willing to sell it at a reasonable price, it's possibly a cheap way to get 80% of the way there?
Given the results from this commercial crew round (a likely 50% success), funding two programs with the expectation of one success seems reasonable. Whether they are able to get commercial interest in a fixed-price award like last time is an open question, as is who might apply.
> Boeing has a decision to make: keep investing in Starliner, or cut the program now
They can't cut the program. They are contracted to NASA. If they try to bail out, they'll be breaching a major federal government contract, which could have serious negative consequences for their ability to win future federal contracts – not just NASA, but more importantly the Pentagon too.
If Boeing really wants out, the only plausible way is they convince NASA management to cancel the contract. That way Boeing can officially claim that they performed adequately, and the cancellation was due to NASA's own decision, not their own failures.
> If Boeing really wants out, the only plausible way is they convince NASA management to cancel the contract. That way Boeing can officially claim that they performed adequately, and the cancellation was due to NASA's own decision, not their own failures.
Alternatively they could convince a judge that NASA was being unreasonable by not certifying and completing this flight, if this goes to court, which many federal contracting squabbles do.
That would be a very high risk move - significant chance a federal judge says “I refuse to second guess NASA’s own engineers on astronaut safety”. In the unlikely event they prevail at the District Court level, I doubt it would be held up on appeal. And if they lose, their reputation will be even more in tatters than it already is.
At this rate SpaceX will have two certified manned launch vehicles (Crew Dragon, Starship) by the time any other providers have a functioning platform.
(yes it will be years before Starship is human-certified... but Starliner has already had MORE years)
And Starship is already putting in some work for the lunar lander variant of the Starship. Sure, launching humans from the moon has different requirements and contingency plans than launching them from earth, but having a lunar lander ready in ~2027 is going to make it a lot easier to then human-rate it for earth-based launches.
ULA is one thing, they are highly successful and established. Starliner is a lemon. I think it would be better for them to develop a capsule based on their own New Shepard vehicle.
I think it's mostly a question of how NASA assesses the vehicle: is it going to be an endless series of patches on a fundamentally flawed base? Or is it somewhere over 50% done, with some software cleanup, thruster fixes, and some decent QA and then good to go?
Rejigging New Shepard with appropriate docking, heat shielding, maneuvering thrusters, life support, power, cooling, etc, etc, etc, is a huge project. Certainly it's a head start, but I think it'd be a ground-up redesign with that as experience and maybe a starting point for beefed-up parts.
Lockheed has Orion, they could modify it for Vulcan or Falcon. Overkill for LEO but at least it's functional. Realistically NASA will have to go through another round of requests for proposal, though I don't know how much interest there will be after Boeing's troubles and with ISS disposal looming.
I've seen papers outlining an Orion docking to the ISS. It was considered as part of the conops back when Orion was part of Constellation rather than Artemis.
Note that the Crew version still seems to be aspirational. And the base-model Cargo version isn't exactly flying in the fast lane, either - "[first] demonstration mission is planned for launch no earlier than 2025."
And note that it took SpaceX almost 10 years to go from Demo-1 of their Cargo Dragon to Demo-1 of their Crew Dragon.
Sierra's Dream Chaser Cargo System variant was due to launch on the second Vulcan test flight this year, but it was recently announced that it wouldn't be ready for that. It's now vaguely scheduled for 2025.
The crew version of Dream Chaser is kinda on hold as they try to get the cargo version flying (they say they're still working on it, but I guess the cargo version is first priority): it'll take a bunch of work to get it completed and certified, but it should be less than starting from scratch.
Once flying, they've got a NASA contract to run 6 resupply missions to the ISS (assuming they can get it flying in time before ISS is deorbited), plus a single flight contract with the UN (!)
Both Dream Chaser and Starliner are proposed as crew transports for Blue Origin's Orbital Reef station.
Unless the Boeing CEO and their children fly back down in the Starliner along with the astronauts, I don’t think anyone else should risk their lives on it.
Sorry I don't provide any sources, but in ancient Rome the engineer that built a stone arc sometimes stood right below it when they removed the scaffolding supporting it. If he did a good job - he lives.
