[HN Gopher] NASA acknowledges it cannot quantify risk of Starlin...
___________________________________________________________________
NASA acknowledges it cannot quantify risk of Starliner propulsion
issues
Author : geerlingguy
Score : 285 points
Date : 2024-08-18 20:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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?
| alsodumb wrote:
| They and their partners (Boeing) are running more tests as we
| speak - probably expecting more data that could answer some
| questions.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| > or even have an idea.
|
| 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.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| If they know what is/was wrong, they can model what happens
| if the problem reoccurs even if they don't know why it
| occurred, disappeared, or might reoccur.
|
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think they're just being great manager-engineers just as
| they should be. The root-ish cause so far determined is
| Teflon seal soaking in rocket fuel and bulging,
| constricting flow. Downstream it is creating improper
| oxidizer/fuel ratio and excess heat at thrusters which is
| triggering alarm and automatic shutdown. These were all
| explained in plain and accessible English in NASA press
| conferences and I've watched it online.
|
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They're running with the theory of it being the teflon
| seals, but IIRC the problem is that it doesn't explain
| why the thrusters appeared to be operating relatively
| normally in a test at the station. The seal deformation
| should be permanent, in which case the thrusters
| shouldn't have recovered on their own, meaning that they
| might not have caught the real issue.
|
| That's what's making the risk difficult to quantify.
| TMWNN wrote:
| > 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".
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I hadn't thought of a political angle for this, but that
| does make sense. Announcing "Elon saves NASA" certainly
| helps the GOP more.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| It clearly helps SpaceX, Musk mostly indirectly, and GOP
| not at all.
| booi wrote:
| Elon is the maga crowd's newest talking head so it helps
| the GOP at least a little.
| Covzire wrote:
| Why does this kind of partisan bickering only ever go one
| way on HN? Why does every decision have to be a careful
| calculus when one political party instead of another
| might get credit? Do people not realize how blatantly
| biased and partisan they sound?
| kcplate wrote:
| It's my opinion that you have been unfairly downvoted on
| this comment. This was a reasonable and astute analysis,
| but I suspect peoples political allegiances and Musk
| opinions create knee jerk downvote reactions on here. Your
| comment is probably a casualty of that.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Dead austronauts would hurt Biden/Harris 10000x more.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think the likely delayed return in February is just
| because NASA want to make this seem as routine as possible,
| so will have them come back as part of a planned Dragon
| trip rather than scrambling an unnecessary and expensive
| unplanned one sooner that screams "rescue" and "we messed
| up".
| mr_toad wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| Dead astronauts are way more expensive.
| XorNot wrote:
| The cost isn't the issue here: the problem is you still
| have to undock and dispose of the capsule without it
| running back into the station.
| detaro wrote:
| The current outlined plan does not require an extra SpaceX
| launch, so that argument doesn't make sense.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| 200 millions usd for NASA is relatively small no ??? still
| a lot of money yes but for space exploration project ????
| probably more than enough people (taxpayer) happy to pay
| that
| 7952 wrote:
| At this point they are probably not going to succeed in
| certification. It is a damage limitation exercise. They
| can...
|
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| 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."
| TMWNN wrote:
| >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.
| verzali wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| Apparently not.[1] Although better sources for this are
| needed.
|
| [1] https://simpleflying.com/boeing-starliner-undocking-
| software...
| TMWNN wrote:
| Eric Berger-- _Ars Technica_ reporter who wrote the
| article SimpleFlying cited--initially reported that
| Starliner needs a software update that will take four
| weeks, and NASA (I believe Ken Bowersox) worded it in the
| penultimate media event as reverting back to the 2022
| software, but we now understand from context that in this
| case that means reverting to the 2022 parameters; NASA
| was very specific about the software itself not having
| changed.
|
| The SLS[1] stans (as Berger described on Twitter) are now
| focusing on how parameter change != software update thus
| Berger was wrong all along. It'd be one thing if said
| changes took a day or two to do. But assuming that it is
| the four weeks Berger reported, that absolutely means
| that it is the same thing as "software needs
| replacing"/"functionality was removed". To the client,
| NASA in this case, it doesn't matter whether the weeks to
| implement a new feature is (one week of uploading
| parameters and three weeks to validate said parameters),
| or (3.5 weeks of uploading new software and 0.5 weeks of
| validating said new software). The end result is needing
| four weeks.
|
| [1] Space Launch System, intended to return the US to the
| moon. Cost: $24 billion and rising fast
| thanksgiving wrote:
| I am not a lawyer or a rocket scientist but the fact that
| at least ONE defect went undetected/unreported/mis
| categorized/something at launch makes me think now
| everything else that Boeing did here is suspect as well and
| you can't take Boeing for its word at all anymore.
|
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They can take control over the spacecraft, the issue seems
| to be that the software is configured to expect crew
| control to be available. So, say Starliner detects an
| anomaly at some point, it will disable automatic control
| and expect crew to take over manual controls. This might
| cause a problem when returning without crew, even if they
| might be able to override that remotely.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| The software currently loaded in Starliner is for manual
| flight. There is a different package that needs to be
| loaded (& verified) for autonomous flight, which seems to
| be what they are planning to do.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| This is not entirely correct, after all, Starliner was
| attempting to dock autonomously before the thruster
| issues hit near the station. The software is configured
| for autonomous undock, but not autonomous fault handling
| (since if a crew is available, they're better for fault
| handling). The software update is to enable the
| autonomous fault handling that is needed when a crew is
| not available.
|
| "Essentially, what we're asking the team is to go back
| two years in time and resurrect the software parameters
| that are required to give automatic responses to
| breakouts near the ISS should we have a problem in close
| to ISS, which the software now allows them to do
| manually," Stich said. "The team is always updating these
| mission data loads as different things change."
|
| - https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/nasa-official-
| acknowle...
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| That doesn't sound good! So the current "autonomous"
| capability isn't fully autonomous, and is less capable
| (at least in this near-ISS maneuvering regard) than what
| they had 2 years ago?!
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I mean, it makes sense that if you have a crew onboard,
| you want to make the crew handle the cases when the
| software thinks something is wrong. Similar to how plane
| autopilots will disengage for many kinds of faults.
|
| If you don't have crew onboard, you don't have any choice
| but to rely on the software's judgement.
|
| I think the big problem is that the changeover is going
| to take several weeks, since Starliner should be able to
| fallback to flying autonomously if the crew happens to
| become incapacitated for some reason. The changeover
| should've just been a matter of sending a command from
| the ground or via a relay satellite.
| bigln wrote:
| 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?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| baggachipz wrote:
| An additional week ensures they stay compliant with their rich
| tradition: a time estimate being off by an order of magnitude.
| TheCondor wrote:
| 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.
| omoikane wrote:
| 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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?
| charlie0 wrote:
| You certainly can't snitch, we saw what happened with that one
| guy who tried it.
| skyfaller wrote:
| Two Boeing whistleblowers:
| https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02/1248693512/boeing-
| whistleblow...
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| We should concede that its probably hard to do one's job
| properly, if one "has" to take on the second job of
| organizing a gangstalking crew or assassins.
|
| How can we fault them for improperly leading Boeing
| workforce with these extra tasks? /s
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| 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.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| NASA has strong military roots and astronauts used to as
| well; the "do what they're told" fits that's motiff.
| alwa wrote:
| I mean also they seem smart enough to have some
| intellectual and epistemological modesty. If I'm the guy
| or woman floating around in space, I have to imagine that
| the collective brainpower on the ground is better-
| informed to make that judgment than I am.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Two issues with that approach:
|
| 1 - do they have the right incentives, is there colossal
| pressure to save face from Boeing? Politics? This
| happened before
|
| 2 - lack of accountability - this is not a question of
| property that can be compensated if they are wrong. they
| can't die instead of you. Your family expects to see you
| again, and you are responsible. There in no prize for
| being 'Dead right'
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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._
|
| 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.
| bigln wrote:
| Do you have any proof that NASA is making decisions to
| avoid making republicans look good or is that good old-
| fashioned biased editorializing?
|
| Please don't lower the value of conversation on HN with
| tacit politicizing like that, thank you.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Proof? No. But higher echelons in NASA are political
| creatures by necessity. You can bet that the coming
| election is factoring into their behavior.
| TMWNN wrote:
| > Having said that, I suspect the astronauts aren't
| actually that worried by that thruster issue. They managed
| to dock it OK (manually).
|
| Watch the Starliner crew entering ISS. Williams is very,
| very, very happy to have survived the ascent.
