9 ms·
It's Sounding Like Boeing's Starliner May Have Failed
- ggm 2y agoWhat I don't see is discussion of the longterm future of the program. This specific unit? Sure. It would be higher risk to propose crewed return in it, compared to using another craft. Not that using another craft is entirely risk free given the issues of suiting up for the return when you were issued kit for the other space craft, but I would think in risk terms thats lower risk. I am more interested what this does to a programme mired in cost overruns, delays and failure. In an election year. Mechanically, you would think this problem with helium leaks is fixable. Politically, this may be the straw which breaks the camels back.
- TheCleric 2y agoIf SpaceX has to step in to get the astronauts, Starliner will be scrapped and written off. Boeing has no benefit of the doubt right now. No one will assume this is a singular incident, and will be viewed with all of Boeing's other troubles in mind. Boeing needed this to go without a hitch, because they aren't trustworthy in the public's mind and NASA can't be seen as continuing to put lives in danger after the retirement of the space shuttle program due to safety reasons.
- ceejayoz 2y agoIt's probably more satisfying to NASA to not scrap the program, given Boeing is on the hook for futher costs.
- tekla 2y ago[flagged]
- joe_inferno 2y agoI mean, the person you're responding to does so…
- mrpippy 2y agoHere’s what Eric Berger wrote at Ars Technica yesterday: “If NASA defers to its fallback plan, flying on Dragon, it may spell the end of the Starliner program. During the development and testing of Starliner, the company has already lost $1.6 billion. Reflying a crew test flight mission, which likely would be necessary should Starliner return autonomously, would cost much more. Boeing might opt to cancel Starliner and leave NASA with just a single provider of crew transportation. That would be painful for both NASA and Boeing.”
- dontlikeyoueith 2y agoUntil Boeing executives start going to prison for their criminal malfeasance, all of their projects should be scrapped.
- tekla 2y ago[flagged]
- djbusby 2y agoMany times good engineering is over-ridden by management. The decision makers should take the hit.
- mrguyorama 2y agoEngineers who are unwilling or unable to say "No" and have it stick when it comes to safety are not engineers! It's one reason why I abhor programmers who call themselves "Software Engineers". If you don't get to make the go/no-go FINAL call, you are not an engineer.
- kamaal 2y agoNonsense. Not every thing is a individual quality slippage. Most of the times its also quantity slippage. Under hiring, under investing in quality, quality checks and other processes on a long term causes these problems. Notice engineering has no say in budgets, hiring numbers, time to delivery etc. Managements making all the wrong decisions over years, and then blaming a dozen engineers for not working themselves to death to cover it is not something that will sell in serious discussions.
- bitcharmer 2y agoFound the MBA! You guys are truly something else:)
- fnord77 2y agoit's a shame because I imagine a bunch of otherwise good engineers are going to lose their jobs and their reputations
- UberFly 2y agoMany who probably should be fired be will be retained due to the union.
- asadotzler 2y agoBoeing doesn't know what's failing with the thrusters. They haven't been able to give NASA a root cause so even though they got 4 of the 5 anomalous thrusters working again, who knows what could fail on the return flight. Boeing should bail and NASA will grumble at the sunk cost of their failed pursuit of redundancy but everyone will be better off. When the ISS had at least 10 years left, paying the increasing costs for Boeing's failures might have been worth it. With only about 5 years left now for crew transport, SpaceX can build one or two more Crew Dragons and cover the load with a vehicle that's well-proved and far less costly than Starliner. If Boeing is forced to re-do this test, if NASA calls CFT a failure and Boeing has to eat the cost of re-doing it, I think Boeing bails. The 5 flights they might still get paid for wouldn't be worth it after the cost of another test. If NASA has the astronauts return on Dragon, Starliner is cooked regardless of what Boeing wants and Boeing wears that black eye for NASA and even some of its DOD supporters. I think Boeing wants out and NASA's trying to hold onto them. This test isn't about Starliner so much as it is about how NASA and Boeing wind down this program.
- verzali 2y agoI've heard Boeing has been looking for a way out for a while now and it's NASA that is pushing them to go ahead with Starliner. A lot of people at NASA don't like relying on SpaceX for everything. Also it's not really certain the ISS will actually be terminated in 2031, NASA has said it could probably be extended, and in theory the plan is then to switch to private stations, which a capsule like Starliner would be able to serve.
