That's why they're called test pilots. They're not putting the general public into spacecraft.
FWIW, like many previous astronauts, both crew members are US Navy test pilots. They've literally made a career out of solving complex problems and navigating ultra-sticky situations.
The function of test pilots is to validate things that can only be validated by manual flight testing, like aircraft handling characteristics—not to risk their lives to do QA.
Hmm. I hear ya, but this isn’t what I want test pilots spending effort on.
Test pilots are closer to an integration test in software. You expect the unit tests to pass green before you expect the related integration tests to work.
Multiple failures of maneuvering thrusters is technically a mission failure (in the flight plan sense), despite having nothing to do with the parameters of the mission, nor anything to do with adding humans. Maneuverability is the difference between a craft and junk.
I wouldn’t find this acceptable in a project I was managing or funding. Just sayin! Still impressed as hell.
> Poorer nations typically have no/few refuse collection services, and people often just pile up and burn their own refuse or dump it in rivers to take it away.
Would it not make sense then if they had a container with which to collect and responsibly dispose of the refuse? A plastic bag perhaps?
They have to put the bag somewhere. Paying for a guy to come around and haul your garbage away every week to be responsibly disposed in a secure landfill is laughably out of budget for a huge chunk of the world population.
Places that still have open defecation and garbage in the streets have bigger issues to be solved before we deduce plastic bags are the problem. E.g. third world.
Seattle and SF have banned plastic bags and the streets are still littered with human feces. Maybe for their next initiative they should pass out reusable bags for people to poop into. Sorry but a feel good measure to make grocery bags illegal doesn't move the needle for me when I still have to play hopscotch with literal logs of human shit.
That's utterly ridiculous and highly inconvenient for nearly everyone that isn't proselytizing about reusable sacks or needs to purchase more than a few items. What works for dedicated urbanists doesn't fly for the other 85% of the population.
Reusable bags are nearly universally unsanitary. People let their cats play in them, never wash them, then place them on the same conveyor belt where you put your vegetables.
I don't think it's utterly ridiculous for most people. It's very common here in the Netherlands and I'm not sure the average Dutch person is so extremely peculiar to the rest of society. It's really no more inconvenient than carrying the bank card I need to pay for my purchase and in the worst case scenario if I forget it I can just buy a new bag to reuse with my other items.
Regarding how clean they are, I just wash mine in the washing machine and I wash my vegetables as well.
When you wash something you're not dissolving contaminants - you're mechanically removing them. Most bacteria are not water soluble yet we manage to wash them off our hands.
I find it amazing that this is treated as such a trivial achievement, with an attitude as if any one of us could have done this. Now back to our regularly scheduled social media apps.
It took them a decade and a half because Boeing learned the hard way that you have to actually be efficient when you don’t get a cost plus contract. Their entire system was setup to extract as much money from the government as possible, not to deliver product on time.
Late and over a budget is how you maximize profit in cost plus contracts.
I'm not shitting on Starliner, it's great that we have another person-rated capsule for spaceflight.
I'm just pointing this out because there are many people apparently who are confusing Starliner for Boeing's version of Starship, i.e. a whole rocket plus crew rated capsule.
Well, "ocean liner" means a large oceangoing ship, "airliner" means large airplane, so people could be forgiven for thinking a "starliner" was a large spaceship and not a tiny pod.
Depends on what you consider starting. 16 years is probably the most reasonable number, but you could argue for as little as 6.
Initial work on Dragon began in 2004, it ‘entered service’ in 2009, had its first mission in 2010, but first connected to the ISS in 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon
Work on a crewed version was officially mentioned in 2006 though they only got a contract for manned missions in 2014 and the first manned mission was 16 November 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-1
It's kind of useful perspective that when the contracts for this were being awarded, Boeing argued that SpaceX shouldn't get the contract at all because Boeing, having "human spaceflight heritage", was guaranteed to do the better job than an inexperienced upstart. Plus the extra $400M they extorted out of NASA despite this being a fixed price, milestone based contract.
It wan’t an inaccurate assessment. SpaceX was working on life support for a crewed module 14+ years before their first successful manned launch. IE: It took them longer than Boeing.
However the missing context is SpaceX put in 8+ years into the project before getting the award which offset most of the issues.
So it worked out well for NASA, but SpaceX was approaching it more as a prestige project than a profitable one.
> when the contracts for this were being awarded, Boeing argued that SpaceX shouldn't get the contract at all because Boeing, having "human spaceflight heritage", was guaranteed to do the better job than an inexperienced upstart.
I think it's useful to note that this wasn't just Boeing's opinion - it was pretty widely believed in the industry. And not without reason - Boeing had Shuttle heritage.
