NASA acknowledges it cannot quantify risk of Starliner propulsion issues
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> I'm retired now but did propulsion and systems engineering on the Transfer Orbit Stage (TOS) developed by Orbital Sciences and Lockheed Martin for NASA/MSFC in the 1990's. [...] I'll make a few comments on how/where things might have gone off the rails with the RCS thruster thermal problem.
[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2...
This is obviously a well-known phenomenon in software engineering and I don't think anyone here is going to be be particularly surprised that it occurs in the aerospace setting. What is a little more surprising, to me at least, is that the systems people over there don't have procedures in place to minimise risks stemming from lack of communication.
It isn't realistic for any sub-team to be fully familiar with the overall system but surely, for instance, if a team is working on component X which interfaces with components Y and Z, then it should be standard practice for the X team to spend at least some time with the Y and Z teams during development?
So we coded to the specs. I spent a lot of time reading those and trying to figure out what they meant. It was a little challenging but usually all the information was there. It worked (mostly) and we tested alot. Some stuff was strange, I still remember seeing angles in BAMs (Binary Angle Mesurements)
SpaceX works "hardware rich", building lots of prototypes early in the development process. When Boeing and ULA launch their first "production" launch, the previous test articles generally haven't been anywhere near complete.
They did test firings of individual thrusters, and even did some with multiple thrusters, but with many of the systems in the doghouse missing and the insulation taken off.
Having read a good amount about their methods, it really seems like Boeing has relied heavily on component level tests and analysis rather than integrated tests. And it has bitten them many times so far.
I'm curious where you're getting this? I've read speculation, but I've never seen any authoritative source claim the test hardware configuration was different than the flight configuration. The better sources I've seen tend to indicate it was an inadequate thruster profile in the tests, rather than a configuration issue.
> "Spend some time with the other team"
How about design documents? Is that truly a lost art among the latter-day geeks?
In my current role (high-assurance deterministic code for self-driving cars, one of the top-tier players, a company who claims to be "safety obsessed"), we have close to zero documentation. Every team or department has their own standards for documentation. Documentation is always back-written after coding is complete. Requirements are written after code is complete. For the past year, I've been given tons of praise at department meetings, "look at so and so, they've written so much really good documentation, their docs are the standard everyone else needs to follow", and then when it comes time for promotions my managers tell me "well, you haven't shipped as much code as other people on the team .... absolutely you've done a terrific job with documentation and we totally recognize you caught a ton of problems before they became problems, but promotions are really based on 'results', and 'results' means how much code you wrote ....". So I'm job hunting.
A team was tasked with modernizing their multi-million dollar decades old test stand. The entire time they were cursing previous engineers for their lack of documentation that made reverse engineering difficult. Then when it came time for them to produce the documentation on their own design, they balked at the idea. I had a conversation with them about how they are screwing over the future engineers just like they were screwed over, but they still maintained cost/schedule pressure was too much to comply. We settled on them being allowed to go forward as long as they set aside a fund source and a date to have the documentation complete. When that date came and went, the documentation wasn't done and the excuse was the funding was used up by other projects. I feel like I owe those future engineers and apology.
I don't think I'd be so trusting/naïve today and would push back harder that if they couldn't get their documentation in order when the design was fresh in their mind, they're even less likely to do so in the future.
This is why you have to get the humans to talk to the other humans. If that communication happens via a collaborative design document then yes, that's a process, and it's one that can work.
Stopping outsourcing doesn’t change the fundamental problem of accountability, people just find different ways to avoid it.
Having worked on the public sector (Air Force), there's enormous pressure on groups like NASA to outsource because voters perceive government work as wasteful and expensive, and contracted work as efficient because free market.
Until the moment it doesn't.
The Mythical Man Month surely applies.
The Mythical Man Month applies when you task more people to work on the same job with the expectation of faster results.
He is proposing to task more people to work on different jobs with the expectation of higher quality results.
/s
Are there full-stack engineers? or are the individual domains too complex compared to coding?
- They sent 4 rovers to Mars, a freaking helicopter, and confirmed water presence.