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsURePrNTx0>
| Tepix wrote:
| That or she's just happy to be back in space for the 3rd
| time. I know i would be. That and i'd be thrilled to get
| to spend 9 months on the ISS instead of two weeks.
| TMWNN wrote:
| > That and i'd be thrilled to get to spend 9 months on
| the ISS instead of two weeks.
|
| Yes, flying in space is cool. No, most people don't want
| to do this indefinitely. Astronauts retire all the time
| even when they are 100% guaranteed more flight time if
| they didn't retire; a whole bunch did that in the 1960s
| and 1970s (some, like Frank Borman, 100% guaranteed to
| walk on the moon), and more during the shuttle era.
|
| It's one thing to have a mission extended by a day, as
| happened to the shuttle routinely because of bad weather
| at the landing site. Skylab 4's mission I believe got
| extended by 28 days, but that was a known possibility
| before launch. To have an eight-day mission be possibly
| extended to _eight months_ is in no way shape or form OK.
|
| Wilmore is going to miss his 30th wedding anniversary and
| other family events
| <https://www.wvlt.tv/2024/08/09/family-reacts-tennessee-
| astro...>. Do you really think he is thrilled by that?
| Really?
| krisoft wrote:
| > Williams is very, very, very happy to have survived the
| ascent
|
| That is quite a bit of projection. I see that Williams is
| happy. I give you that. But what gives you the idea that
| she is happy "to have survived the ascent" as opposed to
| "happy to see her colleagues" or "happy to be in
| microgravity" or "happy to be back at the ISS"?
| yborg wrote:
| If the crew publicly suggest they would rather not join
| their Columbia forebears on the list of incinerated
| spacefaring heroes their careers at NASA (and opportunities
| afterward at Boeing or another contractor) would be over.
| And until the engineering decision is made there is no need
| to take that risk now.
| viraptor wrote:
| If they're are worried for their lives, then a career at
| Boeing may not be that important. They're extremely
| skilled engineers/scientists. It's unlikely they'd have
| issues finding serious work.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| But few opportunities to go to space
| AdamN wrote:
| Based solely on age this is probably their last hurrah in
| space
| jfoster wrote:
| Really?
|
| They're both about 60. Since they're both fit enough to
| be astronauts, I think we can say their life expectancy
| should be at least 85. Perhaps substantially longer with
| some medical advancements or age reversal.
|
| Look at what SpaceX is working on these days (Starship),
| consider that AI & robotics will likely accelerate
| progress, and I would say that you can definitely expect
| affordable and perhaps even relatively comfortable space
| travel within their lifetimes.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I've no doubt that the astronauts are involved in the
| decision making. They are highly intelligent and highly
| trained individuals. They are unequivocally part of a team
| that also includes hundreds of highly skilled people on the
| ground. This is quite literally their job. Talking about
| all of this publicly is not their job. At least, not right
| now.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| basementcat wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly:_NASA_and_the_Crisis.
| ..
| lesuorac wrote:
| I dunno, they cover up health issues and etc _to get into
| space_. They're in space now, might as well drag it out as
| long as they can.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > health issues, safety issues, vehicle issues if it gets
| them closer to flying
|
| 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.
| Intralexical wrote:
| They're also perfectly eager to cuss out bureaucrats who
| get them killed by forcing them to fly known faulty
| vehicles. > 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27#Tile_damage
|
| 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.
| fergie wrote:
| 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?
| alemanek wrote:
| IMO it is probably more that people that work their entire
| lives to be astronauts and then wait years, sometimes
| decades, to get a flight slot are not the type to be risk
| averse. Lots of them were test pilots as well. So, these
| types of folks are naturally risk takers and I am sure have
| full trust in their supporting teams.
|
| I doubt they need to be coerced into doing dangerous
| things. All space flight is inherently risky.
| axus wrote:
| It's probably cooler to fly back on a different vehicle
| instead of re-using the same one.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| TMWNN wrote:
| 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?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Yeah?
| yardstick wrote:
| I interpreted it as she was very happy to have completed
| the first manned mission on a new spacecraft type
| bigln wrote:
| Maybe not everything is just like apps all the time.
| kloop wrote:
| You can treat spaceflight like software and work out the
| bugs by trial and error. Lord knows spacex did.
|
| You just can't put people on the vessel while you're doing
| that part
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| The software industry literally has no standards.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Software isn't an industry. NASA has amazing processes to
| diagram software before a line of code is written.
| katzinsky wrote:
| >Curious as to moral in the Boeing division right now.
|
| As long as the paychecks don't bounce they're probably more
| worried about their individual KPI than the actual results.
| bamboozled wrote:
| *morale
| the_real_cher wrote:
| How is Boeing so consistently terrible nowadays?
|
| Theyre going to kill people at some point.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> They already did with the 2 737 Max crashes.
| zie wrote:
| They put business people in charge with the last merger,
| instead of people with technical backgrounds.
|
| As for killing people, they have already done that with the 737
| Max.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Insane. MBAs are a menace
| Spartan-S63 wrote:
| A professional management class is a menace. Managers with
| experience in the domain they're managing are key.
| Engineers-evolved-into-managers should lead engineering
| firms, etc. If you don't understand what your underlying
| business is, you're doomed to fail. Likewise, businesses
| should be predicated on selling products, not on boosting
| stock prices. There are at least two very wrong things: the
| Jack Welch-ification of companies, and professional MBAs.
| booi wrote:
| case in point, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su. Both I think are
| excellent run engineering tech firms that would be ruined
| by an MBA. See Intel as an example..
| Yeul wrote:
| They didn't have a choice. When Airbus developed into
| feasible competition Boeing suddenly had to start making
| money.
|
| The aviation industry wants cheap, fuel economic and reliable
| "air busses". A brilliant name indeed.
| Intralexical wrote:
| > The aviation industry wants cheap, fuel economic and
| reliable "air busses". A brilliant name indeed.
|
| Ah, so that's what went wrong with the Bombardier CSeries.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| "How is Boeing so consistently terrible nowadays?"
|
| They are a publicly traded corporation. The enshittification is
| inevitable.
|
| They already killed a few hundred people.
| every wrote:
| Bean counters are notoriously poor engineers...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| But they're great at financially justifying and ordering hits
| on whistleblowers.
| kondro wrote:
| Aren't there a couple of unalive whistleblowers?
| lyu07282 wrote:
| afaik 2 so far as we know, John Barnett from "suicide" and
| Joshua Dean from "illness".
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| 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.
| bradknowles wrote:
| 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?
|
| Or did that happen twice?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| I think his post is correct, except that he unfortunately
| got M-D confused with L-M and is probably outside the edit
| window now.
| Vecr wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Boeing did not merge with Lockheed Martin. In
| this alternate history was it because of the F-35 contract?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| ULA (Boeing and Lockheed's spaceflight division) is a joint
| venture between Boeing and Lockheed. Maybe they're
| referring to that?
| _djo_ wrote:
| I think they're confusing Lockheed Martin with McDonnell
| Douglas.
| Sabinus wrote:
| At some stage capitalism/free market needs to happen to those
| companies. If they can't perform they should die and the
| military contracts moved on.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| 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.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Theyre going to kill people at some point.
|
| 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.
| don-code wrote:
| I'm somewhat surprised that, after the SpaceX / Boring Company
| "rescue submarine" offer a few years ago, Elon Musk hasn't
| personally suggested (over X, of course) that SpaceX send up
| another Dragon inside of some compressed timeframe. I'm assuming
| there must be some other limitations at play - maybe one can't be
| readied that fast, or there's some other regulatory reason?
| creer wrote:
| Isn't SpaceX already scheduled with the next vehicle there?
| With likely enough space on it and no rush on the space
| station? SpaceX is already next, already in the news as the
| safe solution.
| gpm wrote:
| As the article mentions, but is discussed in more detail in
| another article [0], the alternative that is being considered
| (and that SpaceX was already paid $266,678 to study, though
| that contract was not necessarily awarded because of _this_
| situation where it might become necessary) is bringing them
| home on the dragon already up there.
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/yes-nasa-really-
| could-...
| nordsieck wrote:
| > the alternative that is being considered (and that SpaceX
| was already paid $266,678 to study, though that contract was
| not necessarily awarded because of this situation where it
| might become necessary) is bringing them home on the dragon
| already up there.
|
| 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.
| bigiain wrote:
| Just as likely, Elon Musk (dead at 52) posts saying the Boeing
| astronauts can go fuck themselves.
| negative_zero wrote:
| The limitation is both ISS scheduling (it's very busy now and
| has been for a while) and number of available docking ports.
|
| 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).
| dotnet00 wrote:
| As others have mentioned, he hasn't needed to suggest it
| because that's the official alternative anyway.
|
| 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).
| bottlepalm wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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?
| ggm wrote:
| 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)
| TMWNN wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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/spac
| e/comments/1ekicol/not_stranded_...>), "stuck" definitely does.
| burnished wrote:
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| Yeul wrote:
| NASA is funded with public money they should feel pressure
| to perform.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Feeling pressure to perform to the extent of tryimg to
| cover up or ignore serious safety issues raised by
| engineers is how you get people dying live on TV.
|
| That is obviously a lot worse than a delay as far as the
| opinion of the public goes.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Feeling pressure doesn't mean giving into that pressure.
| It's not as though they have a responsibility to the
| public to be reckless; quite the contrary.
