Boeing need to stop being given contracts, from the Starliner issues on top of the various scandals with the quality control of their planes, it's clear to see they have no value in human life.
Why does it feel like we don’t have criminal responsibility (well, accountability) here in the US? So much criminal wrongdoing and the company just pays a fine and everything continues as usual.
You can't fix Boeing or any other industry with punishments, the flaw is in the financial system of all the west. Some companies suffer more, some less, but their fate will be the same.
A small example: most battery-powered hand tools (drills and co) use 18-21V lithium batteries, with the same connectors for all manufacturers, as a result you can buy some tools from one brand, some from others and swap batteries issueless. We do the very opposite, not only some vendors even insert a small "intelligence" in batteries to impede the use with tools not identify as belonging from the same registered buyer, formally "to avoid stealing" etc. Car parts are the same.
A working industrial system need open standards for interoperability and competition, need a universal school systems where most R&D are public and the private sector pick ideas from them. So marketed ideas are good for users, not for some vendors against their customers. We have had essentially that in the past, when all westerns economies was working well. We have abandoned that to fully go financial. Current state of thing where an entry level BEV from China cost ~9000€ in Thailand and the very ~40.000€ in the EU. We still have some high-tech dominance, but not for long and not without automotive and mid-tech mass industries in general. We can only recover ANNIHILATING private-public partnerships, putting back well funded public research based on research and development goals not short-term profits, stating clear to the private sector: you can loose talents for the public or starting to follow the new-old system.
This should been able to fix in a decade or so, if the WWWIII get postponed. In a shorter timeframe I doubt anything better than the current disaster could be done.
Boeing probably has a lot of politicians in their pockets. And it is one of the largest defense companies. And NASA needs at least two for competition. So I don't think it's going to change much. But I do agree that NASA should reward more contracts to SpaceX until Boeing proves its competence.
In the selection for the commercial crew program they chose Boeing's Starliner as the safe bet and SpaceX's Crew Dragon add the alternative from the newcomer.
In future bids SpaceX can seamlessly take the role of the experienced company with track record, and thanks to SpaceX's success there are plenty of startups bidding to take the role of the innovative alternative.
Boeing's position in defence and aerospace is very safe, but to keep their space division running they will have to let that lobbying shine
I get that there is probably a desire to solely blame Boeing for this - but this seems like as much of a Project Management and integration failure on the NASA side, as it does Boeing putting defective hardware/software into orbit.
It shouldn't have been allowed to happen, period.
I get that what I said will not be popular, but this has been the consensus of every previous thread on this topic that I've seen - NASA is sorta playing the role of a systems integrator here, and assumes the liability for defective components from their subcontractors, and has the ultimate supervision authority to decide if something can or cannot fly.
> Boeing removed the Starliner’s autonomous undocking feature from its software. The aerospace manufacturer wants to push a software update to the spacecraft in orbit, but NASA fears it could do more damage.
I'm very far away from NASA internals, but as I've seen them in the "older" days was that just a _finished_ product went into space and they would not allow to go into space with something they _knew_ required updates in-mission to complete the _original_ mission.
So it seems like a management issue on both sides.
I think its dumb they couldn't have both software profiles available and be able to choose manual or auto, but the original mission did not call for autonomous undocking.
> NASA is sorta playing the role of a systems integrator here
That used to be the case. For example with the Space Shuttles that is how it went.
With the Commercial Crew Program the idea is that they find commercial providers who take their astronauts where the astronauts has to be when the astronauts has to be there.
One is like building an experimental aircraft from a set of parts. Where they definietly are the system integration. The other is more like paying for airplane tickets.
To quote from the wikipedia page of the program: "The spacecraft are owned and operated by the vendor, and crew transportation is provided to NASA as a commercial service."
> as the ultimate supervision authority to decide if something can or cannot fly.
No. They have the authority to decide if their crew is safe to fly on it or not. But Boeing doesn't need NASA's permission if they just want to fly the Starliner on their own. (As long as they don't fly it with NASA personal, or close to NASA property.)
It is as if you bought a return ticket to fly to some destination and while en-route onwards you heard a death rattle from the engine. Then you have to decide if you trust the company flying you for the return trip, or you find some other way.
nope.. its symmetrical about a bunch of axes. at most they'd need a 60 degree rotation, not 180 like USB-A. So this standard is precisely 3x better than USB-A
I really want to know how a Starliner software update is going to "brick" the ISS Docking Port. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Jalopnik doesn't really seem like an authoritative source on this, especially since the hyperlink they included when they talk about the "Bricking" issue links to some article about simulated decompression sickness that has nothing to do with the ISS docking port...
How could they possibly screw up so badly that a SW update would brick the thing? Did they forget the logic to just reboot to last good/factory FW in case of failure?
This feels like the story they're telling isn't the real story because that's just basic, basic shit that gets beaten on all the time during development.
You're used to consumer software updates that have been tested over literally billions of updates. And they're brilliant - they mostly just work well enough that you don't expect your phone or computer to get bricked during one. But there are rare cases where something goes wrong and they do get bricked. For something like the first ever software update in space, I'd expect the chances of something catastrophic happening would be much higher.
I'm used to writing bootloaders and firmware update systems for heavy equipment with impatient users who do terrible, terrible things to their hardware. Remote software updates fail all the time, for all sorts of reasons, but the things you need to do to come back up 'no worse than when you started' has been known for years.
If you make any sort of device and your updates can brick the device, you suck at what you do.