- They launched 2 telescopes, with Webb forcing us to rethink our model of the universe.
- They made New Horizons do a flyby... of Pluto.
- And they collected samples from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu!
If that's not the demonstration of anything but drastically high competence to you, nothing is.
At this stage, I have to believe you are a troll.
> Curious if the root is someone at Boeing accidentally not relaying vehicle updates to vendors, or if it was a conscious decision to avoid paying for change requests.
Seeing how Boeing "incidents" have piled up in recent years, and reading how most (or perhaps all) of those issues were due to "cost saving" measures, I wouldn't put it past them to have made that decision consciously, lives be damned.
From the comments it can be pretty succinct:
>Yes, I know the aircraft and space divisions are separate. Doesn't matter. Shit always runs down hill if Corporate is squatting.
I've mistaken them for the official nasa webcast more than once before realizing that the two casual dudes talking can't possibly be official commentators. Isn't this some sort of trademark infringement they're doing?
NSF is not affiliated with and does not represent the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA initials are used with NASA’s permission.
"NSF is not affiliated with and does not represent the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)."
I’m shocked they’re able to keep operating like this. Can I walk around Seattle video recording bicycle thieves and call it “Seattle Police Department Video”?
https://manifold.markets/Shihan/will-spacex-dragon-rescue-bo...
I'd love an investigation to see if the public perception matched NASA's perception. I would be money that it doesn't which means NASA has been hiding the truth from the public. How can anyone trust what NASA says after this?
As late as July 28, NASA flight director Ed Van Cise explicitly denied that the Starliner crew was stuck or stranded <https://x.com/Carbon_Flight/status/1817754775196201035>. Even if one quibbles about whether "stranded" applies in this situation (I believe that it does <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ekicol/not_stranded_...>), "stuck" definitely does.
Objectively I suspect the only hidden truths here are perceptions/knowlege that its worse than people think. Hiding you think its better is .. unlikely.
Personally I don't ascribe a moral hazard dimension here. Probably, the NASA officials who had the power to state things, were not the ones conducting testing and their PR people were put on hold. I think its a malice/incompetence thing (Hanlon's razor)
Why is handling the issue quietly worse? Let the engineers do their fucking jobs.
> I'm more upset at NASA than Boeing
More upset than the company that couldn't build a functioning, reliable rocket? Get a grip, dude.
More confidence in NASA's future statements they make to the public.
The NTSB doesn't comment on ongoing investigations either. That's a good thing. Complete transparency only makes sense once everything has been resolved and investigated. Otherwise you have idiots on the internet chasing the flimsiest of threads and making a big stink about insignificant details.
Do you definitely start looking for a new job? Assume that ultimately nothing will change?
I'm even more curious about the astronauts. Are they willing to risk it? Are they even part of the discussions? Are they saying "screw that thing, get me a dragon"? I haven't heard a single word about their take on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly:_NASA_and_the_Crisis...
I would take a risk driving experimental motorbike, would not risk driving a normal motorbike on a highway where mechanic checking it was sloppy and stupid.
Even if risks were, hypothetically identical, risk A is honourable, risk 2 is someone’s incompetence or greed.
> One report describes the crew as "infuriated" that Mission Control Center seemed unconcerned. When Gibson saw the damage he thought to himself, "We are going to die"; he and others did not believe that the shuttle would survive reentry. Gibson advised the crew to relax because "No use dying all tensed-up", he said, but if instruments indicated that the shuttle was disintegrating, Gibson planned to "tell mission control what I thought of their analysis" in the remaining seconds before his death.
So, you know, it's one thing to be a badass cowboy with the risks inherent to exploration. But maybe don't romanticize the political and technical incompetence in this particular situation.
It seems vanishingly unlikely that NASA is free to decide on their own solution. Orders along the lines of "Don't get any astronauts killed before the election" wouldn't be all that surprising, balanced against the problem of making the newly-GOP-friendly Elon Musk look like the hero of the day.
Bottom line, those astronauts aren't going anywhere for a few more months.
Watch the Starliner crew entering ISS. Williams is very, very, very happy to have survived the ascent. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsURePrNTx0>
I doubt they need to be coerced into doing dangerous things. All space flight is inherently risky.