That one was the exception to the rule. The vast majority of CEOs aren't actually that dumb and reckless with their own lives, just greedy and sociopathic.
Those spaceships weren't as obviously stupid as OceanGate's sub. Also, those two aren't typical CEOs either, they're a bit more like OceanGate's CEO: they're ones who built their company from the ground up, and have some kind of strong drive to be the next Howard Hughes or something and be a leader in some revolutionary thing (spacecraft in their case, submarines in OceanGate's).
Boeing's CEO is not like these men. He's just a typical CEO who didn't build the company, and is just a temporary hired gun really, like most of them.
Let's take a moment to appreciate the stupidity. Of course it's not nice to be a cpt. Hindsight. But he tried to build a sub in a... Sub-optimal shape (non-spherical), used inappropriate tools (wireless PS controllers? Wireless? Really?) and the most important idiotic mistake, after all these somewhat accepted mistakes - HE DIDN'T TEST IT. From what I read he just wasn't into testing.
It baffles me the level of stupidity a human can reach with no consequences from the society, what so ever. He is just a small example! I don't have enough space to write here all the CURRENT people who are literally running the world and are being proud to be stupid in public. How stupidity became a commodity?
Maybe it always was. But smartphones and social media definitely pushed it a lot.
You can even see it here, whenever people get downvoted just for posting something that is too uncomfortable (e.g. bcs it's criticism that touches their own lifestyle, ...).
There are ripple effects everywhere. Nowadays it's like yoi said: People are often explicitly proud to be stupid.
What is the crew up to on the station? Have they been assigned work to do since they are up there already and are rated astronauts, or are they just hanging around idle as supernumeraries?
I would hate to be in the latter camp and I imagine the kinds of people who take that kind of job would be like that too.
They are both seasoned NASA astronauts who have done 6-month stints aboard the ISS before (Butch once, Suni twice). They know how to be useful and NASA has indicated that they've been working up there.
Building functioning thrusters should be a routine task, these are used on many spacecraft all the time. But rockets are hard. SpaceX blew up a capsule on the test stand, due to an issue with the propulsion system (thrusters).
The only way they will risk astronaut lives and various reputations allowing them to return on the Boeing capsule is if they are 100% certain of a positive outcome. There are no rescue vessels in space right now, so even a minor problem can be deadly.
It seems unlikely at this point 100% certainty will be reached. And I'm sure NASA is very annoyed that the capsule isn't configured to do an unmanned return. Boeing needs to upload and test software for unmanned return, otherwise it is stuck there until they have those issues worked out (1 of only 2 docking ports perhaps?).
NASA is worried about the thruster issue meaning that they lose control of the vehicle as it undocks and moves away from the ISS, leading to a collision. I guess that's independent of crew being on board.
But also ... the current Starliner software doesn't support an automated (uncrewed) undock. The previous one did, but some code and/or configuration changes are required to enable this on the current vehicle. NASA has said that making the changes to enable this will take about a month (including QA).
In the press conference, they said the collision risk can be avoided by undocking the Starliner and then letting it float away to a safe distance before starting up the thrusters.
> After 87 launches, in August 2021 ULA announced that Atlas V would be retired, and all 29 remaining launches had been sold. As of July 2024, 15 launches remain. Production ceased in 2024.
IIRC they only have enough reserved Atlas V to fulfill all the manned missions they promised to NASA, so there is no room unmanned for test. (And that's a huge problem!)
Will their existing suits work on SpaceX or will SpaceX-compatible suits need to be flown up? If the latter, I wonder what the odds are of a suit-related problem (e.g. doesn't fit, won't seal, etc).
Looks like the problems at Boeing Aerospace run a bit deeper than 'disagreements' with NASA Engineers, as some here are wont to project in discussions today. [1]
They would end up landing in Russia; with tensions between Russia and the west rising (i.e. the US supplying weapons to the country Russia is at war with at the moment), this isn't ideal.
I mean it's an option for sure and in case of emergency it won't really matter whose return pods they use, but it seems they prefer not to.