Unlike science (and particularly math) where everything is trivial unless novel, in most endeavors these are too separate axes. For example, there's no progress or novelty in a sports team winning a championship, but it's definitely not trivial to win. Same for an engineering project - there are many cathedrals out there, but building a new one never became trivial.
> Let's say: if you can just open the manual and start building, then it is trivial.
> We've built many rockets, there are numerous resources about building one, so building rockets is trivial.
Except that you're wrong.
Because it's very common for the first launch of a company's first orbital rocket to fail to make it to orbit. So you can't "just open the manual and start building".
> It is also very common for the first pancake to be a total failure.
I guess, it depends on what you mean by "total failure".
It's very rare for the first pancake to be inedible, or basically anything except a little misshapen. As someone who's primary interested in pancakes is eating them, that's a far cry from "total failure".
But if that is your criteria, there's a very simple and effective solution: ring molds. They cost a couple of dollars on Amazon and guarantee that your pancakes will be perfect circles every time.
In contrast, there is no known way to ensure that a first rocket launch will be a success. If there was, the companies launching them would do it since failed launches are extremely expensive in time, money, and reputation.
Building a new Falcon 9 is trivial - spacex as built a lot already and knows how (or so we assume). However that is only true if you use the existing design as is. Change anything about the design (which we can assume spacex is doing from time to time) makes it non-trivial.
I think it is materially less exciting than it would have been if it had launched years ago when it was scheduled to. It provides competition with SpaceX in one very small niche of space travel with no applications to any other niche. Meanwhile SpaceX is building a Mars rocket with in flight refueling.
I really wish they did have more competition, and I also hope they succeed.
I think one of the challenges (and let's be really clear, Boeing has MANY issues) is that there's a double standard (or at least different expectations).
How many SpaceX rockets and failures have there been? (And that's not a knock on SpaceX, either - this stuff is hard. Combining precision and technology with 'controlled explosion' is going to be a challenge).
But as a NASA person said - NASA-funded contracts "can't" have failures. They obviously do, but he was more talking to the acceptability, political and otherwise. One or two launchpad explosions of a taxpayer funded vehicle and you're fighting Congressional demands to shut down the entire program. SpaceX provides a layer of abstraction and indirection to that, so they can move faster - "Who cares if we blow up 10 in the next couple of years to get to one that works".
The Falcon 9 is, by a wide margin, the most reliable rocket ever built. It's had 341 successful launches and 2 failures. The Atlas V (what is flying on this mission) has had 99 successes and 1 failure. It's also slightly misleading, because its first stage is using a Russian made RD-180 engine. And similarly the SLS (another Boeing et al project) is literally using the exact same engines (RS-25) that the Space Shuttle used.
So SpaceX is the only company truly innovating on all fields, has the highest launch success rate, highest launch cadence, the most capable rockets, and launches for far cheaper than any other company (or country).
> The Falcon 9 is, by a wide margin, the most reliable rocket ever built. It's had 341 successful launches and 2 failures.
I think it's worth pointing out that the failures were early in F9's life, and that the current configuration "F9 v1.2FT Block 5" has had no failures to launch and remarkable success when it comes to landing the booster.
> I think one of the challenges (and let's be really clear, Boeing has MANY issues) is that there's a double standard (or at least different expectations).
> How many SpaceX rockets and failures have there been? (And that's not a knock on SpaceX, either - this stuff is hard. Combining precision and technology with 'controlled explosion' is going to be a challenge).
IMO, this really misunderstands the two kinds of "tests".
SpaceX is engaged in a development program. And as a part of that development program, they're doing test flights to discover how to properly build Starship. Those flights are expected to fail in various ways. The exact way they fail gives SpaceX vital information that's used to improve the rocket.
A big part of the reason SpaceX is doing this is because simulation and modeling have a limited ability to give good answers to questions about novel behaviors when it comes to rockets - the speeds and just too high. And the only way to find the true unknown unknowns is to interact with reality.
In contrast, Starliner's tests are supposed to be demonstrations that the system is complete, functional, and ready for service. They are not supposed to have anything wrong with them at all.
It's worth pointing out that Boeing chose to do less testing and more paperwork as part of Starliner's certification. If Boeing had done an in-flight abort test instead of a pad abort test like SpaceX did, they probably would have caught the OFT-1 problems then.
I think you're conflating the way SpaceX is developing Starship with the way the rest of their business operates (and has operated). Their Falcon rockets (i.e. the ones they actually sell launches on) have an outstanding reliability record, and the Dragon 2 development program (the direct analogue to Starliner) didn't lose any test missions. IIRC the only major hardware loss was during a static fire test of the abort motors on the capsule, which is unfortunate, but not so far out of the ordinary.
there have been many many prototype and other losses. And incidents, some catastrophic, some less so.