How can we fault them for improperly leading Boeing workforce with these extra tasks? /s
As long as the paychecks don't bounce they're probably more worried about their individual KPI than the actual results.
You just can't put people on the vessel while you're doing that part
Astronauts accept an amazing amount of risk, even when using proven systems like Soyuz or Dragon. ISS is one unlucky micrometeoroid strike away from total catastrophe. And yet hundreds of astronaut candidates are jostling with each other (another great drama) to be next on the rocket.
Even uncrewed missions are filled with drama. Imagine devoting 20 years of your scientific career on a probe to Mars and having it blow up on take-off or smash into the Martian surface--so close, and yet so utterly useless.
I think NASA fears that highlighting risk leads to bad press. NASA doesn't want headlines like, "NASA ignores safety concerns--story at 11". But ironically, when NASA minimizes risk, they lower the threshold for how much risk the public will accept. The more they minimize risk, the less risk the public will let them take.
I don't have any good suggestions, though. Highlighting risk inevitably invites the question of "why are we taking the risk at all?" And that's also a hard conversation.
Considering NASA's budget and project list are at the whim of Congress, making the US government look bad is something they select against.
And even look today, look at the relatively small risks (minor environmental rule edge skirting) SpaceX takes with unmanned test vehicles (Starship) and how much they're completely and constantly raked over the coals for it. The media in the modern era only knows how to attack and criticize.
I think NASA loses the funding game if they try to justify themselves based purely on "interesting [scientific] discoveries."
But I think we need professional storytellers and dramatists to tell the story of space exploration in order to really sell the benefits. After all, we enthusiasts love space exploration not because it will lead to zero-G medicines, but because exploring space is freaking cool.
We need to tell an emotional story, and emotional stories have risk and conflict (even if it is conflict with physics).
. . . as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.
> I don't have any good suggestions, though. Highlighting risk inevitably invites the question of "why are we taking the risk at all?" And that's also a hard conversation.
I think it's fine for NASA to take risks doing truly new things, and even then it should do everything reasonable to minimize those risks (e.g. extensive testing, validation, and good engineering). But launching a space capsule and returning it to Earth with its crew alive? That's not a new thing.
Also, it's film at 11 ~not news at 11~ (jokes from when people understood the idiom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbjZEoXQjCM).
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_at_11
> "Film at 11", "Pictures at 11" or "News at 11" is a US idiom from television news broadcasting, in which viewers are informed that footage of a breaking news story will be screened later that day. The word "film" in the phrase dates back to the early decades of TV news when footage was regularly recorded on film.
Film, here, seems especially dated. Sometimes anachronistic idioms get modernized rather than remaining static.
What's particularly interesting is that idiom is not just anachronistic, but that it's been through several evolutionary obsolescences: film -> tape -> digital -> internet / social / streaming / VOD.
I don't think that's a modernization, it's a misunderstanding. The idiom makes no sense as "news at 11" (though the "story at 11" from the op does make some sense), since to even deploy it idiom, you must have already given the news.
I feel like "news at 11" is a case where an idom is twisted when it's not understood to try to make sense of it. There's probably a name for this linguistic phenomenon.
Even if that had an acceptable level of risk, that still leaves two extra crew on the ISS with no seats home in case of an emergency, and NASA's policy in recent years has been to always have emergency return capacity for every crew member onboard.
I'm not saying there isn't a path forward that involves sending Starliner back empty, there are just a lot of considerations going into that decision right now.
But there is another level: there some kind of a background hate directed toward Musk and Space X. Someone in government agencies is asking themselves, how could we put some sticks in Musk's spokes? Some ask him to kidnap seals and put headphones on their heads [1] or calculate what's the chance his rockets would hit whales in the Pacific Ocean [2]. So it's not that they particularly love Boeing that much, but if Boeing's success makes Musk's company look worse, fine, then they'll support Boeing.
Imagine a scenario, for a moment, that the situation is reversed. Space X is the capsule with the issue and Boeing is the one with the cheaper and working version. There would be no hesitation to pointing fingers and accusing Space X make a large media stink about it instead of covering up.