| GenerWork wrote:
| It's sad that you're being downvoted. They absolutely
| should feel pressure to perform as a taxpayer funded
| entity.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They're being downvoted because they're intentionally
| misreading what "pressured to perform" means in this
| context.
|
| Both space shuttle disasters occurred because NASA was
| under pressure to 'perform' in the sense that they were
| under pressure to increase launch rate and cut costs to
| the extent that safety concerns were overlooked.
| Potentially serious issues were overlooked in favor of
| just flying.
|
| Similarly, the concern here is that NASA management felt
| pressured to allow Boeing to put the lives of crew at
| risk despite serious safety concerns from engineers.
| While they would've lucked out in this case since they
| got to the ISS and have alternate ways to come back, if
| that turned out to be the case, it'd raise serious
| additional concerns for NASA's management of other Boeing
| programs (see: SLS and Orion).
|
| As a taxpayer funded entity, NASA should feel pressured
| to perform in that they should feel pressured to progress
| their mission as efficiently as possible. This means
| taking the time to properly weigh safety risks, as a crew
| vehicle exploding due to known problems is a waste of
| taxpayer funds.
| rbanffy wrote:
| As the issues tend to build up at contractor interfaces,
| I would favor NASA to do more vertical integration, but,
| then, it'd need more funding, which won't happen if
| contractors such as Boeing and their own subcontractors
| don't drop the ball so much and if the press doesn't
| blame NASA for those.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The problem with that is historically NASA has used
| contractors to manufacture if not also design virtually
| all of their hardware. They don't have the experience to
| do it all on their own.
| rbanffy wrote:
| NASA wouldn't need to be fully vertical, but it would be
| wise to have as few nested contractor interfaces as
| possible. This would make it have more responsibilities
| in integration of components from multiple vendors, but
| at least they wouldn't be shielded from issues and would
| be able to see them as soon as possible.
|
| Another important thing is that their jobs should be
| protected from political interference, so that nobody
| feels compelled to not speak up.
| Sakos wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| >What would be the difference if they didn't downplay this?
|
| More confidence in NASA's future statements they make to the
| public.
| Sakos wrote:
| And confidence would solve the Starliner problem? Oh come
| on. NASA can't tell the truth because, you know, just look
| at the state of social media and the news today. I wouldn't
| want to tell anybody on HN the truth, much less your
| average CNN or Fox reader/viewer. You want them to tell the
| truth? Stop going on idiotic witch hunts first.
|
| 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.
| lokar wrote:
| You can rarely quantify the risk of complex systems. You should
| instead attempt to bound the risk. This often helps guide your
| next steps: how can you improve the bounds?
| goku12 wrote:
| Quantification of reliability and risk of entire systems like
| spacecrafts is a real activity in aerospace engineering
| (probably in other safety critical fields too). They take the
| reliability figures of every single component based on
| experience, and use them to progressively calculate the
| reliability up to subsystem and full system levels. From this,
| they can assess the probabilistic risk involved.
|
| 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...
| mncharity wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2...
| fransje26 wrote:
| 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.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| _> 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?
| sgt101 wrote:
| 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.
| whoitwas wrote:
| Yeah. Where are the integration tests? As a total outsider
| reading headlines, I would assume there's minimal testing
| framework and sparse QA.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 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.
| chgs wrote:
| The point of outsourcing is because people don't want to be
| held accountable.
|
| Stopping outsourcing doesn't change the fundamental problem
| of accountability, people just find different ways to avoid
| it.
| stackghost wrote:
| >The point of outsourcing is because people don't want to
| be held accountable.
|
| 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.
| soperj wrote:
| > 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.
|
| And, those contracts end up being the most wasteful and
| expensive of all.
| limit499karma wrote:
| The issue is design and development methodology.
|
| > "Spend some time with the other team"
|
| How about design documents? Is that truly a lost art among
| the latter-day geeks?
| hanniabu wrote:
| Everybody hates reading documentation
| seb1204 wrote:
| I read it but there is less and less available.
| Presentation and video recordings are more common but
| useless for the self study and search of information.
| Writing good documentation and instructions is hard. I
| try it a lot.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I'm sure that these groups are producing specifications,
| and I'm sure those specifications are being followed to the
| letter (and perhaps even being validated as such). The
| problem is that the spec only ever contains about 80% of
| reality, with the rest being lost either to implicit
| assumptions made by the writer, or to requirements that the
| implementer couldn't possibly hit and can't know
| (unilaterally) how to trade into something more realistic.
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's also why we could not recreate a Saturn-V today. We
| have the specs, but we don't have the knowledge and
| skills of the people who actually built them.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Even if you have the specs, you do not know if there was
| some important variable that was not referenced in the
| specs, and then you need a billion dollar research
| project to figure out what was missing from the original
| spec. Reference: FOGBANK.
| https://www.twz.com/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-
| use...
| whatshisface wrote:
| Another issue is that the same types of nuts and bolts,
| resistors, and other miscellanea are not manufactured
| today.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I tried and tried to get two teams who were working on
| critical-but-independently-developed systems to put
| together an ICD. Team 2 says "no problem!" and comes back
| with a document 2 weeks later. Team 1 says "this proposed
| interface is terrible, here's a much better way to do it".
| Team 2 replies "oh yeah that's a nice interface but too
| late the interface in the ICD is the one we built two
| months ago can't change it now"
| 3o495u wrote:
| Yes
|
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| They should double the teams. For every interface, they
| should add a team who's sole job it is to design and test
| that interface.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| As labor is a driving cost, wouldn't that almost double the
| price? They are already uncompetitive in price with spaceX
| right? I'm not suggesting that profits be valued over
| lives, but they are clearly doing something wrong beyond
| having too few employees.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Stock market goes up when we get rid of more employees,
| that's all that matters...
|
| Until the moment it doesn't.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| But by that time, the management whose quarterly or
| yearly bonuses drove the decision have moved on to bring
| their skills at increasing stock value to some other
| company (or retired).
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Maybe you are right. Being a public company is a net
| negative for space.
| fn-mote wrote:
| I am pretty sure you should have marked this comment /s.
|
| The Mythical Man Month surely applies.
| AdamN wrote:
| We need another team to determine when the Mythical Man
| Month applies or not
|
| /s
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Can I be on the team that ignores the result?
| withinboredom wrote:
| I think we're on that team by default.
| buildsjets wrote:
| It surely does not.
|
| 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.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| I had a relative who spent years as a systems integration
| engineer at Boeing. This was his job basically.
| nordsieck wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| > _with many of the systems in the doghouse missing and the
| insulation taken off._
|
| 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.
| acomjean wrote:
| 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)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_angular_measurement
| azernik wrote:
| This jibes with the way people compare SpaceX and "old
| space" development in industry sources I follow:
|
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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?
| _moof wrote:
| This isn't really possible on a project like this. There
| are just too many specialties, and you need folks who have
| deep expertise in each one. Just off the top of my head
| there's structures, mechanisms, fluids, propulsion,
| avionics, dynamics, software, integration, systems,
| instrumentation, test, operations, human factors, and
| manufacturing, and each one of those has sub-specialties.
| In avionics for example you've got RF and power (among
| others); in software there's embedded, flight, ground, and
| interfaces (again, among others). There's a chief engineer
| whose job it is to oversee the project but they will be
| relying on the expertise of the individual teams, and each
| team has to work closely with and lean on their partner
| teams. Sometimes you'll have people who are cross-trained -
| I have experience in avionics, software, and ops - but
| that's not typical, and it doesn't take much to feel spread
| thin (I certainly do).
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's like people expect NASA to be infallible.
| pdonis wrote:
| No, people look at what NASA was able to accomplish during
| the 1960s and compare it to now, and wonder how the level
| of competence can be so drastically lower now vs. then.
| NASA was not infallible during the 1960s, but the level of
| engineering competence was much higher.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Well my first thought to answer that question is -- how
| do the funding levels compare between now and then?
| moffkalast wrote:
| > (no affiliation with NASA)
|
| 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?
| allenrb wrote:
| From NSF's "about us" page:
|
| NSF is not affiliated with and does not represent the
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA
| initials are used with NASA's permission.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| > no affiliation with 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"?
| tersers wrote:
| I don't think they're coming down until after election day. All
| the money and time devoted to this cannot result in any further
| failure. It's an easy narrative for the GOP to spin with
| themselves as the only party that can beat China in the new space
| race over the failures the Biden/Harris administration, even if
| they're only at arms length through NASA.
| sitkack wrote:
| I don't think anyone should return on Starliner.
|
| Use Dragon, Starliner can be a test.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| weinzierl wrote:
| The trade-off here is: When does it become more embarrassing to
| bring them home in the competitor's vehicle than to extend the
| mission further.
|
| 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.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Today everything is noncommittal trial and error it seems... oh
| sorry, I think I've spelled "agile" wrong...
| loudmax wrote:
| A surplus of agility is the last of Boeing's problems.
| steve1977 wrote:
| In my experience, agile methodologies do not have a a
| strong correlation to agility.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Boeing (especially Boeing ITDA) did indeed have a run-in
| with Agile SAFE. It went predictably.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Boeing's bean counter management seem more concerned
| about cost saving than quality.
|
| https://www.industryweek.com/supply-
| chain/article/22027840/b...