SN1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15 and the orbital Starship launch attempt all had failures losing hardware. If NASA/publicly funded work had that many failures (or a fraction of them) there'd be Congressional enquiries and calls to shut down the program and stop burning tax dollars.
You are simply underlining my point that your perspective is disproportionately (and inappropriately, in this context) focused on the Starship program, which is completely irrelevant to NASA's Commercial Crew program.
It's true that SpaceX enjoys more latitude to destroy test hardware in its private development programs that aren't funded with somebody else's money (public or private), but why is that relevant here? Commercial Crew was funded by NASA with public money, and SpaceX developed Dragon 2 in a relatively conservative and conventional program with NASA looking over their shoulder the whole time. There is no double standard.
> there have been many many prototype and other losses
SpaceX has an assembly line in Hawthorne and test site in Texas. (Both send kit to the space coast for launch.)
The reliability of what comes out of the former exceed’s Boeing’s. The innovativeness of what comes out of the latter exceeds them once again. Muddling statistics between the two would be like considering Boeing’s experimental drones when measuring its commercial airliners’ reliability. They’re totally different departments.
Different design philosophy. Those launches were expected to fail. None of those were a finished product. It’s more like “let’s see how far we can get with what we have built so far”.
If NASA had that many failures while working on a program explicitly not intended to experience failures and it wasn't being run by Boing, Lockmart or any other defense contractor that has Congress in its pockets, yeah, they'd be getting hell from Congress. But, NASA did used to work on regular old development programs akin to Starship, where perceived failure was completely acceptable to push understanding. For example, there were the Ranger series of lunar impactors, the first 6 of which all failed in various ways, and of course they blew up plenty of rockets and rocket engines back then too.
The issue isn't "burning tax dollars". Congress is too busy selling out the country's future to give a shit about that. The issue is that they'd already rather not be giving any money to NASA in the first place. They'd just give the defense contractors tax payer funded 'donations' directly if they could.
What are you even talking about? NASA has directly publicly funded Starship development to the tune of ~4 Billion with the Artemis Moonlander contract and extension.
The overall perspective is that SpaceX developed their crewed capsule much much faster and cheaper than Boeing. The data also indicates that flying with SpaceX is safer.
Congress doesn't care about buring tax dollars as long as it is spent in their districts. Otherwise Artemis and SLS wouldn't exist.
Boeing and SpaceX are both not NASA, so same level of indirection. If Boeing went the iterative route with some failed experimental launches, that could/should be just as acceptable.
But they didn't, they went for the first time right approach, but that failed too. If you are going to have failures, maybe just accept that first time right doesn't exist, or just takes much much longer.
No, I totally agree. I'm talking about the mindset difference. I'm not saying "SpaceX is 'cheating'" or anything like that. Just the mindset differences are leading to what we see here in terms of iteration cadence.
> Now back to our regularly scheduled social media apps.
"Ask not what flying cars can do for you; ask what 140 characters can do for your country." [0,1]
"We choose to go to LEO. We choose to go to LEO... We choose to go to LEO in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but so that MIC will learn to build without cost-plus contracting" [2, 3]
Quick, without cheating, can you name the second human being to run a mile in less than four minutes? Can you name the current world record holder?
I guess that most people in my small town don't know who Roger Bannister is. A lot more of them can tell you the name of the first local to officially run a mile in less than four minutes. They couldn't tell you if anybody from my state has done it since.
I guess that's just a long way to say, "That's natural."
Probably not, they’d sub in a standby if the launch window allowed for the time to do it. There’s a prelaunch diet plan but it’s hard to find information on it because the space diet gets all the attention. It’s not too exciting though, it’s mostly just a subset of whatever each astronaut considers comfort food with extra attention to nutrition and food safety.
The Apollo 11 astronauts had steak and eggs for breakfast before the launch.
That's very interesting! My first reaction is one of disbelief because steak and eggs could send someone with IBS running for the loo, but a trip to space likely entails altered energy needs, and a high energy meal loaded with protein would certainly make sense.
As I understand it, any chronic conditions that would impact an astronaut's ability to do their job would disqualify them. There's just too much at stake and too much competition for the spot. IBS isn't explicitly listed as a disqualifier like diabetes or heart disease but I doubt it would fly with NASA, especially since it tends to get worse under stress.
Depending on the severity - before launch probably, after the launch it's a risk call and they would probably adopt wait and see if it gets better approach. The reason for scrub would not be the diarrhea, but rather not knowing the reason why. Astronauts are placed in isolation / fed high quality and low diarrhea risk food. This mitigates most of normal reasons of why it could happen, so getting proceeding with the mission without understanding what is going on is risky.