[1] https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-4-transcript/
> Whether the seals would be dismayed by the sonic booms. Now, there’ve been a lot of rockets launched out of Vandenberg and the seal population has steadily increased. So if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac, based on the evidence, if you were to correlate rocket launches with seal population. Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures.
[2] https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-4-transcript/
> Now, again, you look the surface, look at the Pacific and say what percentage of the Pacific consists of whale? I could give you a big picture and point out all the whales in this picture. I’m like, I don’t see any whales. It’s basically 0%, and if our rocket does hit a whale, which is extremely unlikely beyond all belief, fate had it, that’s a whale has some seriously bad luck, least lucky whale ever.
Just to make it clear, I don't like Musk, I don't have any stock in his companies, and don't buy his cars or use twitter/X. But it's still interesting to observe this effect of cover up and strange push against Musk.
Now they are saying the astronauts could be up there until MARCH. They miscalculated by EIGHT MONTHS. These people are complete clowns.
Dump that pile of junk, cancel the program, and fire all the managers involved in this cosmic fiasco.
As an Ars commenter observed <https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/nasa-acknowledges-it-c...>, it is possible that the real issue isn't whether Starliner is safe to return with humans. If that were the question two months of debate are, as you said, by itself enough to say "no". Return Wilmore and Williams on Crew Dragon. Done.
The commenter posited that the real issue is that NASA does not trust Boeing's software to undock Starliner autonomously. We know that Wilmore had to take manual control on the way up because of the thruster issues. NASA may fear that if thrusters fail again, Starliner software may again not be able to handle them, and the spacecraft might ram ISS. Thus, the agency wants a human to be able to take over if necessary. *That* is the dilemma. This is something that I and others had mentioned over the past couple of weeks, but the Ars commenter is I think the first outside NASA to put it so starkly.
If I were a decision maker at NASA and I simply "trust" Boeing at its job and something goes wrong, I would likely end up fired at best.
[1] https://simpleflying.com/boeing-starliner-undocking-software...
In parallel, my pet theory is that NASA has probably already made up its mind (astronauts are not going to return on Starliner), and have been dragging this out mostly to make it look like they aren't just going to throw their contractors under the bus (even if they deserve it). Boeing has declared cold feet over fixed cost contracts (in general, not just with NASA), and I think NASA wants to keep the rest of the contractor pool at least at ease that, okay maybe NASA might start being stingier with the money and contracts, but they aren't going just throw you under the bus when issues appear.
1. Return uncrewed and burn up. Nasa complemented for its caution.
2. Return uncrewed successfully. Nasa complemented for "excess of caution".
3. Return crewed successfully. Major concern remains over the craft. People continue to question the decision making for years.
4. Craft kills the crew.
Either way you are not getting a certified spacecraft out of this.
Of course there is a further possibility that the departing craft will cause risk or damage to the iss.
I mean I'm sure that's still happening to some degree but this process of modeling sounds a lot more formal.
The longer NASA pushes out a decision on what to do with Starliner, the more it becomes likely that people within the Biden administration don't want to go with the obvious choice of bringing home the crew on a Crew Dragon, because they don't want the resulting headlines shouting "Elon Musk rescues astronauts from space".
I'd been a space fan for long enough that I know "improper O/F ratio" usually goes under a picture of a fireball or an artist's impression file image. There were multiple spacecrafts that at least blew off engines that way. The JAXA SLIM mission just this January had it that way. The fact that NASA/Boeing Starliner team keep triggering it and getting away with it is probably technically magnificent.
With that prior knowledge, one way I can interpret those corpospeak is "we aren't sure if we can continue to do that and not finally kill the engines, or worse yet, turn everything into a bomb with people inside or around". Many are instead receiving "we technically know such and such [unintelligible] but we aren't sure of anything and we have no idea". That's a great demonstration of public relations skills.
That's what's making the risk difficult to quantify.