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Oh yes. I worked at Boeing until recently.
| steve1977 wrote:
| "a waterfall pig with agile lipstick"
| lucianbr wrote:
| What does this have to do with anything? Are NASA or Boeing
| using Agile for any project related to this mission?
| cabbageicefruit wrote:
| No. Not at all. SpaceX is much closer to "agile" than
| Boeing or NASA, and I don't think their success is a strike
| against agile.
|
| 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
| steve1977 wrote:
| My beef is with selling incompetence to plan as agile...
| not with agile done properly (which is rare).
| rbanffy wrote:
| Quite the opposite. Agile is about testing ALL THE TIME and
| building incrementally. They have flown humans right after a
| single successful cargo mission. Did they have no further
| anomalies in the second mission? I seriously doubt it. Now
| they have a bunch of issues on the RCS and reentry rockets
| that can't possibly be entirely new (unless someone changed
| something and people have flown an untested critical
| component). Worse for Boeing, those components are procured
| from a third party which now they must be questioning how
| much QA went into them.
| boredpudding wrote:
| Based on previous articles[1], it's either return them on
| Starliner or bring them home as part of the SpaceX Crew-9
| mission[2].
|
| 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/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-9
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Or using Russian Soyuz craft. Not politically viable, but a
| choice nonetheless
| fernandopj wrote:
| I thought the 24 September date was for them to return using
| that Dragon capsule within days, was it not? They would have
| to send two less people on Crew 9 mission, then wait the
| entire mission duration to return? That's so odd.
|
| 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.
| gangstead wrote:
| That is the date they will send up a half full Dragon for
| Crew 9 Mission, which will return home in February. They
| aren't changing its return date, just how many people it
| launches with. Crew 9 can't take off until there is a free
| docking port so Starliner needs to be gone (crewed or not)
| before Dragon can launch (with 2 or 4 people depending on
| how Starliner leaves).
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Does that mean SpaceX needs to wait for Starliner to be
| gone before trying anything? What happens if Starliner
| somehow messes up more? God I can't fathom...
| fernandopj wrote:
| IIRC the Crew 9 mission was postponed for exactly this
| reason. At some point, Starliner needs to be kicked out
| because they need the docking space. They can't keep
| postponing ISS missions as they please.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| What's really scary is what if Starliner fucks ISS up
| during the undocking process...
| gangstead wrote:
| Exactly right. If a bunch of thrusters don't fire up
| again you now have a huge piece of debris at risk of
| colliding with the ISS. This probably gives NASA the most
| pause before doing an unmanned Starliner exit. Having
| people on board Starliner might be able to recover from
| more thruster problems but then there'd also be people on
| a death trap. So an unmanned Starliner might be risking
| as much life as a manned Starliner and NASA has no idea
| how much.
|
| As for your earlier question: yes. Starliner has to leave
| before Crew 9 can dock. And their rules are it won't
| launch Crew 9 until there is a port for it to dock to.
|
| On the ISS there are 4 ports on the Russian side only
| compatible with the Soyuz / Progress ships and 4 for the
| US side. 2 are "Common Berthing Mechanism" (CBD) used by
| Cygnus cargo modules (and the original Dragon 1) and 2
| are "International Docking System Standard" (IDSS) used
| by newer Dragon 2, Starliner, "and future" vehicles.
|
| The result is that before a second Dragon can launch
| Starliner must leave. If Butch and Suni aren't on it then
| Crew 9 arrives with 2 empty seats and 2 new space suits.
| The contingency exit plan in between Starliner leaving
| and Crew 9 arriving is for Butch and Suni to lay on the
| floor of Crew 8 Dragon without pressure suits below the 4
| Dragon crew members (their Starliner suits can't plug
| into Dragon's systems).
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Man this really doesn't look good. I wonder if they have
| to eventually use the Russian option.
| nimbius wrote:
| whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union,
| and it doesnt happen to China, but its happened _twice_ to the
| US now.
|
| 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?
| practicemaths wrote:
| Maybe China and Russia are less risk averse? Americans hate
| dead astronauts.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The US has far more deaths per flight than any other
| nation. There have been 19 astronauts that have died during
| spaceflight. [1] 14 of them have been American, with the US
| and USSR/Russia having a comparable number of total
| launches. The USSR/Russia's most recent fatality was in
| 1971.
|
| 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...
| practicemaths wrote:
| When is the last time that China or Russia tried testing
| an entirely new launch vehicle? It is my understanding,
| aside from upgrades, they have not really built anything
| new.
|
| Edit: also looking at your list of accidents, China has
| one with 6-100 deaths.
|
| And USSR has 120 deaths in 1960.
|
| I think you need to look at deaths beyond just Astronauts
| here.
| jerf wrote:
| "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"
|
| This paradox is easily resolved. As risk aversion goes to
| maximum, the _only_ acceptable solution is to do what was
| done before. Anything we deviate from doing before is
| something that could fail in a new and unknown way,
| possibly bigger than before.
|
| This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of
| large bureaucracies. It is one of the major drivers of
| their inertia and inability to change course. When the
| penalty for slightly more failure than before (in
| anything except money spend, that's OK as long as it's
| done by high level people) is expulsion and scapegoating
| and the reward for doing slightly better is a pat on the
| back and a denied request for a salary upgrade/slight
| promotion, you converge on having an organization full of
| people where this is the only path forward, no matter how
| much acknowledgement there is that the current situation
| is broken by every last person involved.
|
| To take a really big diversion, one of the deeper aspects
| of the "move fast and break things" philosophy isn't just
| about directly moving fast and breaking things; it is
| creating a culture where people have permission to fail
| at least a _little_ before being evicted from it. Your
| biggest successes will always involve some failures on
| the way, so if you rigorously eliminate all failure from
| your organization, all but the smallest, most basic of
| successes will go with it. It 's not that you literally
| want to break things or that managers should necessarily
| create a "broken things" metric and try to keep it in
| some band above zero but below catastrophe, it's about
| making avoiding breakage not calcifying and paralyzing
| your company by making it the absolute number one
| priority above all else.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of
| large bureaucracies.
|
| Not really, because commercial air travel had problems
| early on, and the FAA approach was to investigate,
| determine root causes, and make changes to eliminate or
| reduce the probability of them happening again. Assigning
| blame or scapegoating was not part of their process (not
| that it didn't happen in the media). And now commercial
| air travel is very safe.
| theluketaylor wrote:
| Except commercial and amateur air travel seems to now be
| stuck in a local maxima deeply similar to what the parent
| talks about, avoiding risk by doing the same thing. There
| are good processes to improve the safety of existing
| operations and good reasons to keep doing proven things,
| but innovation is deeply choked.
|
| See the decades long process of trying to switch away
| from leaded aviation fuel. Small aircraft are all running
| engine designs from the 1960s despite huge advances in
| internal combustion and fuel composition in other
| applications. Getting a new engine design or fuel mixture
| approved has proven effectively impossible, so processes
| have defaulted to doing things the exact same way to
| avoid risk.
|
| See also the 737 MCAS debacle. Boeing was highly
| incentivized to keep the 737 flight characteristics
| exactly the same to avoid needing to re-certify the
| airframe or re-train pilots they invented MCAS to mimic
| the old behaviour and didn't tell pilots about it,
| leading to deadly results. Rules designed to allow change
| actually perversely made it a better option to avoid
| change (or at least avoid the appearance of change), so
| risk behaviour defaulted to do it the same way as before.
| philwelch wrote:
| The only reason the US had so many more fatalities is
| because the Shuttle carried a larger crew in the first
| place.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| China, at least Modern China is extremely risk averse.
| Basically if anything bad happens (not necessarily a death)
| the whole team would go through a lengthy close-looping
| quality management process. It is only after the success of
| SpaceX that things seem to loosen up a bit.
| tjpnz wrote:
| >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?
|
| How sure are you about there being no issues or delays?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong
| space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no
| issues_
|
| 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.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| The U.S. has launched more manned missions in the last three
| years than China has in the last 20.
|
| 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?
| computerex wrote:
| Say what you will, Russia still has the most reliable
| launch vehicle that's ever existed.
| plasticchris wrote:
| Proton? It has about 89 percent success, nowhere close to
| Falcon 9's 99 percent success rate.
| computerex wrote:
| No, Soyuz. And Soyuz has like 4x-5x number of launches of
| Falcon 9 so direct comparisons like yours don't work.
|
| Soyuz is the most reliable launch vehicle and spacecraft
| that's ever existed.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Note that your original comment made no acknowledgement
| of the number of launches by each country. But now when
| it suites you, it's all important.
| computerex wrote:
| What? I was responding to the person saying falcon 9 is
| the most reliable vehicle we have.
