[HN Gopher] NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to E...
___________________________________________________________________
NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without
Crew
Author : samwillis
Score : 172 points
Date : 2024-08-24 17:41 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nasa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nasa.gov)
| sitkack wrote:
| Excellent news! Thank you NASA for making the right human and
| engineering decision.
|
| This was news to me tho, "and Dragon-specific spacesuits for
| Wilmore and Williams." The spacesuits are specific to the
| vehicle?
|
| Changing my underwear so I can drive to hardware store.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Don't spacesuits typically have some umbilical connection to
| the capsule life support systems? It's easy to imagine that
| these connectors might not be standardized between different
| capsules, and that sending up a new space suit might be easier
| than designing an adapter.
| sitkack wrote:
| 927!
|
| We are literally building the future, HTF do we keep getting
| into these situations?
| yhvh wrote:
| Efficiency
| marssaxman wrote:
| What does "927" mean?
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| 927 is a noun at this point to me. Hell so many xkcd
| could be: 1319, 936, 2347. It's crazy how often
| referencing a xkcd is the highest signal to noise way of
| communicating a concept.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I guess that's a real S5:E2 experience.
| genewitch wrote:
| there's a joke that goes something like
|
| A group of professors liked jokes, but got tired of
| hearing the same ones, so they started numbering them. So
| instead of telling a joke or funny observation when
| something happened, they'd say "112" and the others would
| laugh. or "64", more laughter.
|
| One day they get a new prof on their team and after a few
| weeks of this number, laugh, number, laugh, during a
| meeting, the new guy says "-149". There's dead silence
| for a while. The eldest prof starts laughing, "i've never
| heard that one!"
| fragmede wrote:
| those are good ones. 386, 303, 979, and 1053 also come to
| mind.
| userbinator wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/927/
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| Easy to imagine but there are so many details to nail down
| that it's hard to do in practice.
|
| In the words of someone in the industry who tends to be on
| the laconic side:
|
| "It is not as simple as a 'common connector'. There are
| different pressures, mixture ratios, comm gear, seat
| interfaces, etc. A requirement for commonality flows
| requirements upstream to the suit, seat and spacecraft. "
|
| https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2.
| ..
| marssaxman wrote:
| I meant it the other way around - incompatibility is the
| easy-to-imagine default! In absence of some heavily-funded,
| top-down, NASA-driven standards-development process, no
| such thing as a standard spacesuit connection should be
| expected to exist.
| Animats wrote:
| > "and Dragon-specific spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams."
|
| Oh, good. Previous proposals included having them return in a
| Dragon unsuited.[1]
|
| [1] https://futurism.com/stranded-astronauts-spacex-boeing-
| space...
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| I believe that's still the contingency plan in the unlikely
| event that they have to evacuate the ISS in the period
| between Starliner undocking and Crew-9 docking.
| grawp wrote:
| Yes it is and it is not the first time having such
| contigency plan.
|
| Quite recently there was a Soyuz with crippled cooling and
| the contingency plan for the American astronaut that came
| with it was to evacuate via Dragon if there was an
| emergency before new Soyuz arrived.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Justin Bailey mode
| somenameforme wrote:
| I'm unsure of the specifics of the Dragon capsule, but I know
| that on the Soyuz even the seats themselves are custom molded
| to each astronaut. You've gotta keep in mind that the capsules
| are designed for failure scenarios. That includes things like
| _extremely_ high g force ejections (pushing close to 20g) from
| a failing rocket, depressurization scenarios, and so on.
|
| It all seems a bit over the top when things go well, but
| especially as we start to up the rate of sending people into
| space - things don't go well quite often. The Space Shuttle
| only sent people to space 135 times, and there was a complete
| loss of life on two of those missions. If aircraft had that
| sort of failure rate then you'd see a plane dropping out of the
| sky about once a minute, literally.
| jonplackett wrote:
| That is quite the analogy. Not sure if it says more about the
| insane dangers of space or the insane reliability of
| airplanes.
| blcknight wrote:
| Aviation is insanely reliable. The 777 flew thousands of
| flights per day, every day for 18 years before its first
| fatality.
|
| It's why scandals like the 737 Max are so appalling. We
| know better. Boeing knew better.
| Retric wrote:
| Personally I am amazed just what the focus on safety has
| achieved.