Why yes an astronaut has had diarrhea while on the ISS. And it was me!
Getting diarrhea in outer space was certainly not on my bucket list. It was, however, a normal… and qualified “pain in the rear (see what I did there?!).”
It was early in my 5-month stay aboard the International Space Station. Not sure what brought it on —guessing food— my symptoms began to occur as I was sleeping in the U. S. Lab module. Waking sometime around 2 a.m. Greenwich time (the time zone used for our daily schedules), I knew what was coming. And it was coming fast! I sailed down to the Russian Service Module —the only toilet on the station back in 2007— and entered the tiny enclosed area short of panic, but with very high anxiety.
After quietly closing the sliding door, I fired up the Russian-designed toilet. I was actually grateful for the late hour, as I was hoping this would ensure that my two Russian crewmates (Oleg and Fyodor) would remain asleep… leaving me to my own devices.
Ultimately, I would be successful in my crisis-laden endeavor. After using two of the toilet system’s plastic bags (for collecting the fecal matter), and only one rubber glove, my symptoms subsided for a time. This allowed me the opportunity to quietly clean everything up, power-down the system, and fly back to the U. S. segment. It was there that I quickly broke open the American medical kit. Concealed beneath the module’s floor, under a large “door” adorned with the easily recognizable red cross symbol, I used its table of contents to locate the medication I so desperately needed. Immodium AD was —thank God— available for my use, and I followed the dosage recommendation to the letter. I would never have diarrhea again… in space anyway!
Most Americans can barely afford a used car, let alone new, and you are suggesting they should rent a car at additional cost to supplant the EV they never wanted in the first place, for such obscure edge cases as "road trips"?
If you are in the market for a Lexus you are by definition in the 1% of car buyers.
I truly believe EVs will fade away into niche items for enthusiasts, with hybrids taking over the market. Toyota is playing the long game and is right on this one. The rush to widespread EV adoption is being spurred by activists who fail to see the big picture. There is a major lack of infrastructure problem that continues to be ignored and isn't being addressed.
> Most Americans can barely afford a used car, let alone new, and you are suggesting they should rent a car at additional cost to supplant the EV they never wanted in the first place,
I am saying Americans who are choosing between buying an EV but are afraid of range limits will be just fine buying an EV with lower range and using the savings to rent a car for the times they need to go more than 300 miles at once.
> If you are in the market for a Lexus you are by definition in the 1% of car buyers.
The used Lexus (Hybrid!) I was looking at was 35k, the average price of a new car in America. The engine was noisy and it had the worst implementation of a hybrid drive train I'd ever seen. Anything more than the slightest press on the throttle and the gas engine kicked on, it was absurdly useless.
Fwiw you can get a good EV for 18k (year or two old Chevy Bolt EV) and a brand new EV for 26k (Hyundai has a 7500 off for everyone for new Kona Electrics).
> The rush to widespread EV adoption is being spurred by activists who fail to see the big picture.
Somehow other counties, including huge ones like China, are not having issues with EV adoption.
> I truly believe EVs will fade away into niche items for enthusiasts,
EVs are simpler to make and have far less mechanical complexity. Battery prices are dropping every year and there is an obscene amount of research going into ensuring that trend continues. Once battery prices drop a bit more EVs will be far cheaper to build, buy, and maintain.
I actually looked at a plug in hybrid, the Kia Niro EV. A boring compact car with a hybrid drive train that you can plug in.
$40k USD for a compact Kia. The regular model is around 30k, the hybrid 35, and the plug in hybrid was 40.
Or, buy a brand new EV for $26k.
How exactly so hybrids make any sense? They are a psychological crutch against fears of range anxiety.
But again, ultimately none of this matters because EVs keep getting cheaper every year and they'll continue to get cheaper. As a species we've been making DC motors for almost 140 years, we are really damn good at making them reliable and efficient.
> There is a major lack of infrastructure problem that continues to be ignored and isn't being addressed.
In q2 of 2023 over 1000 fast chargers were installed in the US.
To create a proper growth curve for EVs, deployment doesn't have to be evenly spread out across the US.
If you replace 30% of cars in the top 5 US metro areas, you've created a huge market.
Heck just solve charging in NYC and SF. Then do other dense cities (Chicago, Boston, etc) and then the market becomes big enough that it is self sustaining w/o needing government help.
IDK what you mean. There are loads of niche fabless car companies. They won't be the next VW or Toyota so you wont find their dealerships everywhere and models for every budget, but they're fine catering to the wealthy man or woman who wants something different than your average mass produced luxury German, British or American car, to stand out.
FWIW, like many previous astronauts, both crew members are US Navy test pilots. They've literally made a career out of solving complex problems and navigating ultra-sticky situations.
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