- saturn8601 2y ago>A lot of people at NASA don't like relying on SpaceX for everything. Can you blame them? Just today it came out Musk was funding an organization that had set up fake voter registration websites in swing states to collect voter data. In EVs there are many options to avoid Musk and his products. In Space there is nothing. Wonder if it would be possible to create a new space entity: you take half the funds given to Boeing's program, stand up new company and poach SpaceX employees with extremely aggressive offers. He has nothing without his employees's sacrifices. Its amazing that he manages to retain such great talent while continually treating them like crap(from everyone I spoke to and read about it is true).
- nordsieck 2y ago> What I don't see is discussion of the longterm future of the program. I think it depends on what you consider "long term". Starliner is being certified to fly on the Atlas V. But ULA has discontinued that rocket because the first stage engines are manufactured in Russia. Boeing has 6 more rockets - one for each of the operational flights that NASA has contracted to service the ISS, but once those are used up, Boeing would have to recertify the capsule on a different rocket (presumably ULA's new Vulcan rocket). Presumably this recertification effort would be much easier since both the rocket and (presumably by that point) Starliner would be operating successfully, so it'd largely be a matter of analysis and other paperwork. But it would still take considerable time and expense.
- Havoc 2y ago> we hope politicians and others investigate what went wrong Boeing happened
- idatum 2y agoAm I delusional that there once was a NASA that was completely transparent almost as a flex to show how they had the chops to overcome challenges? Or am I conflating in the moment transparency with the postmortem reports that followed the Apollo (13) era?
- ceejayoz 2y agoThere'll be a postmortem on this one, just like there were for both Shuttle losses and SpaceX's 2015 loss (https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IG-16-025.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IG-16-025.pd...).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mrpippy 2y agoThis article is mostly just quoting from Ars, link should probably be: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/yes-nasa-really-could-bring-starliners-astronauts-back-on-crew-dragon/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/yes-nasa-really-could-...
- JohnDeHope 2y agoAgree. It'd be nice if there were some universal "just take me to the source" feature in media. I know most of what I see on YouTube is just other people reacting to, or re-reading, or generally regurgitating prior people's material.
- consumer451 2y ago> It'd be nice if there were some universal "just take me to the source" feature in media. I believe that I have made a similar comment on HN before. If we lived in a full trust environment, then the page would contain something like <link rel="canonical-source" ... Since we don't live in a full trust environment, this seems like a really good use case of an LLM-based search engine. Given context understanding + standard search index meta data, a GPTSearch type of product should be really good at finding the original source, shouldn't it?
- nordsieck 2y ago> I know most of what I see on YouTube is just other people reacting to, or re-reading, or generally regurgitating prior people's material. The cool thing is that you can get genuine investigative journalism if you know where to look. For example, here is Covert Cabal who has bought several satellite photos of Russian tank storage bases and just counted up the tanks there. And has done this several times over the course of the Ukraine war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWCEZUQtUwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWCEZUQtUwE
- solarkraft 2y agoBut only if you really know where to look (and people who share links often don’t). I’d give a good bit for something that automatically takes me to real sources.
- dvh 2y agoWhat role will Boeing play in moon missions?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wmf 2y agoBoeing is responsible for the SLS core stage.
- munchler 2y agoSo it turns out that the tendency to enshittification isn't limited to online platforms. What happened to Boeing should become a lesson for bean counters everywhere, and we should try to ensure that our economic system doesn't reward such behavior at other companies.
- ronsor 2y agoThat's because enshittification is simply the new term for the well-known and quite old race to the bottom. We don't reward this behavior on purpose: participants who use the strategy are cheating!
- fragmede 2y agoit had a rather specific meaning but then it got put everywhere cynic assholes could throw it, so now it doesn't mean what it used to.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41134620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41134620
- ThinkBeat 2y agoI think that has been clear for quite a while. It is also worth noting that the two extra people are eating and breathing (hopefully) and using other resources that were not budgeted for. It is not a problem short term. ISS is supposed to have supplies for 3 or 6 months (I cant remember which). But this will mean that the next supply shipment needs to be heavier than budgeted for.
- silexia 2y agoWhy would Boeing receive any contracts over SpaceX? Ah yes, contracts are awarded based on politics, not competence.