|
| The 737 Max was objectively surprisingly safe to fly at
| the time of the groundings. As in for the average flying
| passenger their odds were significantly higher to die of
| something else on the day of their flight than from a
| crash. But still we know how to do better and things
| improved.
|
| Imagine if we treated each individual car accident as a
| failure and millions of like could have been saved. It
| may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory
| feature etc, but I suspect there's a lot more we could do
| even without that.
| beerandt wrote:
| Decades of focusing on safety are being unwound because
| of ~decade plus (so far) focus on efficiency and
| environmental regulation.
|
| You can't maximize both.
| dmd wrote:
| That's right. It's definitely those darn environmental
| regulations. Nothing at all to do with short-term profits
| and MBA-syndrome.
| phire wrote:
| And none of the fatalities were the fault of the
| aircraft.
|
| One crashed on the runway after pilot error, killing
| three people (two of them weren't wearing seatbelts)
|
| One was shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft missile,
| killing all on board.
|
| And the other is a mystery, we can't even find the crash
| site. But most evidence points towards deliberate pilot
| suicide.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Both I reckon. Still, I wonder what the safety record for
| airplanes was back when the total number of airplane
| flights ever taken was the same number as today's total
| number of space flights ever taken.
| avmich wrote:
| > on the Soyuz even the seats themselves are custom molded to
| each astronaut
|
| The seats are standard, but each astronaut has their own
| mold, taken on Earth, which is put into the seat.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Startup idea #18463: Butt molds as a service
| schiffern wrote:
| The Soyuz seat liner (head is toward the right): https://ar
| .culture.ru/attachments/attachment/preview/5fe115c...
|
| The completed Soyuz seat (head is toward the left): https:/
| /ar.culture.ru/attachments/attachment/middle/5de8f6c2...
|
| Source https://ar.culture.ru/en/subject/lozhement-
| kosmonavta-kov
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| How do you know it's the right decision?
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Because every Starliner flight has had serious problems but
| the same cannot be said of the SpaceX vehicle, which is in
| addition more proven.
| alangibson wrote:
| Acceptable loss of crew event is like 1 in 250 (can't
| remember the exact number). They can't quantify the
| probability of failure, so not putting them in Starliner is
| the right call.
| schiffern wrote:
| Yep, 1-in-270. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Cre
| w_Program#Spacec...
| skissane wrote:
| 1-in-270 is overall probability threshold for a 210 day
| notional ISS stay.
|
| For the journey home from ISS to Earth, the probability
| threshold is 1-in-1000. Likewise, it is 1-in-1000 for the
| journey from Earth to ISS.
|
| The riskiest part, which increases the probability from
| 1-in-500 to 1-in-270, is the ISS stay - the extended stay
| in space is faced with a continuous risk of
| micrometeoroid damage.
| james_pm wrote:
| The suit is part of the spacecraft. In the case of Dragon, it
| pressurizes, inflates and deflates at times depending on the
| phase of the mission.
| schiffern wrote:
| Exactly this. You can hear it directly from the SpaceX
| employees who developed the suits:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LMwKwcMdIg
| ozim wrote:
| I think you underestimate space travel to space station.
|
| Well it seems like it is routine thing now and spacex seems
| like routinely launches without a flaw.
|
| But going up there and making it back is still huge feat that
| is possible only by collaboration of huge numbers of super
| experienced and highly trained professionals.
|
| I am going a bit over the top - but still travel even to low
| earth orbit is something far outside of any human being reach -
| on his own or his group of buddies.
| Natsu wrote:
| I'm just glad they're prioritizing crew safety here. I don't have
| a lot of trust in Boeing right now.
| lokar wrote:
| You have to assume Boeings reputation is an issue here. It
| changes the expected value for the decision maker(s) since the
| cost of going with Boeing (allowing a crewed return) is so much
| higher for them personally in the failure case.
| theginger wrote:
| What happens if you need to file a tax return but you can't
| because your flight back from space got cancelled and you were
| delayed for 6 months?
| shrubble wrote:
| You do get some kind of automatic extension for being out of
| the country...
| mglz wrote:
| Does overflying the US in low Earth orbit count as reentry?
| Or do you need to re-enter the atmosphere im order to re-
| enter?
| evilduck wrote:
| Outer space is agreed upon by the USA as being beyond a
| country's sovereignty claims - https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/
| en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/int...
|
| The Karman Line is also generally accepted to be the
| boundary of outer space, set at 100 kilometers above
| ground.