|
| I was merely pointing out that soyuz has like 1500+
| launches over Falcon 9 and that there is no comparison.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _pointing out that soyuz has like 1500+ launches over
| Falcon 9_
|
| Not the current variants. If we're integrating everything
| called Soyuz we may we well do the same with Long March
| and every American rocket that uses similar engines.
|
| Falcon is widely considered the most reliable platform
| you can launch on today.
| computerex wrote:
| Widely considred by whom? Elon Musk? Soyuz has like a 98%
| average success rate over all the variants.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Widely considred by whom?_
|
| Every statistical audit I've seen by someone with a
| background in aerospace engineering.
|
| > _Soyuz has like a 98% average success rate over all the
| variants_
|
| Great. You don't get to fly on "all the variants," you
| fly on the most recent. The RD-107A, 108A and Soyuz-2 are
| not as reliable as Falcon 9.
| trothamel wrote:
| As I mention in a sibling post, Soyuz might have more
| launches, but it also has way more launch failures.
| computerex wrote:
| Not just more launches, over a THOUSAND more launches.
| Soyuz has a 98% success rate. Falcon 9 needs to do A LOT
| more launches before it can be comparable.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > And Soyuz has like 4x-5x number of launches of Falcon 9
| so direct comparisons like yours don't work.
|
| You made the comparison first. Are you taking it back
| then?
| computerex wrote:
| Jesus please go back to reddit. I was simply pointing out
| that Soyuz has had a LOT MORE launches than Falcon 9,
| literally over a thousand more, so no one can in good
| faith that Falcon 9 is more reliable given the numbers
| and statistics.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| But they can claim, in good faith, that Soyuz is? Im
| afraid thats not how logic works. Either the error bars
| are too large to take a position, or they aren't. You
| can't have it both ways.
| computerex wrote:
| Fact remains that Soyuz has over a thousand more launches
| than Falcon 9 with an average success rate of 98% over
| all its variants. It's the single most reliable launch
| vehicle mankind has ever made.
| trothamel wrote:
| Looking at the three most recent Soyuz variants:
|
| Soyuz-U had 765 successes in 786 flights. (97.3%) Soyuz-
| FG had 69 successes in 70 flights (98.5%) Soyuz-2 has 160
| successes in 166 flights (96.3%)
|
| Falcon 9 has 362 successes in 365 flights. (99.1%). That
| includes the partial failure of the CRS-1 mission, which
| successfully delivered CRS-1 to the space station but
| released secondary payloads into a lower than expected
| orbit. It does't include the AMOS-6 fire, which would
| bring Falcon 9 down 98.9%.
|
| Falcon 9 is more reliable than Soyuz.
| dash2 wrote:
| Interestingly none of those numbers is enough to give a
| significant difference between failure rates in a chi-
| squared test with p < 0.05 - not even if you pool all the
| Soyuz variants. Though they do all hit p < 0.10.
| trothamel wrote:
| Thanks for running the numbers, which I think prove that
| it's impossible to say that Soyuz is more reliable than
| Falcon, even if you count AMOS-1 (which feels like it
| should be counted) and CRS-1 (which I don't).
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Russia != Soviet Union. That being said, they've been
| using roughly the same vehicle for a very long time (20+
| years if you only consider the latest gen Soyuz, much
| longer otherwise). I would hope it is reliable by now.
| rbanffy wrote:
| More than half of Russia's space history is Soviet space
| history. Russia just happens to be the country that
| inherited most of the stuff after the Soviet Union ceased
| to exist.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| The Soviet Union is included in the Russian Federation's
| history, but not the other way around. Had they said
| Russia, then sure.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Russia just happens to be the country that inherited
| most of the stuff after the Soviet Union ceased to exist_
|
| Stuff, not capability. Russia's recent spacefaring
| attempts have cemented its deterioration.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Capabilities degrade over time for a number of reasons.
| In this case I assume not only lack of continued
| investment but also fear management.
| electriclove wrote:
| SpaceX has...
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I'd argue that a private company, ran by an immigrant,
| that started with private capital, carrying out the
| launches makes it more American than if NASA had done it.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| I found Xi Jinping's HN account!
| wumeow wrote:
| He's got a lot of them here.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| > whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet
| Union
|
| 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.
| bparsons wrote:
| Two space shuttles burned up...
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Challenger is 100% on NASA but the Columbia disaster was
| a perfect storm of small mistakes that could be
| individually safely mitigated (but not all together) more
| than a blatant failure on any one person or group in the
| org's part. Additionally space shuttles had experienced
| conditions extremely similar to Columbia's time and again
| without any major damage or risk to crew. It still was a
| failure but it was a much more complex and subtle form of
| failure than the Challenger disaster.
|
| But neither of those remotely compares to Soyuz 1 or
| Soyuz 11. The failure in Soyuz 11 had been seen time and
| again during trainings and testing but was waived away
| and the only reason it didn't occur earlier was because
| of pilots unofficially taking steps to mitigate the issue
| outside of the flight plan that then weren't performed on
| Soyuz 11. And the failure in Soyuz 1 was expected from
| before launch. It wasn't a statistical probability that
| the team made a risky gamble on (like Challenger) but was
| a definite death sentence. Soyuz 1 is equivalent to if
| you had the Challenger failure but on several hundred
| different parts of the rocket instead of on just one.
|
| Either way the point of my original comment was to
| dissuade the notion that the USSR didn't have
| embarrassing crewed failures in space flight, not to try
| and pick sides on who was worse.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Read _The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error_ by
| Sidney Dekker. In manufacturing, it's always a perfect
| storm because of the variation of Murphy's Law that's
| usually in effect: Everything that can go wrong, usually
| goes right.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Reading analysis[0] of the damage caused by a foam strike
| on STS-119 makes the loss of Columbia feel more "on NASA"
| to me than not. NASA knew a foam strike could be
| catastrophic and that the odds of a bad strike weren't
| astronomically remote. It had already happened on STS-119
| and only luck prevented loss of the vehicle.
|
| I didn't have that take initially, but the Causality
| podcast did an episode[1] on it a few years ago that got
| me into reading more about it.
|
| [0]
| https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts119/090327sts27/
|
| [1]
| https://engineered.network/causality/episode-24-columbia/
| SoftTalker wrote:
| As did an early Apollo capsule.
|
| This stuff is still risky even today. It's not like
| hopping on a flight to Chicago.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I saw an old documentary (cannot recall where) about the
| Soviet space program. They could not afford a lot of
| testing or simulations on the ground but there was immense
| pressure to make progress, so they would just launch stuff
| and try to learn from the results, good or bad.
| nimbius wrote:
| this is, frankly, some pretty generous editorializing.
|
| 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 ...
| capitainenemo wrote:
| From that article... '"I asked Siddiqi if he thought his
| transcript had been doctored. He said, "I'm 100 percent
| confident the transcripts are genuine," though there may
| be other recordings from other tracking locations.When I
| showed it to Bizony, he said, "An official Soviet
| transcript of anything, from the death of a cosmonaut to
| the birth of a healthy baby boy, isn't worth the paper
| it's written on. ... Given that we at least broadly trust
| Russayev's recollection of events, we are entitled to
| believe that Komarov, for all his discipline as a
| cosmonaut, would have been entitled to some spitting
| madness and frustration."'
|
| Certainly that was my first thought when I read "Russian
| State Archive"
| buildsjets wrote:
| Oh, that's what the OFFICIAL Soviet state archives say!
| Well, I am certain that they were trustworthy narrators,
| and I'm sure they would have been careful to make an
| accurate record of anything embarrassing to the Party.
| big-green-man wrote:
| Didn't happen in the Soviet Union, nope sure didn't. they
| just let the cosmonauts die.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/01/chin.
| ..
|
| I agree it makes the US look pathetic.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| It was bad behind the iron curtain, so bad, that in ukraine
| half a million man are willing to fight and die to not go
| back behind one. The propaganda posters hanging on the wall,
| had nothing to do with the reality behind it.
| namaria wrote:
| You're right, China and the Soviet Union would never allow a
| public discussion of technical problems in their governmental
| programs.
| dave78 wrote:
| At this point, now that the SpaceX alternative has been
| officially acknowledged, I really don't see how anyone at NASA
| would be comfortable risking the return on Starliner. If they
| do and it fails and the astronauts die, everyone will be
| (rightly) outraged that a viable rescue plan was available and
| not used. It could become an existential crisis for NASA.
|
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I hope you're right, but at the same time it would be quite
| sad if this is all theatrics to preserve the feelings of
| Boeing fanboys (how do those still exist?)
| Hinermad wrote:
| > Boeing fanboys (how do those still exist?)
|
| There are still fans of Boeing's ability to make money, no
| matter how bad they are at making aerospace products.
| hotstickyballs wrote:
| They exist because Boeing gives their voters jobs.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| I doubt Boeing fanboys are part of the equation.