They have an idea. "Tests of a similar control jet on the ground suggested a Teflon seal in an internal valve could swell at higher temperatures, restricting the flow of propellant to the thruster." That is the idea they have and they are checking if it matches with the measured signals / explains the observations.
But yeah, about the only thing more irritating than having a problem occur for reasons you don't understand is having it disappear for reasons you also don't understand.
They have weekly status update conferences, and just cancelling those conferences might be more of a PR risk than just keeping the conference and announcing that they're delaying making a decision.
It's like if I have a service outage, maybe I might spend a few minutes to collect debugging information, but my priority would be to bring the service back up via rollbacks or whatever to restore a previously known good state. Currently they are debugging Starliner with people stranded, but maybe they should prioritize on getting those people back home first.
Or maybe everyone involved don't consider being stranded for months in space as a bad state.
If the system is so complex that an extra week does yield some major new insights, that’s way too complex to use.
Theyre going to kill people at some point.
As for killing people, they have already done that with the 737 Max.
The aviation industry wants cheap, fuel economic and reliable "air busses". A brilliant name indeed.
The rest is a long, slow, decline into Boeing being what L/M was when they needed to be rescued.
Or did that happen twice?
When you look at people like Gates, Jobs, Musk, Huang, they are cutthroat businessmen but they also have passion for their products. When I listen to interviews with a lot of US car CEOs, they seem to be interested only tangentially interested in cars, it’s just all numbers.
developed by Boeing that became notorious for its role in two fatal accidents of the 737 MAX in 2018 and 2019, which killed all 346 passengers and crew among both flights.
They are a publicly traded corporation. The enshittification is inevitable.
They already killed a few hundred people.
Use Dragon, Starliner can be a test.
Fortunately, running down the clock makes this a foregone conclusion. A lot of the components and systems on this thing have expiry dates. So, they are running down the clock. And of course the longer that lasts, the more potential for new problems there is.
By simply running down the clock, they get to land the thing without passengers and without having to do so because of the original failure. So everybody saves face (somewhat). My guess is they'll try to land it normally without passengers to "validate" it at least worked as advertised. But without risking astronaut lives. And then dragon swoops in and it's business as usual and nobody died.
The difference between Dragon and Starliner is that Nasa used Dragon for years without passengers so they knew the thing worked as advertised. And then the first launch with passengers was a non-event in terms of safety as it was just another launch for them. It's what SpaceX does: iterate lots until they can nail it every time.
The issue with Starliner is that launching it is too expensive to do this. No reusable rocket means they need a new one every time. So, this is only the third launch they've attempted. And the previous unmanned launches had lots of delays and issues. Technically they've never had a flight without problems.
They never had a lot of confidence building launches without passengers because the cost for that would have been astronomical. So, it's a big question mark in terms of safety. And all the constant incidents involving Boeing aren't instilling a lot of confidence.
So, they are simply running down the clock until failure is a foregone conclusion. The pressure is on Boeing to guarantee safety to NASA. And there's no way that either of them is signing off on a manned return of this thing because they'd never hear the end of it if it goes wrong. Which is why we're getting all these euphemistic statements about hard to quantify risks to explain why they can't sign off.
They went and made it political.
This isn't directed at you, for you, I wish could actually pay you for your response.
SpaceX has one thing going for it and it is iterate and gather data. NASA used to have this, and then they lost it. When shit becomes "important" it also becomes ridiculously stupid. We need to figure out how to make things not important.
PS. There was a nice movie released 1979 about that :)
There is a slight inconvenience in that the ISS has 6 bedrooms and 7 astronauts, so now one of them will be sleeping on the couch for 8 months rather than 8 days.
Wonder what that actually translates to, in space
Is there an extra "guest" specially-adapted "zero gravity sleeping bag" or such?
If they decide to go with the plan of sending a reduced crew in Crew-9, they'll probably add extra supplies to that too. So, supply wise there shouldn't be any concerns.
Not sure, but a Cygnus resupply mission (NG-21) launched on the 4th of August, so I'm sure they have plenty of supplies.
Boeing saving face is worth nothing. The productivity loss is something, but nothing in comparison to stranding (or worse) 2 astronauts.