|
| The ISS orbits at something like 415km above Earth.
|
| I'm no lawyer but is seems plausible to say no, orbiting
| above 100km of altitude over the USA would not be
| considered entry into the country.
| refulgentis wrote:
| The government forces HN to turn into Reddit: everyone has to
| post vacuous banter comments until you file. (edit: the post I
| am replying to was the top comment at the time, for about an
| hour)
| freehorse wrote:
| Can't one just file that through internet in the US? They do
| have internet access as far as I understand.
| jraph wrote:
| I hope no SMS 2FA is needed for this :-)
| ginko wrote:
| Don't tax accountants exist in the US?
|
| edit: I have to admit my reply was a bit dismissive but can
| someone enlighten me: Surely you have to be able to pay someone
| else to file your taxes for you, right?
| chuckadams wrote:
| Yes of course those exist, and the other thing is that the US
| doesn't jail people for failing to file a tax return. If you
| owe, you get a fine, and if you don't pay the fine they seize
| assets or garnish wages or whatnot. Usually takes years for
| this to happen. If you don't owe, they're happy to keep your
| refund til you get around to claiming it later.
| LegitShady wrote:
| they force you to file through turbotax on space station
| internet. Using turbotax is the penalty.
| kens wrote:
| This actually happened on Apollo 13. Backup pilot Jack Swigert
| was assigned to Apollo 13 two days before launch because the
| expected pilot, Mattingly, had been potentially exposed to
| rubella. The flight launched on April 11, just a few days
| before the April 15 tax deadline and Swigert realized in flight
| that he had forgotten to file his taxes. Flight controllers
| thought it was a joke but Swigert was serious: "It ain't too
| funny. Things kind of happened real fast down there and I do
| need an extension. I may be spending time in another quarantine
| besides the one that they're planning for me." (I.e. besides
| the 21-day astronaut quarantine, he might end up in prison.)
|
| The IRS stated that they could resolve the problem since anyone
| outside the United States on April 15 automatically gets a two-
| month extension. (Even though "legally, no one has ever decided
| whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the
| United States.")
|
| Of course, Apollo 13 soon had problems that pushed aside any
| concerns of tax filing.
|
| NY Times report:
| https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/13/archives/apollo-13-coasts...
|
| Mission transcript: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/static/history/alsj/...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _(Even though "legally, no one has ever decided whether a
| journey into space technically counts as leaving the United
| States.")_
|
| At least the customs requirement has been resolved:
| https://www.flexport.com/blog/apollo-11-astronauts-
| cleared-m...
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| With that much overtime money surely they can get an excellent
| accountant!
| flag32 wrote:
| Good call.
| LegitShady wrote:
| >"Starliner is a very capable spacecraft and, ultimately, this
| comes down to needing a higher level of certainty to perform a
| crewed return," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial
| Crew Program. "The NASA and Boeing teams have completed a
| tremendous amount of testing and analysis, and this flight test
| is providing critical information on Starliner's performance in
| space. Our efforts will help prepare for the uncrewed return and
| will greatly benefit future corrective actions for the
| spacecraft."
|
| "we think its gonna blow up"
| jonplackett wrote:
| So when is the uncrewed flight back? I wanna watch.
| genter wrote:
| "NASA Decides", not "Shitty Boeing Engineering Results In".
|
| Come on NASA, place the blame where it's due.
| nomel wrote:
| The government war machine doesn't hurt itself, even when its
| tentacles are spread a bit apart.
| bigyikes wrote:
| Since there are no people on board...... I hope it blows up
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| One more nail in Boeing's coffin.
| shagie wrote:
| While Boeing - the union of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas -
| needs some fundamental changes, Boeing the _company_
| represents a significant trained workforce for aerospace
| construction.
|
| Saying "welp... guess we'll close up shop and ship those jobs
| somewhere else. Time to learn French and go work for Airbus
| (The ArianeGroup is Airbus and Safran)."
|
| Wishing for the demise of Boeing represents an irrecoverable
| loss of industrial capacity for the US.
| makerdiety wrote:
| A true scientist would come to the conclusion that at this
| point in time it's time to give up on the great liberal
| democracy project. A true scientist has the scale needed to
| recognize that capitalism, as practiced under liberal aims,
| does not have the desire nor the ability to satisfy modern
| industrialism's education prerequisite. A societal culture
| that has prioritized the reverse of education is what has
| led to the United States's incompetence at technology and
| industry. The United States was never going to succeed in
| this arena.