|
| NASA is an executive agency, the President doesn't like the
| head of SpaceX, and it's an election year.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _NASA is an executive agency, the President doesn't
| like the head of SpaceX_
|
| NASA is a _huge_ fan of SpaceX. Look at the Artemis
| programme and the amount of technology risk concentrated
| with them. They'd similarly defer to SpaceX if Crew
| Dragon had an issue.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| NASA certainly is deeply entwined with SpaceX, but that
| relationship predates the Biden/Elon animosity.
|
| Biden has the authority to say that he's not going to
| give Elon this gloating opportunity ahead of the
| election.
|
| Biden also has the authority to make SpaceX catch a seal,
| strap it to a board, and make it listen to rocket noise
| through headphones to see if it becomes distressed.
| renewiltord wrote:
| They exist because "real engineering" is something people
| think ex-software people can't do. And because some people
| have a reflexive dislike of Elon Musk.
|
| This is real engineering, folks. By the experienced real
| engineers at Boeing. Not the idiots at SpaceX whose stuff
| keeps blowing up.
| supportengineer wrote:
| In school we learned this is called a "trial balloon"
| nordsieck wrote:
| > 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.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I gather that they're also worried that the Dragon option
| turns into another can of worms due to a risk that an
| automated return of the Starliner could result in bricking
| the ISS's docking port. Something about how they _removed_
| the automated docking /undocking software from Starliner for
| the crewed mission, for reasons I'm guessing I could not
| begin to fathom.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It isn't that they removed autonomous undocking. IIRC
| autonomous docking/undocking were part of the requirements
| for the commercial crew program. Starliner even did attempt
| an autonomous docking to the station.
|
| 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.
| pennomi wrote:
| Right, but "switch the configuration" isn't trivial,
| they're estimating something like 4+ weeks of work. IIRC
| it's essentially equivalent to reflashing the whole thing
| and revalidating the install was correct.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I agree, what I'm trying to emphasize is that the current
| software is able to undock autonomously, it isn't able to
| handle failures autonomously. Many people seem to be
| thinking that Starliner had been capable of autonomous
| docking/undocking and the functionality had been removed
| for seemingly no legitimate reason. But, if we understand
| that autonomous undocking is present, but autonomous
| error handling is not, the engineering reason becomes
| obvious, that when you have a crew available, they're the
| better option for error handling than the software.
|
| I'm not trying to make the excuse that's going around
| about how they don't need to change the software, just
| the configuration. It's absurd that they need 4 weeks for
| this change when switching from manual to automatic fault
| handling should be a basic safety contingency (it'd be
| necessary if the crew had become incapacitated for any
| reason).
| jwineinger wrote:
| I wonder if the astronauts themselves get some say in this.
| What if they decide, since it is their lives, that they're
| not getting into the starliner, even if NASA decides the risk
| is acceptable?
| khuey wrote:
| At the end of the day NASA administrators can't actually
| force the astronauts into Starliner. Clearly they get some
| say in it if they're willing to push hard enough.
| dave78 wrote:
| I'm sure if they have opinions they would share them with
| NASA and probably their families, and of course if it
| comes out that NASA ignored their concerns and they
| perished that would be pretty bad.
|
| However, I imagine that part of becoming an astronaut
| means that you really have to get comfortable with
| trusting others to make critical, ultimately life-
| affecting decisions on your behalf all the time. So
| perhaps their mindset is more of "we trust that all the
| smart people on the ground are doing their best to make
| the safest decision for us, and we'll go with what you
| say".
|
| If I were one of them stuck up there, though, I'd
| probably want to get on a video call with the Boeing
| engineers and look them in the eyes, show them pictures
| of my family, and ask if they are confident their vehicle
| will bring me home safely.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they
| formally commit to it.
|
| If they are doing comms like that, it's telling, they need to
| cut it out and focus on their real issues.
| wmf wrote:
| NASA's real issue is, and has been for decades, not getting
| their funding taken away. Not embarrassing themselves is a
| big part of that.
| tomohawk wrote:
| NASA chose to give 2/3rds of the funding to ULA, and
| seemed pretty reluctant to include SpaceX - it seemed
| like they were forced to at the time.
|
| They mismanaged the space shuttle, racking up huge costs
| on a vehicle that put people's lives at risk, while lying
| to congress and everyone else about how reliable it was.
| Feynman's report is a good read. Here's an HN thread.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989483
| greenavocado wrote:
| Unfortunately, a couple astronauts dying isn't an existential
| crisis for NASA, especially considering their incompetence in
| the years after the WW2 German rocket scientists died off.
| actinium226 wrote:
| The people making this decision are not 5 year olds. They're
| not "letting everyone get used to the idea." That may be a
| nice side benefit of their decision process but the driver is
| crew safety and data on thruster performance. If they find a
| rationale for the failures that makes them confident in
| Starliner they'll use it. That's what the delay is about, not
| "letting everyone get used to the idea."
| mattw2121 wrote:
| They may not be 5 year olds, but they understand the
| general public are 5 year olds and may be setting a message
| to account for that.
| actinium226 wrote:
| They don't answer to the general public.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I want to agree, alas cannot.
|
| 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.)
| svnt wrote:
| In PR terms they are managing the Overton window. As a
| strategy it is sometimes called gradualism or
| incrementalism.
|
| 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.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they
| formally commit to it
|
| 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.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| There is no tradeoff. NASA has no horse in the race. Starliner
| is made by Boeing. Both Boeing and SpaceX are NASA contractors.
| trentnix wrote:
| I'm guessing Boeing, even if it's just by virtue of having
| been around so much longer than SpaceX, has greased a lot
| more pockets than SpaceX. Consequently, while NASA has no
| horse in the race, I'm guessing plenty of well connected
| people in and around NASA have a horse in the race.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| the horse they have in the race are their 2 stranded
| astronauts
|
| 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
| rbanffy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| imglorp wrote:
| NASA is to blame for their part as responsible steward of
| public funds. The agency has bent over backwards, to a fault,
| to hand a contractor a cherry deal, papered over quality
| issues, performed dubious acceptance testing, made them look
| good for PR spinning all the failures, all while paying
| double vs the other (successful) vendor.
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The thing about reality is that it always exposes PR spin,
| cheating, and fraud, eventually. Often disastrously. A
| lesson that seems difficult to learn, for some reason.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| All this is true, but NASA at least deserves some credit
| for finally moving to fixed-price contracts instead of just
| shoveling endless dollars at their contractors for nothing
| to get done. The fact that Boeing is so dysfunctional that
| they can't deliver anything on fixed-price contracts is
| their fault, not NASA's, and they will have to either shape
| up or exit the sector.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _The agency has bent over backwards, to a fault, to hand a
| contractor a cherry deal, papered over quality issues,
| performed dubious acceptance testing, made them look good
| for PR spinning all the failures, all while paying double
| vs the other (successful) vendor._
|
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _NASA has been doing the same thing with Boeing that is
| has been doing with SpaceX_
|
| No.
|
| SpaceX delivered. And SpaceX hasn't been called out in a
| NASA OIG report as having mismanaged a critical programme
| (SLS Block 1B) [1].
|
| > _as if NASA is trying to create a launch industry
| instead of a launch monopoly_
|
| Boeing brings nothing to the table in launch
| diversification. Crewliner isn't a launch programme. It
| is currently _the_ stupidest aerospace programme on the
| planet, and that would still be true if it actually
| worked. (Zero redundancy given its dependence on a
| deprecated launch vehicle.)
|
| [1] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-015.pd...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| SpaceX delivered. Eventually.
|
| Boeing will deliver. Eventually. They always do.
|
| _Boeing brings nothing to the table in launch
| diversification. Crewliner isn't a launch programme. It
| is currently the stupidest aerospace programme on the
| planet, and that would still be true if it actually
| worked._
|
| Boeing provides a counterbalance to an Elon Musk
| controlled SpaceX. If Elon were sane, this wouldn't be
| necessary, but right now he's inflaming race riots in
| Europe.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _SpaceX delivered. Eventually._
|
| At half the cost, pretty much on time and without
| stranding a crew.
|
| > _Boeing will deliver. Eventually. They always do_
|
| With infinite time and resources anyone can.
|
| As the OIG's report spells out, Boeing's mismanagement is
| material and unusual. It's wild to ignore that to justify
| a false equivalence.
|
| > _Boeing provides a counterbalance to an Elon Musk
| controlled SpaceX_
|
| In the way a rubber duck counterbalances a battleship.
|
| There is nothing Boeing is working on that challenges
| SpaceX launch monopoly. Starliner doesn't challenge
| Dragon's monopoly because it only has seven launches left
| in its lifecycle. (Again, I'm ignoring that it does not
| work.)
|
| I'm not arguing we go all in on SpaceX. I'm saying we
| need a second space provider, and Boeing isn't it.
| Continuing to bet on Boeing cements SpaceX's lead.
| ru552 wrote:
| He's probably talkin about how Boeing is multiple years
| late and still has a shoddy product.
| imglorp wrote:
| I don't understand the venom here. SpaceX bids on
| contracts, does the job, and goes home, no drama. Most
| recently, they split a bunch of contract wins with ULA.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > All government procurement is fraught with industry and
| political pressure which looks like it happened here, yet
| again.
|
| In an ideal world, NASA would be immune from political
| pressures the same way the military, which are equally
| ineffective, seem to be.
| dash2 wrote:
| Surely, the answer to your question is right there in your
| comment.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| They also may have to consider for all of the issues that
| Starliner might have the only way to have competition in the
| space is to have more than one company that can create
| spacecraft. But, I agree that this debacle never made any sense
| and it started to be obvious to have to use another service .