A docking system has many, many moving parts under significant stress, and not all of them are tested under the assumption that arbitrary software could drive their positions/torques beyond assumed limits. You can’t factory-reset metal fatigue after it has happened. It’s quite reasonable for NASA to say “this OTA update has to be tested and QA’d to the most rigorous standards.”
My theory, given that this claim makes no sense and the article doesn't cite any sources that say anything like this, that this is just bog standard G/O Media blogspam, with bit of misinformation to increase views.
> Three separate, well-placed sources have confirmed to Ars that the current flight software on board Starliner cannot perform an automated undocking from the space station and entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
The reasons why the current software can't perform this operation when it could during ground testing are supposition though, and it seems Jolopnik ran with that a little bit.
are we? I know that word has "shit" in it, and this is a degredation of things, and so we want to use the new word so sound like we're cool and hip to the new lingo the kids are using, but the term, as coined by Cory Doctorow, refers to when a platform ends up in late stage capitalism and goes off extracting value from users at the cost of their experience. Like Facebook. Is that what's going on here, or is it just a more general things are shitty?
On the ground people need to build a jettison rig that they can install inside the Starliner, launch that rig with SpaceX up to the ISS, install the rig, jettison the Starliner, and finally come home with the SpaceX module. Any other way is certain death and the Russians won't help them.
Wasn't this clarified in the teleconference that it only needs "mission load" upload, some sort of script change rather than software rebuild? The Ars article quoted seem to predate the conference. Isn't this kind of a stale news?
Readit News
People should be in prison.
A small example: most battery-powered hand tools (drills and co) use 18-21V lithium batteries, with the same connectors for all manufacturers, as a result you can buy some tools from one brand, some from others and swap batteries issueless. We do the very opposite, not only some vendors even insert a small "intelligence" in batteries to impede the use with tools not identify as belonging from the same registered buyer, formally "to avoid stealing" etc. Car parts are the same.
A working industrial system need open standards for interoperability and competition, need a universal school systems where most R&D are public and the private sector pick ideas from them. So marketed ideas are good for users, not for some vendors against their customers. We have had essentially that in the past, when all westerns economies was working well. We have abandoned that to fully go financial. Current state of thing where an entry level BEV from China cost ~9000€ in Thailand and the very ~40.000€ in the EU. We still have some high-tech dominance, but not for long and not without automotive and mid-tech mass industries in general. We can only recover ANNIHILATING private-public partnerships, putting back well funded public research based on research and development goals not short-term profits, stating clear to the private sector: you can loose talents for the public or starting to follow the new-old system.
This should been able to fix in a decade or so, if the WWWIII get postponed. In a shorter timeframe I doubt anything better than the current disaster could be done.
In future bids SpaceX can seamlessly take the role of the experienced company with track record, and thanks to SpaceX's success there are plenty of startups bidding to take the role of the innovative alternative.
Boeing's position in defence and aerospace is very safe, but to keep their space division running they will have to let that lobbying shine
The US govt is now relying on just Space X
Human grief in, human relief out.
It shouldn't have been allowed to happen, period.
I get that what I said will not be popular, but this has been the consensus of every previous thread on this topic that I've seen - NASA is sorta playing the role of a systems integrator here, and assumes the liability for defective components from their subcontractors, and has the ultimate supervision authority to decide if something can or cannot fly.
> Boeing removed the Starliner’s autonomous undocking feature from its software. The aerospace manufacturer wants to push a software update to the spacecraft in orbit, but NASA fears it could do more damage.
I'm very far away from NASA internals, but as I've seen them in the "older" days was that just a _finished_ product went into space and they would not allow to go into space with something they _knew_ required updates in-mission to complete the _original_ mission.
So it seems like a management issue on both sides.
I'm sorry, where do you see this impulse? I'm just not following.
That used to be the case. For example with the Space Shuttles that is how it went.
With the Commercial Crew Program the idea is that they find commercial providers who take their astronauts where the astronauts has to be when the astronauts has to be there.
One is like building an experimental aircraft from a set of parts. Where they definietly are the system integration. The other is more like paying for airplane tickets.
To quote from the wikipedia page of the program: "The spacecraft are owned and operated by the vendor, and crew transportation is provided to NASA as a commercial service."
> as the ultimate supervision authority to decide if something can or cannot fly.
No. They have the authority to decide if their crew is safe to fly on it or not. But Boeing doesn't need NASA's permission if they just want to fly the Starliner on their own. (As long as they don't fly it with NASA personal, or close to NASA property.)
It is as if you bought a return ticket to fly to some destination and while en-route onwards you heard a death rattle from the engine. Then you have to decide if you trust the company flying you for the return trip, or you find some other way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Docking_System_S...
And adapters:
> The International Docking Adapter (IDA) converts older Russian APAS-95 docking systems to the International Docking System Standard
Imagine flying all the way and then realizing you forgot your adapter...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Docking_Adapter
Jalopnik doesn't really seem like an authoritative source on this, especially since the hyperlink they included when they talk about the "Bricking" issue links to some article about simulated decompression sickness that has nothing to do with the ISS docking port...
This feels like the story they're telling isn't the real story because that's just basic, basic shit that gets beaten on all the time during development.
If you make any sort of device and your updates can brick the device, you suck at what you do.
> Three separate, well-placed sources have confirmed to Ars that the current flight software on board Starliner cannot perform an automated undocking from the space station and entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
The reasons why the current software can't perform this operation when it could during ground testing are supposition though, and it seems Jolopnik ran with that a little bit.