We should be re-framing this entire thing - what is the best case scenario? The stranded astronauts return safely as soon as possible. Do that however you can and be happy you don't actualize some far worse reality. That is the real path to Boeing saving some face.
Boeing can change the configuration, and I guess they're in the process of doing so, but it takes four weeks to run all the tests on that configuration and make sure everything works as it should.
The keyword here is reliable and I would add the word competitive. Having an expensive, late, unreliable provider may in fact be a net negative. I think Starliner in it's current form isn't helping the industry. I hope they get their act together, or that we fund a reliable and competitive alternative to SpaceX.
I'm also surprised by how many human replies these comments get, seemingly unaware what they're responding to, given that it's HN and how long it's been since the release of GPT-3, I thought a larger percentage of readers would notice.
Lockheed Martin is building a cislunar transporter for getting fuel to NRHO. What is needed is a cislunar crew transporter in addition to the fuel transporter.
And to your comment about SpaceX, this is a Boeing problem and you’re just throwing SpaceX under the bus for the other company’s troubles. SpaceX is the alternative provider. How many more do you think is feasible?
That is what happens. If a company wants to play in this sort of arena, it will not be treated "fairly" and will suffer for the mistakes of others. In a narrow two-company industry, the mistakes of either party will always impact the industry as a whole.
Think of that company that lost a submersible at the Titanic. Undersea tourism is also very narrow industry. All companies involved are dealing with the repercussions of that accident from diminished demand to potentially stricter regulations, not to mention increased insurance costs. That isn't fair, but that is how such industries work.
I'll say what you hopefully mean: SpaceX needs solid competition but the old-school contractors are broken. Pending an analysis of their impotence, they may need thorough fumigation before we rely on them for anything.
Edit: Low IQ downvoters are too stupid to recognise obvious ChatGPT replies. I checked his comment history and found that he uses ChatGPT here regularly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274200
This is not necessary.
~by feeding boeing even more government cash and looking the other way when they get "rid" of whistleblowers, yeah.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-crew-dragon-explosion-titan... ("SpaceX says Crew Dragon capsule exploded due to exotic titanium fire")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20445725
I don't think it's practical to try to make this part user-serviceable.
If I recall correctly, the Dragon explosion was especially interesting because the reaction was previously unknown. So, it wasn't just a design flaw that allowed NTO to leak into a helium line, it was also a new discovery that titanium can react with NTO under high pressure and ignite.
I'm sure they have more sensors than that.
They have a lot to weigh up.
They still don’t know root cause(s). That’s real bad Frank.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/yes-nasa-really-could-...
It's a little more nuanced than that.
If NASA decides to bring the Astronauts home on a Crew Dragon, there will be a short window of time between when Starliner undocks and when the next Crew Dragon docks that there will be 6 International Astronauts on the ISS and only 4 seats.
If an emergency happens during that time, NASA would jerry-rig some extra seats in the existing Crew Dragon and bring all 6 home that way. But that's a very short period of time - just a couple of weeks.
The next Crew Dragon will only have 2 Astronauts aboard, and will contain suits for Butch and Sunny, so that all 4 of them can return normally on that vehicle at the end of the next rotation.
It's part of why the next crew dragon mission is being delayed, it needs to use the docking port currently occupied by Starliner (and Starliner can't leave until Boeing updates and uploads software for full autonomous operations).
The next Dragon crew rotation is coming up in September, so the current proposed plan is to only send 2 people up, along with the Dragon IVA suits for Butch and Suni, and bring them back when that crew rotates back out in February.
SpaceX (afaik) also doesn't have any spare Dragons available for an extra rescue mission right now. One is set to fly their EVA test flight in a week or so and does not have the hardware to dock with the ISS, instead replacing it with an EVA port. A second Dragon is being prepped for a crewed polar flight sometime later this year, and a third one is likely in the process of being refurbished for the crew rotation in February.
But also, they can't dock a second Crew Dragon at the station until they undock Starliner, and that is its own can of worms right now (needs a few weeks to update the software for uncrewed operation).
When in 1974 the 56 day planned mission on Skylab 4 was delayed by 24 days it was a major event.
