[HN Gopher] Boeing's starliner docks at ISS after five thrusters...
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Boeing's starliner docks at ISS after five thrusters unexpectedly
shut off
Author : heywire
Score : 75 points
Date : 2024-06-06 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > Starliner's docking has not gone smoothly, the spacecraft
| developed trouble with its reaction control system thrusters
| notfried wrote:
| Will these leak and thrusters issues affect the return trip?
| bell-cot wrote:
| Absolutely. Even if zero additional problems crop up while they
| are at the ISS, the Controllers will need to have fall-back-
| back-back-and-further-back plans on tap, in case of yet more
| failures in the Service Modules' propulsion systems.
| cbsks wrote:
| Not surprisingly, they already have these backup plans. The
| potential for RCS jet failure was known ahead of time and was
| determined to not be a flight safety concern.
|
| There's a bunch of info about it here:
| https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/05/24/nasa-says-boeings-
| star...
| LegitShady wrote:
| It sounds like they only recovered 4/5 thrusters.
| bumby wrote:
| To be clear, I believe there are a total of 28 RCS thrusters,
| 5 of which had issues
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Sounds like they worked through it, so docking was successful. I
| imagine that much like SpaceX in a similar situation, there are
| lessons learned that will be applied to the next iteration.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Generally you actually want 0 "lessons learned" in human
| spaceflight. Test flights especially and unmanned missions have
| a much higher tolerance for error. A bunch of thrusters failing
| with people on board could have been catastrophic and is well
| into the territory of "enormous problems which never should
| have happened".
|
| The astronauts may have to be "rescued" with a different
| capsule returning the departing astronauts to earth.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I agree, zero would be ideal. Maybe I'm just too accustomed
| to the iteration we see all the time when SpaceX equipment
| fails. This is arguably more a traditional space program and
| less of a 'go fast and break things' process.
|
| IIRC, SpaceX also had some sort of glitch when docking with
| the station, on a crewed mission. Related to the thrusters,
| too, if memory serves.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Found this https://www.space.com/spacex-dragon-
| international-space-stat...
|
| Which was a problem, but it was a backup in case of a leak
| that broke, it had 0 effect and it was a cargo mission not
| a people mission. Starliner's failure today did have a
| significant mission effect and had people.
|
| SpaceX had a bunch of rocket landing failures on real
| missions, but that didn't matter because landing was a
| bonus, basically nobody had done that before and everything
| was just fine if a rocket blew up trying to land.
|
| SpaceX has also done a bunch of test launches with new
| vehicles, this also doesn't matter if they fail, they're
| specifically launched to find failures instead of expending
| tons of engineering effort which is more expensive than
| blowing up test rockets.
|
| Those things are quite separate from "there's people on
| board and several thrusters broke requiring unexpected
| manual pilot intervention", this was not expecting or
| allowing for failure by design but a serious anomaly that
| has to be researched how the problems weren't caught in
| human certification.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| SpaceX destroys a lot of hardware, but during almost
| quarter of a century of operations, they had AFAIK just
| one work fatality - a worker was blown off his truck in
| McGregor in 2014.
|
| No doubt they were lucky several times, but so were
| others, and most space institutions have much longer
| fatality lists, especially when adjusted to total flight
| volume.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| Fatalities aren't the whole story.
|
| > The 2023 records, newly disclosed by the Occupational
| Safety and Health Administration, also show that injury
| rates at some SpaceX facilities grew worse than those the
| company had reported in 2022. At its manufacturing-and-
| launch facility in Brownsville, Texas, for instance,
| SpaceX reported 5.9 injuries per 100 workers, surpassing
| its rate of 4.8 injuries in 2022 and topping a space
| industry average of 0.8.
|
| That's 7x the industry average.
|
| Ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-
| news/articles/2024-04-22/exc...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Could it be a reporting issue?
|
| Fatalities certainly aren't the whole story, but they do
| have one "advantage": they cannot be hushed away, at
| least not in the Western world. (In China or Russia,
| well...)
|
| That is why, in an analogical situation, crime and public
| safety of individual countries is often compared using
| murder levels. It is expected that most developed
| countries cannot really suppress/fudge murder statistics,
| even though they can do a lot of shenanigans around
| registration of lesser crime.
|
| I can see a similar situation with individual
| corporations and their diligence when it comes to
| reporting injuries.
| justinclift wrote:
| I'll be _super_ ironic if they have to come back via SpaceX
| capsule. :)
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Ideally you want the iterative lesson learning to wrap up
| before you put the humans inside.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Yeah, that would be ideal. But it seems uncommon. Lots of
| complexity in a spacecraft.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| That's why they're called test pilots. They're not putting
| the general public into spacecraft.
|
| FWIW, like many previous astronauts, both crew members are US
| Navy test pilots. They've literally made a career out of
| solving complex problems and navigating ultra-sticky
| situations.
| perihelions wrote:
| The function of test pilots is to validate things that can
| only be validated by manual flight testing, like aircraft
| handling characteristics--not to risk their lives to do QA.
| latentsea wrote:
| Sometimes the tests aren't green.