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It's NASA's call, not Boeing's, and what'd make NASA look bad
| is getting the astronauts killed.
|
| 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?!
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Although, second order effects: if they use the 2nd launch
| provider option now, that might bring about an immediate and
| permanent end to the 2nd launch provider option.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I don't see that. From NASA's POV, they'll want to keep the
| dual provider setup, and the government doesn't generally
| seem too happy on having to rely on Musk for more than it
| "has" to.
|
| I'd like to see the day where Blue Origin replaces Boeing
| as 2nd provider though.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Government spending is just about jobs right? Don't you get
| more jobs if you give money to many different companies
| instead of one company?
| philwelch wrote:
| It's not really that costly or inconvenient to extend their
| stay on ISS compared to Skylab though. With Skylab 4 you had to
| somehow figure out how to support food and water for half-again
| as many astronaut-days as planned but ISS has routine supply
| ships and a big enough permanent crew that adding two extra
| people isn't a strain. From the perspective of ISS operations,
| having an extra two crew members more than you planned also
| means you can get more work done. And if you're one of the
| astronauts, who has worked hard for the dream of going to
| space, getting a bunch of extra space days is not exactly an
| unwelcome surprise either. So not only is it not actually a big
| deal to keep them on the ISS for longer, but I bet a few people
| are happy to have an excuse to keep them there.
| causi wrote:
| In 1974 we were less used to the paradigm of giant companies
| receiving twice their proposed budget and accomplishing nothing
| with it.
| amelius wrote:
| Why don't they store a bunch of thrusters at the space station.
| Sounds like a tool you want to have handy when up there.
| bearjaws wrote:
| In launches / outer space: The answer to any question "why
| didn't they have X" is always weight.
| jdblair wrote:
| thrusters are also likely not a "field replaceable unit" in
| current designs
| bearjaws wrote:
| That is a great point, I can't even imagine the headache to
| design for that capability.
| amelius wrote:
| But due to recent events we can all imagine the headache
| to not have that capability ;)
| perihelions wrote:
| The spacecraft's _already_ built with a (large) surplus
| of thrusters--the extra thrusters are all right there,
| pre-attached. It 's because of that safety margin that
| NASA relaxed their requirements and launched with
| thrusters exhibiting high failure rates in testing.
|
| Redundancies don't help you if you have a safety culture
| that treats redundancies as consumables. The more one
| team widens a safety margin in one place, the more
| another leans on that safety margin, and relaxes their
| own.
| martyvis wrote:
| I think you'll find that they have more thrusters on the
| spacecraft that they actually need - they can control attitude
| even if they lose one or more thrusters. So the possibility of
| the failure of them is already in the design.
| perihelions wrote:
| The fuel lines aren't plug-and-play rubber hoses--they're
| cleanroom-welded exotic metals that pipe toxic, explosive fuels
| that corrode (and can explode on contact with) most materials.
| Remember the SpaceX Dragon craft that blew up on a test stand?
| That was a failure of their analogous subsystem-hypergolic
| oxidizer ignited a valve, which was machined from solid
| titanium, and exploded.
|
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Just an aside, but im amazed they can even reliably pinpoint
| the root cause for these explosions. How do they do this?
| Some mixture of live sensor data and just general intuition
| (oh the explosion started here and we know x is a limiting
| factor, etc)?.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They have a lot of sensors on everything, plus they'd be
| filming from a lot of angles, and the additional benefit of
| ground testing is that they can look at the debris. You can
| piece together where the explosion happened based on the
| charring and where the parts broke and how.
|
| 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.
| Intralexical wrote:
| Four microphones will let you pinpoint the location of any
| sound in a 3D volume.
|
| I'm sure they have more sensors than that.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Can it fly back unmanned?
| roelschroeven wrote:
| Apparently, not in its current configuration. The previous,
| unmanned, mission could do that (obviously), but Boeing changed
| the configuration and now Starliner can only undock with people
| inside of it (as far as I understand it, it can do everything
| else unmanned).
|
| 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.
| gangorgasm wrote:
| Do we more or less know how many days worth of supplies they have
| to keep both up there if needed?
| smilespray wrote:
| I don't know the specific answer, but I would double-check we
| got the same number of astronauts back down as we sent up.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Totally on point.-
|
| PS. There was a nice movie released 1979 about that :)
| dotnet00 wrote:
| IIRC they usually keep an extra 3 months worth of supplies
| available at the station, to allow for delays to resupply
| missions. A resupply mission also arrived at the station
| recently, which would have had additional supplies for them.
|
| 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.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Do we more or less know how many days worth of supplies they
| have to keep both up there if needed?
|
| Not sure, but a Cygnus resupply mission (NG-21) launched on the
| 4th of August, so I'm sure they have plenty of supplies.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Supplies aren't an issue - they send up more every couple of
| months, and just did so a week or two ago.
|
| 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.
| gangorgasm wrote:
| > 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?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| All I read was that the "couch" is a sleeping bag in the
| Japanese module. I think the real sleeping quarters provide
| privacy as well as strapping down the occupant as some
| semblance of gravity.
| farceSpherule wrote:
| Hopefully NASA hubris does not kill more people like it did
| during Challenger and Columbia.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Given alternatives, if the risk cannot be quantified, the risk is
| too high.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| And what's the actual cost here? Some productivity loss in the
| ISS (2 less astronauts on the new rotation) and missed
| opportunity for Boeing to save some face by bringing them back?
|
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| As for productivity, right now they have an extra couple
| hands that are well experienced in ISS operations.
| eagerpace wrote:
| The only risk returning the capsule unmanned is to their
| reputation. This is an easy decision.
| grecy wrote:
| They are also worried that it can't actually return
| autonomously, that it might fail to un-dock properly or that it
| might crash into the ISS.
|
| They have a lot to weigh up.
| xyst wrote:
| What's wrong with just extending it to next year? Is ISS at
| capacity? Money/budget issues? NASA reputation?
| wmf wrote:
| ISS is at capacity. There are only two docking ports IIRC.
| mdavidn wrote:
| All docking ports at ISS are occupied, and the two additional
| astronauts need to eat. The crew will need supplies before next
| year.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| 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.
| cedws wrote:
| Political reasons maybe. Both NASA and Boeing are effectively
| arms of government.
| TheBlight wrote:
| My suspicion is this is also why they won't let SpaceX rescue
| the crew prior to the election.
| macintux wrote:
| Part of the problem is they don't know whether they _can_
| jettison Starliner. The software that 's intended to undock
| without crew aboard was removed.
| stetrain wrote:
| 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.
| plopz wrote:
| 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.
| rdtsc wrote:
| 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.
|
| [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.
| cubefox wrote:
| It's also strange that ULA continues to get more rocket
| launch contracts from the US military despite SpaceX charging
| less money.
| AmVess wrote:
| 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.
| double0jimb0 wrote:
| Didn't read, you don't have to based on headline.
|
| They still don't know root cause(s). That's real bad Frank.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| As a big SpaceX fan, I appreciate the innovation and success that
| SpaceX has brought to space exploration. However, it's crucial
| that we have multiple reliable launch and crew providers to
| ensure the safety and sustainability of space missions. While
| SpaceX has been a game-changer, relying solely on one provider is
| risky. The ongoing issues with Boeing's Starliner highlight the
| importance of diversity in our space program. We need to support
| and develop multiple providers to maintain a robust and secure
| presence in space.
| bgirard wrote:
| > However, it's crucial that we have multiple reliable launch
| and crew providers to ensure the safety and sustainability of
| space missions.
|
| 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.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| IMHO, Starliner is too big of an MVP
| windexh8er wrote:
| That's because Starliner isn't an MVP. It's a vehicle
| designed to transport humans. You don't send humans to
| space in an MVP.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| To be clear, you can have multiple and iterative MVPs
| dotancohen wrote:
| Then at least one of them isn't M or at least one of them
| isn't V.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Min Viable .. sure you can do that. I guess I am thinking
| of a different definition than you of viable
| dotancohen wrote:
| I'm saying that if you do multiple MVPs, then at least
| one of them isn't Minimum or one of them isn't Viable.
| flamedoge wrote:
| so whats it good for. sending monkeys?
| ajcp wrote:
| > That's because Starliner isn't an MVP.
|
| > You don't send humans to space in an MVP.
|
| You are technically correct given that minimum viability
| for Starliner is sending humans to space AND returning
| them to earth.