With the current debacle we are past 65 days of a planned 8 day mission. In a past world this would have been seen as a the shame with the fact in which vessel the crew returned, being a just a minor sidenote.
My belief is that the fact that they're publicly "considering" the SpaceX plan means that they've probably already decided to do that and what we're seeing in the media right now is NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.
The messaging from NASA has slowly shifted from "They're returning on Starliner" to "They're returning on Starliner, and we're considering contingencies" to "We'll make a decision whether they return on Starliner or Crew Dragon".
It does kind of seem like NASA is giving Boeing as much time as they can to try to pull a rabbit out of a hat, with the understanding that if they don't deliver, that the Astronauts are going back on Crew Dragon.
The issue is that of fault handling. If the software detects a malfunction when a crew is onboard, the best option is to switch to manual control. But if a crew is not onboard, the craft should handle the failure on its own in the safest possible way.
So, what happened is that they loaded in software which expects the crew to be available. Now, obviously with thruster malfunctions already happening, they can't assume that a fault won't be detected after undocking, so they have to switch the software over to the configuration where it can no longer rely on the crew as a fallback.
Or NASA caving to outside pressure to look, relook, and look once more for any possible way to make a Starliner return possible. Likely the same pressure that called for Starliner in the first place.
If they are doing comms like that, it's telling, they need to cut it out and focus on their real issues.
There are still fans of Boeing's ability to make money, no matter how bad they are at making aerospace products.
This is real engineering, folks. By the experienced real engineers at Boeing. Not the idiots at SpaceX whose stuff keeps blowing up.
NASA is an executive agency, the President doesn’t like the head of SpaceX, and it’s an election year.
I would like to believe you, unfortunately previous events show that decisions are not driven primarily by crew safety and data on thruster performance. Politics plays heavily in most decisions.
(e.g., the Shuttle was sold to Congress as a multipurpose vehicle that could support military, scientific, and commercial missions. However, the need to gain political support led to compromises in its design, particularly the decision to make it a reusable vehicle with an orbiter that could carry large payloads, which led to safety issues. The political drive for cost-effectiveness also led to the program being underfunded, contributing to the Challenger disaster in 1986.
The 'Journey to Mars' program was designed to sustain NASA's long-term goals but lacked a clear timeline, partly due to political hesitance to commit to a specific date or strategy that might not align with subsequent administrations' priorities. The program was influenced by political leaders' desires to show progress in space exploration while avoiding the high costs and risks associated with a definitive Mars mission plan.)
Five-year-olds do not use this technique, they do what they want when they want to with no regard for their public image, which is what you are stating NASA will do.
So the timeline is irrelevant to embarrassment. The Crew-9 mission has been rescheduled to 24 September, a decision needs to be done way beforehand. If the decision is bring them down using SpaceX, the Starliner crew will then stay until the end of the Crew-9 mission in March.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-boeing-starliner-decision/
I'd imagine they would just change the mission to send an empty Dragon in March to get them, but use the launched September Dragon to return those Starliner astronauts right away.
I find it odd to shame NASA for what is a Boeing failure. They hired Boeing to ferry people to the ISS and back. Boeing built a spacecraft that broke down and is considered too dangerous to carry people on the return leg.
Why are we blaming NASA here?
All government procurement is fraught with industry and political pressure which looks like it happened here, yet again.
Lest it looks like a one time thing, have a look at the OIG report about the SLS program perforance from Boeing, in a disastrous condition.
They can’t. They are under political pressure from Congress.
Which, in part, is a good thing because it makes NASA into a technology development government agency that creates jobs in sometimes unlikely places and trains people on skills that are very valuable in other fields.
Yes, we know NASA has been propping up SpaceX, but how does that relate to Boeing?
Oh wait, NASA has been doing the same thing with Boeing that is has been doing with SpaceX? Giving both companies the opportunity to redeem themselves from (sometimes explosive) unexplained errors while paying them hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to do all of it? It's almost as if NASA is trying to create a launch industry instead of a launch monopoly controlled by an erratic individual who has no issues with just randomly blowing stuff up because he feels like it.
