FWIW, a nice comment[1] from forum.nasaspaceflight.com (no affiliation with NASA):
> 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.
> Almost all problems occurred at interfaces between companies (prime vs. sub, customer vs. prime) or between different groups within the same company, where one group misunderstood what another group was doing, or at actual mechanical and electrical interfaces between components designed and built by different groups.
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?
Back when I worked on this hardware/software integration, we often didn't have the hardware to test.
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)
PRINCE-2 and other methodologies used in these kinds of programs make ample provision for doing this - but like all methodologies the benefits only come from proper application. If the program manager is subjected to political pressure from different stakeholders then the processes and approaches that should catch division and misapprehensions may simply not run.
What's amazing to me is that it doesn't seem like Boeing did tests with a fully integrated capsule until after the CFT test was in progress.
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.
Maybe there should not be 300 subcontractors involved in delivery and contracts should stipulated that work cannot be outsourced? The outsourcing of everything is part of the reason no one is ever held accountable.
I wonder if it's possible to avoid sub-teams of a project at this scale, could everyone working on it have a general understanding of the entire system? even with imperfect understanding, individual contributors would cover the gaps for each other.
Are there full-stack engineers? or are the individual domains too complex compared to coding?
From one of the twitter posts cited in the forum post:
> 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.
I don't know if it's supposed to take a rocket scientist to figure out whether Boeing these days has been living up to its 20th century reputation for improved reliability.
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.
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”?
I'm more upset at NASA than Boeing over this for downplaying this issue for months while doing very serious things in the background like hot fire testing. Not transparent at all. You can easily see how public perception thought everything was fine all through July here:
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?
This reads as histrionics. You want an investigation into whether the general public felt the same panic people on the project do? No thanks, I'm alright with letting them get on with it and getting the full picture later.
An investigation into whether NASA's public messaging jived with their internal communications seems like it could be a good idea, since we know previous disasters were in part caused by NASA feeling external pressure to perform even while their engineers were freaking out internally.
> I'm more upset at NASA than Boeing over this for downplaying this issue for months while doing very serious things in the background like hot fire testing. Not transparent at all.
Is "hiding the truth" only a view if the truth is worse than the public think or could you imagine arguing that NASA "hid the truth" that its safer than the public thinks?
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)
I don't understand. What would be the difference if they didn't downplay this? There'd be a massive shitstorm distracting resources at NASA and Boeing from doing their jobs and we wouldn't be any better off. How is that better for anybody?
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.
Curious as to moral in the Boeing division right now. If you designed/built/influenced any part of the design and watching this play out publicly. Leaving astronauts stranded and potentially with a module stuck on the space station.
Do you definitely start looking for a new job? Assume that ultimately nothing will change?
>> Curious as to moral in the Boeing division right now.
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.
Astronauts, first and foremost, want to fly. They have been known to hush up health issues, safety issues, vehicle issues if it gets them closer to flying. I'm guessing Butch and Suni are having the time of their lives watching the surface of the Earth fly by outside the window. They will chomp at the bit to manually fly a Starliner home good valves or no just to show their colleagues how awesome they are.
If you listen to the teleconference, NASA was asked and it really seem to be more that they'll do what they're told; which seemed odd to me. And those conferences have not had either the astronauts or Boeing on; which IMHO is just weird.
Having said that, I suspect the astronauts aren't actually that worried by that thruster issue. They managed to dock it OK (manually).
It's more NASA getting comfortable that they understand the failure.
They've been standing by the process in the statements they've made. I'm sure they're confident they're going back on a Dragon by now so their personal risk is minimal.
Its worth noting that NASA astronauts are gifted, but often more working class than equivalent organisations. I wonder if their humble social status (relatively speaking) makes it easier to coerce them into doing dangerous things?
What's the problem? The vehicle mostly worked. It's like your app shipped but had a spinning cursor issue and users had to manually clear cache. It's an overwhelming success by standards of software industry.
Watch the Starliner crew entering ISS. Williams is very, very, very happy to have survived the ascent. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsURePrNTx0> Does she seem to think that the craft merely had a spinning-cursor issue?
I wonder sometimes whether NASA should lean into the high risk of spaceflight instead of trying to minimize it. If they could get the public to pay attention, their budgets would go up. Highlighting the risk--without exaggerating--would be a good way to get people to care. People love (maybe even crave) drama.
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.
Agreed--my suggestion isn't to take more risk, but to highlight the current very high risk that NASA is already taking. Both Starliner and Dragon have a loss-of-crew risk of at least 1 in 500. That is unbelievably high, and I think NASA could drive interest in the space program if they (appropriately) highlighted that risk.
NASA is a fundamentally political organization. Given that it's political the risk isn't worth it. Risk only happened early in NASA's history (Apollo) because the alternative geopolitical risk (Soviets landing humans on the moon) was so much higher. Once that driving force was gone there was no longer an appetite for risk.
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.
The ISS can tank micrometeorites just fine. They could put a hole straight through the ISS but the station is only pressurized to one atmosphere; the leak would be slow and easy to patch. It wouldn't even be the first time they had a leak..
I assume that depends on the size of the micrometeoroid. Though I suppose any meteoroid large enough to destroy ISS would not be "micro". But maybe not.