| fragmede wrote:
| sometimes in the messy real world, things go wrong even
| when the tests _are_ green.
| b33j0r wrote:
| Hmm. I hear ya, but this isn't what I want test pilots
| spending effort on.
|
| Test pilots are closer to an integration test in software.
| You expect the unit tests to pass green before you expect
| the related integration tests to work.
|
| Multiple failures of maneuvering thrusters is technically a
| mission failure (in the flight plan sense), despite having
| nothing to do with the parameters of the mission, nor
| anything to do with adding humans. Maneuverability is the
| difference between a craft and junk.
|
| I wouldn't find this acceptable in a project I was managing
| or funding. Just sayin! Still impressed as hell.
| fabian2k wrote:
| The reports while it was happening suggested that they were
| almost down to no redundancies for the thrusters. Which would
| have been bad enough to disallow the capsule to approach the
| ISS. They managed to get enough thrusters working to still
| dock, but it seems that this was rather close.
|
| So even though it worked in the end, I would assume that this
| is still a quite serious incident and will require some
| examination.
|
| Also it seems that these problems are not well understood,
| which is not the kind of problem you want to have on manned
| spacecraft:
|
| > Some notes from the post-docking news conference on
| Starliner: Engineers found a fourth helium leak after capture.
| The thruster issues were similar to those observed on OFT-2,
| and are still not fully understood.
|
| https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/1798827111454827003
| leptons wrote:
| >there are lessons learned that will be applied to the next
| iteration.
|
| Maybe that's why there's 20 thrusters instead of 5.
| downrightmike wrote:
| What a joke: An accurate and all encompassing critique of the
| vehicle and the company who made it.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Has SpaceX had any thruster problems when docking with the
| space station?
| willy_k wrote:
| They had an issue with a leaky valve, in a backup system, on
| a cargo mission.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/valves-are-a-
| regular-c...
| gpm wrote:
| Crew Dragon C204 docked with the ISS and returned without
| problem without people. It was suppose to do so again with
| people, but instead it blew itself to smithereens on the
| ground due to a thruster problem.
|
| Which is to say "not exactly (at least that I remember), but
| problems in a similar vein on hardware that did similar
| things".
| perihelions wrote:
| I'm not certain I counted right, but I believe it was eight
| failed thrusters in its first uncrewed test in 2020, and later
| four failed thrusters in the second one, in 2022. (Combining the
| failure count of the larger orbital maneuvering thrusters with
| that of the smaller reaction-control systems).
|
| - _" The NASA source said eight or more thrusters on the service
| module failed at one point and that one thruster never fired at
| all."_
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/nasa-and-boeing-are-...
|
| - _" Two of the 20 main thrusters on the spacecraft 's service
| module, used for orbital maneuvering, failed shortly after
| Starliner separated from its Atlas V rocket. They were not
| recovered during the flight. Two smaller reaction control system
| thrusters also failed during the approach to the space station,
| but they were recovered."_
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/nasas-verdict-on-sta...
| amelius wrote:
| Hurray for the software that managed to work even with the
| failed thrusters.
| bumby wrote:
| Starliner had major software issues from previous uncrewed
| demo launches, including thruster mapping issues, i believe
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| I wonder how this affects the certification.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I bet the actuaries responsible for the astronauts' life
| insurance just bumped the premiums up a few tiers.
| borbulon wrote:
| I think given Boeing's focus on profit over quality and safety
| lately, this really shouldn't come as a surprise.
| impulser_ wrote:
| They should be focused on profit, because they haven't made a
| profit in almost 5 years now and Boeing is a very important
| company to the US. If Boeing ends up going bankrupt, the US
| government will 100% have to bail it out.
| yarg wrote:
| The reason that they're losing money is that nobody trusts
| their planes - because they're badly designed and prone to
| falling out of the sky.
| thsksbd wrote:
| That's inevitable. Management knows they're too big to fail.
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| > As a result, NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore had to assume manual
| control of the crew capsule for a while before it went back into
| its autonomous mode
|
| Is there a video of this? Bet it was nail biting.
|
| Kudos they pulled it off given all that went wrong.
| jakderrida wrote:
| You know you can always rely on a guy named "Butch Wilmore" to
| take control when shit hits the fan.
| HighlandSpring wrote:
| Butch "Space Cowboy" Wilmore
| wmf wrote:
| He trained for hundreds of hours to fly the capsule manually
| and the docking process is excruciatingly slow so it's probably
| not that stressful. Even when everything is working they let
| the astronauts have a little manual control as a treat.
| UberFly wrote:
| I don't know. I pictured it like the landing scene from
| airplane and I'm sticking with it.
| jdsalaro wrote:
| > He trained for hundreds of hours to fly the capsule
| manually and the docking process is excruciatingly slow
|
| _COME ON TARS!_
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| These are the same thrusters that are on Orion [1][2]. (They were
| delivered to Boeing 6 years ago.)
|
| [1] https://www.spacefoundation.org/2018/03/15/aerojet-
| rocketdyn...
|
| [2] https://www.compositesworld.com/news/aerojet-rocketdyne-
| to-p...
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| "If it's Boeing I ain't going"
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