Seems a bit of a ground control trust issue given there are 2 Russians up there at the moment, I wonder how they are intended to return at a future date.
Russian cosmonauts already regularly fly on SpaceX missions [1], and Americans also regularly fly on Soyuz missions. [2] The entire point of science cooperation, sports, and the like is to rise above politics.
In the 1960's (I think?) NASA did studies on various emergency situations in preparation for the post-Apollo space stuff that never happened. I remember a zippered inflatable sphere that could be used to EVA a person between vehicles, and I think there was an inflatable cone-shaped reentry device that got out of orbit, and down to a reasonable altitude, before being discarded and the person used a parachute for landing.
With a really big parachute, you could I suppose. Although it would need to survive getting peppered with high velocity debris, and have a way of opening up without sufficient air drag.
Yes, you would burn up because after the chute slows you down just a little bit, you’ll quickly smash into the atmosphere at a fairly steep angle. One way you might be able to avoid burning up is by firing a rocket downwards to slow your fall while dragging the giant (like, tens of square km) parachute behind you to reduce velocity. Then, maybe, it would be possible to reenter at a gentle speed, eventually shutting off the rocket entirely. Of course, this would probably require something close to a weightless and infinitely strong chute.
Remember this was called a conspiracy theory when people immediately said that, now it's just true. They tried to drip-feed this information to soften the blow I guess.
In fact, the first people to say that the extension in space was indicative of a serious problem and that Boeing's PR was BS were right, yet they were attacked.
I have a ton of issues with Elon, and growing, on his social and political views, BUT...
...when you look at the zero-to-one of standing up Tesla and SpaceX from nothing, he's achieved something quite amazing - twice. Boeing has over a century of engineering experience and it has experienced more problems and more delays getting Starliner into operation than SpaceX did with Dragon.
Both Tesla and SpaceX have demonstrated fresh thinking, new ideas and new approaches to tired and incumbent thinking in both the automotive and aeronautical industries. While also getting the basics right. People bitch about panel gaps in Model 3's but Model 3s and Ys are actually the safest cars the EPA has ever tested in their class.
I think Boring Company is a bit silly and I'm not sure Elon can apply his thinking to X, but I wonder if we'll see similar performance to Tesla and SapceX from Neuralink.
I hold $TSLA and I would hold SpaceX if I could obtain some, I don't have any interest in holding $BA
Boeing's basically a defunct company at this point, no?
(Yes, there are still outstanding contracts, carriers don't like mixed fleets, etc, but... in terms of quality I can't see anybody saying "Yeah, Boeing, we're going there, that's the best you can buy")
On the defense side, Boeing may be "too big to fail". After the the post Cold War consolidation, losing any of the big 5 USG contractors (Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics) would blow a huge hole in the industry. It's likely they'll be kept afloat with token contracts until they can get it back together.
On the commercial side, Airbus is the only real alternative. I'm sure this is great for them but realistically how much of Boeing's market share could they scale up to fill? Embraer doesn't do large jets and the other manufacturers are Russian and Chinese.
Yeah, but I'm pointing out that a company with multiple sectors is looking weak in basically all of them. Even the military contracts they win have increasingly been money losers.
The reason sounds like a combination of cost cutting and perhaps face saving - combining the "rescue" return with a half-crew next scheduled Dragon trip.
I've got to assume there's a faster contingency plan for a real emergency - that SpaceX could scramble a Dragon launch almost immediately if they had to?
It's a fixed price contract, they've been paying for Starliner out of their own pocket for a long time now, not to mention any penalties NASA will levy.
They spent $100B in the last decade buying back their own stock. Imagine if some of that went to this issue instead. Or making sure bolts were tight on doors.
There are a surprisingly large number of people who believe that space doesn't exist and that all such expeditions are faked.
I sometimes wonder what goes through their heads when they read stories such as this one. What exactly is in it for Boeing, NASA and Space-X to fake all of this?
I'm no conspiracy theorist but, if it's fake, the money is still real. Redistributing billions of dollars to the elite heads of the illuminati under the cover of socalled "space exploration".