In an ideal world, NASA would be immune from political pressures the same way the military, which are equally ineffective, seem to be.
GP just seems to have beef with agile and seems to be trying to loop any random failure, whether or not agile was involved, into the discussion.
Here is a past HN thread discussing exactly this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856590
NASA have dual launch providers for a reason, and now is the time to take advantage of it.
I'd be amazed if these guys don't come back on Dragon. What's the benefit to NASA on having them coming back on Starliner if the risk level is seen as higher?!
I'd like to see the day where Blue Origin replaces Boeing as 2nd provider though.
Why is the US giving Boeing a free pass for this? it frankly makes the US look pathetic. News stations quit covering it once the cat was out of the bag that this isnt a "routine evaluation" and the crew is actually just stranded.
23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand?
Tell that to Vladimir Komarov who launched on Soyuz 1 despite knowing it was a death sentence because if he refused then his close friend (Yuri Gagarin) would have to fly in his stead.
The rocket had several hundred structural problems and they knew it would fail but they launched anyways.
So he died screaming while he burned to death on reentry and he broadcasted it in the clear so that everyone could listen. And they insisted that his remains be shown in an open casket so that leadership would have to look at what they did.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/c...
Or the three backup crew members who flew Soyuz 11 and died of asphyxiation despite the fact that it was a known issue that the cabin pressure valves that led to their deaths did not reliably close automatically. Manually closing them was not part of their reentry flight plan and the only thing they got was a warning from an original crew member to do so because it wasn't safe and they wouldn't add it to the flight plan.
Komarov was selected to command the Soyuz 1, in 1967, with Yuri Gagarin as his backup cosmonaut. refusing to fly has the same consequence for every space program: the backup flies.
as for the "died screaming" claim, thats some malarkey.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a...
What we've learned: American historian Asif Siddiqi has a transcript of Komarov's final moments in the Soyuz. He got it from the Russian State Archive. It goes like this:
Komarov: Activated, activated, don't worry, everything is in order.
Ground: Understood, we're also not worried. How do you feel, how's everything? Zarya, over.
Komarov: I feel excellent, everything's in order.
Ground: Understood, our comrades here recommend that you take a deep breath. We're waiting for the landing. This is Zarya, over.
Komarov: Thank you for transmitting all of that. [Separation] occurred. [garbled]
Ground: Rubin, this is Zarya. Understood, separation occurred. Let's work during the break [pause]. Rubin, this is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over. Rubin, this is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over. This is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over ...
China has literally dropped rockets on Chinese villages.
The Soviet Union treated its astronauts as disposable, and covered up many of their failed missions.
What do you consider a free pass for Boeing btw?
To be fair, that we know of. It's entirely possible that their re-entry vehicles also had issues that they decided were an acceptable risk, and were proven correct - without publicizing them.
How sure are you about there being no issues or delays?
NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing which has left 14 astronauts dead, and now these astronauts stranded. There just seems to be a extreme disconnect between the actual engineering staff and the managerial layer, probably exasperated by the fact that political appointees head the organization.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/01/chin...
I agree it makes the US look pathetic.
and to be honest, if spacex had made the shuttle that was assigned to boeing they would probably have made it work. no plan survives contact with the enemy and no engineering design survives its own prototype. the people working at these companies and managing the teams is what made the difference, not nasa's original design
Granted that these figures are theoretical and probably varies from reality by a good margin. But these figures are still useful. For one, these figures are updated, recalculated and refined as more actual figures are obtained from components, packages, subsystems and system level tests. The final reliability and risk figures progressively approach the actual values as more tests, including flight tests are conducted. In addition, even preliminary figures help you identity potential risks and mitigate them with better engineering margins, redundancy, better test methodologies, etc. In other words, the quantification helps you contain the risks much better than any qualitative analysis.
In this particular instance, NASA's statement is concerning because it would mean that they don't the reliability figures for many components and/or don't have the reliability assessments based on tests.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150002964/downloads/20...
Not saying Boeing is any better, but the culture at his companies seems to be: "Fast dev and fake high quality. Hype it up."