- ranger207 2y agoThey wanted redundancy in launch systems and capsules
- ceejayoz 2y agoThe idea was to have more than one provider, in case one had an issue. SpaceX just had a second stage issue, for example; it was fairly minor, but if it had grounded Falcon 9 for six months it would be a problem. No one expected Boeing to fuck it up this badly.
- nordsieck 2y ago1. Unless Boeing decides themselves to back out of the contract, I don't really see Starliner "failing". I do think that it will be quite expensive if they have to re-do the crew flight test - there'll be a substantial delay while they address the failures and Boeing will have to eat the cost of a full Starliner cycle (including a new service module) along with an Atlas V. I can't tell if the potential profit of the other operational missions is worth it or not in that case. 2. From what I understand, Boeing and NASA believe that the cause of the thrusters malfunctioning and the helium leaks is a combination of exposure to corrosive propellant (NTO/MMH) and the heating effect of the "doghouse" which is an insulated structure on the side of the service module that houses many thrusters and is insulated to protect the systems from low temperatures by being exposed to the vacuum of space. 3. IMO, most of Starliner's failures have stemmed from a reluctance from Boeing to embrace integrated hardware-in-the-loop testing. Instead they seem to rely on component level testing and analysis. The problem with that approach, of course, is that it's pretty bad at catching unknown unknowns. If Boeing had opted for a in-flight abort test (like SpaceX) instead of doing a pad abort test, they would probably have caught the timer issue that plagued OFT-1. Likewise, if they had fueled up Starliner and let it sit for an amount of time that is likely to occur pre-launch, they would have caught the valve corrosion issues that delayed OFT-2. You can see some of the details about the doghouse here[1]. As you can see, it appears like all of the testing was done with the insulation off and many of the systems stripped out of the doghouse. It seems likely that this overheating issue would have been caught much earlier if they had conducted more integrated testing. --- 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Starliner/comments/1eiggns/boeing_cst100_starliner_crewed_flight_test_cft/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starliner/comments/1eiggns/boeing_c...
- TheJoeMan 2y agoI can't find a source, but I have heard from an engineer friend on the inside that originally, Boeing's hubris led them to not engineer a way to unload the hypergolic propellant once loaded. This was because it should just load and launch... which obviously encountered problems when they had a scrub that required destacking a few years ago. While they frantically created a way to unload the propellant at the time, this would have been after the decision to not run a load, sit, unload test.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ThinkBeat 2y agoThinking about recycling on the ISS. Whatever can be reused is a big plus. I often find it fascinating to ponder that most all atoms on earth have been here a very long time and will stay around for a very long time. (I think). When I drink a glass of water, I figure atoms making up this specific water has probably been through the cycle of digestive systems and plant millions of times. and yet it is wet, tasty and safe. IIS is a closed system. In theory all the atoms remain. Currently they do recycle urine. What would be involved in breaking down fecal matter far enough that something nutritious could be recovered and reused after a proper and safe process. There has to be a lot of useful atoms available in it. Presumably, the energy required to do anything like this would make it entirely impossible.
- jaredhallen 2y agoNot an expert in this area, but I don't think the ISS could be considered a closed system. I hear you on the atom angle, but there's energy to take into consideration as well. I suppose in theory it could work like one of those self contained ecosystems in a glass ball or whatever - those still take in solar energy. The issue you'd have to tackle is that mammals are ingesting carbon based food, taking the energy out of it, and exhaling the carbon through respiration. Their bodily waste is mostly either nitrogen or bacteria, which can be converted through natural processes into forms that plants can uptake in conjunction with the aforementioned exhaled carbon. So basically it seems to me like the most straightforward way to achieve what you're suggesting would be to use the processes we already use on earth.
- a3n 2y agoIt's sounding like Boeing and NASA ignored the most important lesson from Challenger: Don't launch if you know there's a problem. And for the same reason: political and business pressure.
- TheHumanist 2y agoExactly where my mind has gone repeatedly in this saga. How do you all not understand this now? Fix your shit, then launch. But, as you said... Just as with Challenger, business and political pressure.
- bankcust08385 2y agoIt's the best effort a strategic defense contractor can deliver without competitive bidding or nonperformance penalties. Why should they deliver anything but failure when the government (NASA) will just ask them to do the same thing again with a "different" result? They pinky promise it will be different this time.
- bitcharmer 2y agoIt hasn't failed. The invoice was issued and paid for. That's Boeing's only priority