|
| At this point I'm not sure anyone at NASA would agree
| that Starliner should have been used to send humans to
| space even.
| chrsig wrote:
| I mean, I wish that didn't need to be said, but after the
| whole submarine-controlled-by-an-xbox-going-to-the-
| titantic thing, who am I to say what bucket of bolts
| people might jump into entirely on their own accord
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| So what do you call and MVP of transporting humans?
| mulmen wrote:
| The ability to return, alive.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > IMHO, Starliner is too big of an MVP
|
| Maybe.
|
| But it's a lot simpler than NASA's previous vehicle, the
| Shuttle.
|
| If you read the selection statement[1], it seems clear in
| retrospect that NASA put too much weight on Boeing's
| Shuttle experience (via Rockwell), and not enough emphasis
| on SpaceX's Dragon 1 experience. But I think, at the time,
| it was difficult to know which factor was more important.
|
| ---
|
| 1. https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/cctcap-
| sourc...
| phkahler wrote:
| >> IMHO, Starliner is too big of an MVP
|
| Keep in mind that Starliner is NOT the entire launch
| system. It is only the crew capsule. It rides on top of an
| existing rocket. The same is true of SpaceX Dragon which
| rides on top of Falcon 9 that already existed.
|
| To your point, Starliner could have started as cargo-only
| to prove out as much as possible. That's what Dragon did.
| whatshisface wrote:
| A cargo-only starliner still would have suffered the same
| problem and had the same risk of ramming the station.
| jfoster wrote:
| Seems like it would be best to test approaching an
| imaginary or decoy space station when proving a new
| vehicle.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Or before trying to do it all including a bellyflop
| dotancohen wrote:
| That test was scraped as a cost saving measure. 2016 or
| 2018 if I recall correctly, after it had been delayed
| several times.
| option wrote:
| Yes, we need multiple providers and the proper way to do that
| is not by bailing out poor designs by incumbents. Instead, we
| should be setting lucrative incentives for new entrants.
| zhaphod wrote:
| Given how vehemently the Senators were in forcing NASA to
| create a second award for HLS, I wonder why there is no backup
| for SLS+Orion.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Starliner /could/ be a backup however it does not have those
| Moon requirements
| dotancohen wrote:
| Starliner is a completely different vehicle designed for
| completely different requirements. The only thing that they
| have in common is that they can both operate in a vacuum.
|
| That's like saying that a motorcycle could replace a semi,
| because both have wheels and a motor.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yeah, Orion is a huge bottleneck to future moon missions,
| because it is the only way to get off the moon back to earth.
| Everything else has multiple solutions. The entire idea
| behind the lunar gateway was to make it possible for CLPS
| companies to reach NRHO with underpowered rockets instead of
| only a hypothetical launch vehicle such as the lunar
| Starship, which does not even exist as of today.
|
| 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.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| I am not a fan of big SpaceX. I find it wanting. The tech is
| just not what makes you write letters home to mama. More like
| make you meh. Issue being regulalarization from the government.
|
| It's the USA and DODA that want to be big mama. Their are
| billiance in the mind, amoung the cubes at places like SpaceX.
| They just get there pats on the head and go about there day
| being good boys. Big boy made a poopy.
|
| At the ends of our day we have to sit down and say: "SpaceX did
| some things." "The things, those were big". We all say it.
| Nearly every single day. Does this mean anything for us? Now
| this is a question.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| ChatGPT comment?
| maeil wrote:
| It is, and I'm curious what dang and HN's plan is wrt this
| issue going forward. On one hand, the "assume good faith" has
| been a core tenet of this community. At the same time, LLM-
| generated walls of text aren't good faith. And they're not
| going to get less common from here on out.
|
| 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.
| coldpie wrote:
| >> ChatGPT comment?
|
| > It is
|
| What? Huh? How did you determine this?
| iwontberude wrote:
| It's truly a rorschach test of sorts. I agree with you
| that there isn't enough information to say, but reading
| through the comment history of the commenter in question
| does not make it seem more likely that they are GPT.
| Reminds me of Fallout 4 with everyone suspicious of each
| other being synths.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the demand for space missions is tough to
| justify starting a new company with that goal in mind. It will
| require heavy government funding to make it sustainable.
|
| 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?
| travisporter wrote:
| I didn't read the parent comment that way, who did give due
| deference to spacex. This is hard stuff, as I was reminded
| when the dragon capsule exploded during very early testing.
| But spacex is such a beast that it overcame that ridiculously
| fast.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> this is a Boeing problem and you're just throwing SpaceX
| under the bus for the other company's troubles.
|
| 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.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I am not throwing SpaceX under the bus. I am saying that we
| can't rely only on SpaceX. We need to fix Boeing or fund
| another provider.
| imtringued wrote:
| Give Dream Chaser another chance. It is already going to be
| necessary as an escape pod for large commercial space
| stations. If it does double duty as capsule backup, it will
| achieve greater amortization.
| xcv123 wrote:
| Did you copy and paste this from ChatGPT?
|
| 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
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > Low IQ downvoters
|
| This is not necessary.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| "We need to support and develop multiple providers to maintain
| a robust and secure presence in space"
|
| ~by feeding boeing even more government cash and looking the
| other way when they get "rid" of whistleblowers, yeah.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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..
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Why doesn't that trigger explosive decompression? Just
| because it's so small?
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| You easily fire several bullets into the skin of a typical
| airline fuselage and have no problems beyond air getting
| out. Explosive decompression requires much higher pressures
| or sufficiently weak materials. One atmosphere is not much
| of a difference. The only real danger is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hammer which scales
| with volume of air escaping.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Is explosive decompression of a human occupied area of a
| space ship ever actually a concern then? Seems like the
| pressure difference could only ever be 1
| tivert wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Also, it's _film at 11_ ~not news at 11~ (jokes from when
| people understood the idiom:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbjZEoXQjCM).
| echelon wrote:
| I don't think you're right about the idiom _being wrong_. I
| 've always read and heard "news at 11".
|
| > 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.
| tivert wrote:
| > Film, here, seems especially dated. Sometimes
| anachronistic idioms get modernized rather than remaining
| static.
|
| 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.
| mrWiz wrote:
| I always understood "news at 11" to mean that a fuller
| report of the event that was just briefly introduced
| would be provided at 11.
| tivert wrote:
| > I always understood "news at 11" to mean that a fuller
| report of the event that was just briefly introduced
| would be provided at 11.
|
| That feels like a retcon, for lack of a better word. I'd
| like to see a clip of "news at 11" being used that way by
| an anchor in a news broadcast (especially pre-1980).
|
| Edit: I think the term that covers what I'm talking about
| is folk etymology:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology:
|
| > Folk etymology - also known as (generative) popular
| etymology,[1] analogical reformation, (morphological)
| reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation[2] - is a
| change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement
| of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one through
| popular usage.[3][4][5] The form or the meaning of an
| archaic, foreign, or otherwise unfamiliar word is
| reinterpreted as resembling more familiar words or
| morphemes.
|
| My theory is that:
|
| 1) Delayed available of footage due to film technology
| created the "film at 11" idiom, which became so
| ubiquitous it was the basis of jokes.
|
| 2) "The phrase was used in many TV shows and movies from
| the 1960s through the 1980s."
|
| 3) Film was replaced by video at some point prior to 1980
| (guess). The idiom ceased being used in news broadcasts,
| and became unmoored from its foundations but continued to
| drift around in popular culture.
|
| 4) People ignorant of the origin use "folk etymology" to
| mis-correct/twist "film at 11" to "news at 11," which
| fits the pop culture formula.
|
| 5) "News at 11" gets repeated all over the internet all
| the time.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| It's not new. It's _infrequent_ but not new.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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?
| tivert wrote:
| > 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."
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I agree. I would rather expand the discussion on benefits
| so that we see that the risk is worth it. I just don't know
| how to do it.
|
| 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).
| adolph wrote:
| 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._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
| stetrain wrote:
| NASA incidents that result in loss of life tend to result in
| public congressional inquiries. See Apollo 1, Challenger, and
| Columbia.
|
| Considering NASA's budget and project list are at the whim of
| Congress, making the US government look bad is something they
| select against.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| mlindner wrote:
| 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.
| jfoster wrote:
| Imagine the alternate reality where the media is getting
| excited about new ventures and celebrating successes. Wish we
| lived in that world.
| 00_hum wrote:
| its amazing how long the corruption festered before planes
| started falling out of the sky.
| resource_waste wrote:
| We've seen Elon's companies are more than okay with cutting
| corners as long as marketing optics look good.
|
| Not saying Boeing is any better, but the culture at his companies
| seems to be: "Fast dev and fake high quality. Hype it up."
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| This article is about Starliner. Why are you bringing up Musk?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| It's hard enough to get to space even after checking everything
| twice, now you need to do it on a damaged craft in reverse and
| you can't check
| bamboozled wrote:
| How did this thing get into space with people in it?
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