6 ms·

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'

by ndiddy 2y ago

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 2y ago
They and their partners (Boeing) are running more tests as we speak - probably expecting more data that could answer some questions.
icegreentea2 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      It clearly helps SpaceX, Musk mostly indirectly, and GOP not at all.
      - booi 2y ago
        Elon is the maga crowd's newest talking head so it helps the GOP at least a little.
        Covzire 2y ago
        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?
        allenrb 2y ago
        Maybe because there’s a larger overlap between HN demographics and those of the Democratic Party versus those of the GOP? That’s beside the point, though. NASA is an agency of the United States Government. The idea that politics do not come into play is naive at best.
- mr_toad 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Dead astronauts are way more expensive.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    The current outlined plan does not require an extra SpaceX launch, so that argument doesn't make sense.
  - tonyhart7 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
>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-cannot-quantify-risk-of-starliner-propulsion-issues/?comments=1&post=43073205 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Apparently not.[1] Although better sources for this are needed. [1] https://simpleflying.com/boeing-starliner-undocking-software-issue-nasa-astronaut-return/ https://simpleflying.com/boeing-starliner-undocking-software...
    - TMWNN 2y ago
      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
bigln 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
An additional week ensures they stay compliant with their rich tradition: a time estimate being off by an order of magnitude.
TheCondor 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.

by ndiddy 2y ago

alsodumb 2y ago

They and their partners (Boeing) are running more tests as we speak - probably expecting more data that could answer some questions.

icegreentea2 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    It clearly helps SpaceX, Musk mostly indirectly, and GOP not at all.
    - booi 2y ago
      Elon is the maga crowd's newest talking head so it helps the GOP at least a little.
      - Covzire 2y ago
        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?
        allenrb 2y ago
        Maybe because there’s a larger overlap between HN demographics and those of the Democratic Party versus those of the GOP? That’s beside the point, though. NASA is an agency of the United States Government. The idea that politics do not come into play is naive at best.
mr_toad 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Dead astronauts are way more expensive.
- XorNot 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  The current outlined plan does not require an extra SpaceX launch, so that argument doesn't make sense.
- tonyhart7 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago

>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-cannot-quantify-risk-of-starliner-propulsion-issues/?comments=1&post=43073205 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Apparently not.[1] Although better sources for this are needed. [1] https://simpleflying.com/boeing-starliner-undocking-software-issue-nasa-astronaut-return/ https://simpleflying.com/boeing-starliner-undocking-software...
  - TMWNN 2y ago
    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

bigln 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

An additional week ensures they stay compliant with their rich tradition: a time estimate being off by an order of magnitude.

TheCondor 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.