It might backfire. Manned space missions are risky and expensive, and the interesting discoveries seem to be coming from unmanned missions. Are there enough microgravity experiments left to justify the risk and expense of the ISS?
> It might backfire. Manned space missions are risky and expensive, and the interesting discoveries seem to be coming from unmanned missions. Are there enough microgravity experiments left to justify the risk and expense of the ISS?
I think NASA loses the funding game if they try to justify themselves based purely on "interesting [scientific] discoveries."
High and low are quantifiable risks. Starliner risk is a divide by zero error NaN instead of a value.
. . . 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 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.
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.
It's an incredibly new thing. The total number of manned space launches ever is less than the number of commercial flights that take off in 15 minutes.
> "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.
Why is NASA covering for Boeing? Jettison that shit and let it crash into the ocean as a burnt hunk as their infinite hemming and hawing indicates is apparently overwhelmingly likely to happen.
Can you guarantee that hitting the "undock and re-enter" button right now would result in Starliner safely leaving the ISS and then clearing its orbit?
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.
At some level by covering or Boeing they are covering for themselves. They were the ones putting the astronauts on it, after all.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
They removed the autonomous flying part for this mission, so they can't jettison it without a human inside. They are supposedly working on adding that feature back in. It also cannot be attached to the canada arm so they can't even clear it away from the port its using.
The whole thing speaks to complete mismanagement on every level. That they still haven't made any kind of decision 3 months in is absolutely laughable.
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.
If anyone here's familiar with how these decisions are made, I'm curious about why NASA says they need another week to choose their path forward. Given that we're already over two months into a week-long mission, what information don't they have that they would have in another week?
>Given that we're already over two months into a week-long mission, what information don't they have that they would have in another week?
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.
That comment confuses me slightly. NASA always has the ability to take over the controls of a spacecraft operating around the ISS, even remotely by command from the ISS itself. The software should certainly be able to handle this.
Well, they said they would do more modelling. Since they've definitely already done a pile of modelling, the remaining modelling is probably running down a list of alternate assumptions and approaches in whatever modelling system they've been using. Most likely they've already gone ahead modeled out all of their most likely and high confidence assumptions and approaches. Likely the modelling results haven't quite converged, leading them to be unsure.
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.
NASA is paying SpaceX something like $200 million per launch. They won’t want to do that unless they have to. And if they did they still need to figure out what to do with Starliner. If they pay SpaceX and then later manage to get Starliner to work then that’s a lot of money down the drain.
What does this sort of modeling look like? I guess I kind of naively assumed there were people gathering information on the current state, collecting different ways to get the astronauts back with detailed cost/benefit, quantification of risk, etc. and then some executive was collecting this to make a decision.
I mean I'm sure that's still happening to some degree but this process of modeling sounds a lot more formal.
> 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).
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".
Modeling is irrelevant when you don't know the cause of the failures or even have an idea. 5 thrusters failed and 4 came back and apparently they don't know why in either case.
Well, unlike in web software, very real people could die if they screw up, and they aren't exactly pressed for time right now, so what's wrong with being careful?
I think for part of your question (why do they specifically say a week), the length isn't all that meaningful. As in, if they want to more time to make a decision, they'll just announce another week's delay.
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 intriguing to me that they seem to be prioritizing information collection to determine whether Starliner is viable, as opposed to definitively announce a return via SpaceX and making preparations for that.
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.
They may still be chasing down some loose ends. While additional time allows for some more models and theories, I think it becomes exponentially less likely that it will alter the safe course of action.
If the system is so complex that an extra week does yield some major new insights, that’s way too complex to use.
I believe the article contains the answer to your question. It says "engineers will attempt to model the behavior of the valve with the bulging Teflon seal over the next week and its effects on thruster performance."
Boeing merged with Lockheed/Martin when L/M was in serious trouble and rumors say it was pushed by the DOD because of all the L/M defense contracts involved. This then lead to the worst parts of L/M (management over engineering) gaining a foothold at Boeing (Engineering over Management).
The rest is a long, slow, decline into Boeing being what L/M was when they needed to be rescued.
I thought the real damage of management over engineering was done when they merged with McDonnell Douglas, and it was the MDD managers who got put into all the cushy higher level jobs?
I think the key is to have leaders that have passion for the product and aren’t just interested in making profits and increasing stock price.
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.
It's an obvious conclusion at this point but there's a lot of pressure to decide otherwise because of the financial and political stakes. The core issue is that NASA and Boeing know this and don't want to sign off on this. But they also don't want to sign of on the failure of the mission just yet; having signed off on the launch already. So, they are a bit stuck here.
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.
Yeah, and the fact that is gone on so long without them throwing a bunch of shit into Starliner and sending it back down with a whole lot of telemetry shows just how much clothing the emperor doesn't have. If NASA and the rest of the USA had an Engineering Culture, it would be a forgone conclusion that if the experiment went sideways you'd figure it out and continue on.
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.
Readit News
> 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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_angular_measurement
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.
> "Spend some time with the other team"
How about design documents? Is that truly a lost art among the latter-day geeks?
Are there full-stack engineers? or are the individual domains too complex compared to coding?
Dead Comment
> 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.
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.
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...
As long as the paychecks don't bounce they're probably more worried about their individual KPI than the actual results.
Dead Comment
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."
. . . 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
> 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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".
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.
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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.
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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.