|
| The kid gets a failing grade. Pick someone else that is a
| better candidate at mission success. Select someone that's
| serious about doing real work.
|
| Maybe capitalism's competitor, whatever that may be, is
| better at heralding space travel and mass production?
| doublepg23 wrote:
| Doesn't this ignore SpaceX being American?
| makerdiety wrote:
| Excellent question. And the answer is, of course, very
| simple: Being American (or, more generally, a liberal-
| democracy subordinated entity), you should expect even
| Elon Musk's SpaceX to be a bad bet. SpaceX will display
| its inherent inability too, eventually.
| zorak8me wrote:
| That's a convenient wave of the hand, isn't it? "Oh it
| will eventually break" is just entropy, and can be
| applied to anything.
| makerdiety wrote:
| I'm only minimizing the value of the Enlightenment's
| liberty proposition (liberalism) as a result of the
| scientific observation that entropy most definitely
| accelerates through liberal-democratic ideas and
| enterprises. Don't propose liberalism and then I won't
| appear aloof when I'm actually watching the situation
| very closely.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Lol. Who else is in this class? Little Piotr Communism
| dropped out of school 30 years ago. China's busy just
| trying to catch up. Everybody else can't seem to figure
| out how to pass econ-101.
| makerdiety wrote:
| "Who else is in the pool of promising candidates for
| intelligent economics?" is the question we're trying to
| answer.
|
| > China's busy just trying to catch up. Everybody else
| can't seem to figure out how to pass econ-101.
|
| edit: Getting to the frustration of realizing all
| reasonable options have been exhausted is an obstacle to
| climb over.
| gkuhl21 wrote:
| Where does a true Scottsman stand on this issue? ;-)
| genewitch wrote:
| okay, so what's the solution if boeing can't make fit for
| purpose vehicles (air or space)?
|
| Just let them keep eating crackers in bed, or what?
|
| aka "too big to fail"
| jessriedel wrote:
| It is an incredible but true fact there's often no known
| way to repair large organizations once they have gotten
| sufficiently sick. They have to be dissolved and new
| companies have to be built from the ground up. As you
| suggest, this is incredibly destructive. The employees and
| expertise aren't destroyed -- they start and join the new
| companies -- but the relationships and institutional
| knowledge is largely lost. But it _is_ recoverable, and the
| alternative is often worse.
| practicemaths wrote:
| I hope it does not. We do not need more space debris in orbit
| or more risk to the station and crew.
|
| Also if it lands okay then they are more likely to deduce and
| correct what the issues are for a possible future mission
| (though at this point I do not know the likelyhood that
| Starliner will get another chance)
| CrazyStat wrote:
| If it were to blow up it would almost certainly be in the
| atmosphere due to entering at a bad angle or something. This
| would leave no debris in orbit and would not endanger the
| station or crew.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| It would only "blow up" on reentry, don't think there's much
| risk of an actual pressure vessel rupture or hypergolic
| explosion. So no space debris at least, just littering the
| ocean.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| > I hope it does not. We do not need more space debris in
| orbit or more risk to the station and crew.
|
| Even if such an explosion happened the debris wouldn't be
| around for long, stuff in LEO will fall back to earth quite
| quickly without stationkeeping.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Vehicles in LEO have taken near catastrophic strikes
| before. There's a better safety margin, but it's not
| reduced to zero.
| cft wrote:
| I wonder when they plan the return. You should enter a short
| position if you are sure it'll blow up
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| It's very likely to not blow up. The engineers who studied
| the issue all think it's much more likely to work just fine
| with lower thrust levels.
|
| Why not just fly the crew back in it then? "likely to work
| fine" is not sufficient level of certainty for NASA (anymore,
| because of bitter lessons). They need to be able to quantify
| the risk. And this is not possible, because an uncertain
| amount of damage was already done inside the thruster dog
| houses when they overheated and some material in them melted,
| and they cannot be inspected.
|
| What guaranteed the unmanned return was that when they did
| new ground tests with the equipment, the damage was not
| consistent between tests. This means they cannot model what
| happened, and they cannot inspect the current state of the
| dog houses, meaning that no sane engineer will sign off on
| it, even though the damage is probably not very large and
| they can prevent future damage by using a less aggressive
| flight plan.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > is not sufficient level of certainty for NASA (anymore,
| because of bitter lessons).
|
| It never was. If you trip into a known failed safe
| situation the mission rules immediately change. This has
| been true since manned space flight started.
| ozim wrote:
| I think anyone following these news was shorting Boeing for
| quite some time already.
| davisr wrote:
| Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41339667
| fredgrott wrote:
| key point:
|
| NASA and BOEING disagreed on whether it was safe for Starliner to
| depart to Earth with astronauts.....
|
| I think it might be time to short Boeing stock....
| fullshark wrote:
| I think it might be time for the gov't to nationalize the
| company
| gduplessy wrote:
| Yes, let's make them even less efficient.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| That's a 20th century solution.
|
| The right thing to do now is to shutter the company and make
| all it's patents and designs public domain
| onepointsixC wrote:
| I'm sure the Russians and Chinese would love that.
| cft wrote:
| Same as shorting the dollar: it will fall, but you don't know
| when
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I want to call my bank and take Boeing out of the composition
| of my personalized synthetic index fond. Sadly, nobody offers
| that.
| alangibson wrote:
| You can just buy all the stocks of the S&P 500 minus
| Boeing.
| cdfuller wrote:
| Where was that stated? In the press conference they said Boeing
| deferred to NASA to make the decision because they had a better
| perspective on the entire landscape of the problem.
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| At first I misread that as the astronauts would come back aboard
| the starliner
|
| And I was like...now I'm scared for them
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| The only sensible choice. Glad to see NASA make the right call.
| Putting the lives of the crew over expedience is the correct
| priority.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Many of you might assume that Starliner is a cost-plus contract.
| Cost-plus contracts are common for large capital projects but
| they often end up running way over budget because the provider is
| essentially incentivized for budget overruns because they get
| paid more.
|
| It turns out Starliner is a fixed-price contract (for $4.2
| billion). So when Starliner had an issue a couple of years ago
| Boeing was forced to do another test and eat the launch cost. We
| ened more of this.
|
| SLS (and Artemis?), for example, is largely done by cost-plus
| contracts.
|
| It's common for companies and governments to want to have more
| than one supplier so they can't so easily be price-gouged (which
| doesn't really work but that's a separate topic). SpaceX got a
| $2.6 billion contract for Crew Dragon and its launch cost has to
| be substantially lower than Starliner's.
|
| So NASA will still push Starliner for this reason. But this whole
| debacle is deeply embarrasing for Boeing, so much so that people
| at the top may actually get fired. That's really rare for the
| executives responsible for a strategy to be held accountable for
| its failures.
|
| Boeing is just not in a great place and I honestly don't know how
| you right the ship at this point. A fish rots from the head and I
| imagine Boeing has descended into warring fiefdoms where some VPs
| just try and increase their head counts so they can get promoted
| to SVP.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I don't agree that we need more fixed price contracts on
| engineering, manufacturing and development (EMD) programs.
| Boeing shouldn't have accepted firm fixed price. Cost plus is
| the correct contract geometry with future production lot buys
| as firm fixed price.
|
| This was basically an experiment gone wrong.
| lysace wrote:
| It's funny to see the lengths some crowds will go to to avoid
| mentioning that some South African guy's space company will
| instead bring the crew back to earth.
|
| https://www.space.com/nasa-boeing-starliner-astronauts-will-...
|
| > Boeing Starliner astronauts will return home on a SpaceX Dragon
| in 2025, NASA confirms
|
| It's also mentioned in the NASA news release:
|
| > Wilmore and Williams will continue their work formally as part
| of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025. They will fly
| home aboard a Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members
| assigned to the agency's SpaceX Crew-9 mission.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| Went from "NOO that's just an irresponsible conspiracy theory!"
| to trickling that truth out, and then barely mentioning it.
| Volundr wrote:
| Eh? I haven't been following this closely, yet I've seen
| multiple headlines the last few days about SpaceX rescuing
| stranded astronauts, at at least one on the front page about
| the spacesuits being incompatible. Who exactly is avoiding
| mentioning it?
| lysace wrote:
| > Who exactly is avoiding mentioning it?
|
| Anyone in this post, before my comment. During 4 hours, while
| being the only relevant post on the front page.
| IAmNotACellist wrote:
| "They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting
| into. I say, let them crash."
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