I listened to the whole conference and here's my impression:
1. NASA manager Steve Stich said there's a relatively wide "band of uncertainty" in how risky a Starliner return is. Some (many?) NASA engineers are at the high end of the band and are advocating a return on Dragon instead. Boeing is obviously at the low end of the band and thinks it is a low risk.
The problem is, the data doesn't rule out either side of the band. So they are trying to get more data to narrow the uncertainty (in either or both directions). [Interestingly enough, the data from the White Sands testing made them more worried because it revealed the Teflon seal deformation.]
But my sense is that if they don't narrow the uncertainty (i.e., convince the NASA engineers) then they will very likely choose a Dragon return. That is, it sounds like if nothing changes, the astronauts are coming down on Dragon.
2. Stich said they need to decide by mid-August, in order to have time to prepare the Crew-9 launch for Sept 24th. So we'll know by then.
3. They emphasized that (a) the thruster problems are all fixable (given time), and (b) that even if Starliner returns without a crew, they will have learned enough from the test to potentially certify the capsule for regular service. This is probably the only way they'll be able to keep Boeing as a provider. A redo of this mission would cost Boeing half a billion dollars, easy. And since the contract is fixed-price, this would just add to Boeing's losses. So I expect they will certify Starliner even if it comes down without a crew.
4. In some ways, Starliner is being held to a higher standard than Dragon Crew-2. If Starliner were the only vehicle available, NASA and the astronauts would absolutely take the small risk and come down with a crew. But since Dragon is available, I think NASA is thinking, "why take the risk?"
5. There's a huge difference between how NASA engineers and lay people look at this issue. Many people (particularly on Twitter) have a binary safe/not-safe view of the situation. Either Starliner is safe or it is not. Either the astronauts are stranded or they are not. But the engineering perspective is all about dealing with uncertainty. What is the probability of a bad result? Is the risk worth the reward? Even worse, everything is a trade-off. Sometimes trying to mitigate a risk causes an unintended effect that increases risk (e.g., a bug fix that causes a bug).
I don't envy the engineers, either at NASA or at Boeing.
I think many might not be aware of Starliner's sordid history. It has failed essentially every qualification test in various ways. Their pad abort test (where you simulate a launch abort while on the launch pad) resulted in only 2 of the 3 parachutes deploying in beyond optimal conditions. NASA considered that such a resounding success that they let them completely skip the far more challenging in-flight abort test. Their first automated mission to the ISS completely failed and did not make it to the station. NASA finally required a redo from Boeing and their second one did make it to the ISS, but only after experiencing widespread leaks and thruster failures literally identical to the ones that have now left these astronauts stranded.
If SpaceX or another company had remotely similar results, they would never have been greenlit. For instance in spite of a flawless pad abort test, NASA required SpaceX also carry out an in-flight abort. And that's completely reasonable - you don't simply skip tests, even with optimal performance. Skipping tests following suboptimal performance is simply unjustifiable. And so I think we're largely looking at another Challenger type disaster caused by a disconnect between management (and likely political appointees) versus engineering staff, rather than inherent risk. But this is not a vessel that should have ever had a single human anywhere near it, and so their official comments (and even actions) on the situation are going to be heavily biased due to their own behaviors.
They also wrapped their avionics cables in flammable tape and had to redo everything. The original, approved tape was still available, not a supply issue. I think that is pretty telling.
Inflammable means flammable? What a country!
/s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym :)
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings
Inflammable has one meaning.
"in" denotes the opposite, so "inflammable" has been used to mean not flammable due to expectations of grammatical consistency, and as a result the word is generally preferred to be avoided entirely nowadays in favor of either "flammable" (or "highly flammable"), or "nonflammable".
"Flammable" is such a weird word. Folk etymology would derive it from a transitive verb "to flame" that doesn't really exist (i.e. is not used, at least not that way).
There is a transitive verb "to inflame", which is common. It derives from the noun "flame" and the prefix "in-", which when applied to nouns makes it a verb meaning "to cause [the noun]".
They also ignored the common word "inflammation", which nobody thinks means "to stop your tissues from flaring up".
None of that matters. People parsed "inflammable" differently and arrived at a new meaning. But I just find it odd that, while doing that parsing, they never considered that they never use the verb "to flame" in ordinary speech.
Inert occurs in the same “domain” of chemistry that suggests as nothing will occur to a given material.
"Inert" goes further, it says the material is chemically unreactive.
Whereas wood or fabric could be flammable or nonflammable depending on how it's coated or treated.
Ayuh, it's English, it doesn't have to make sense as long as it makes sense.
'Flame' as in 'to catch fire' has some rare usage in English- "The main blaze of it is past, but a small thing would make it flame again" says Shakespeare. The more common usages are metaphorical- 'flame with passion', or more modern 'flamed them online', though I don't really see that usage much anymore either.
Noninflammable for the maniacs.
Uninflammable, please.
+1 By the way, Dutch has "onontvlambaar"
English Trying to make sense for one second challenge. Level: Impossible
It's always amusing all the gotchas that exist in English. I'm glad I grew up in it rather than trying to learn it as a second language.
This interpretation is based on incorrect decomposition of the word.
In this case, the "in" prefix means "in/on". Think of it as "inflame" + "able". Similar to how "inflammation" doesn't mean "a state of not burning" and "inflamed" doesn't mean "not burning". Also see "ingress", "ingest", "inaugurate".
I'm only an armchair etymologist and this is wild speculation, but I think that the meaning of the "in" prefix might depend on whether we get the word directly from Latin, or whether it comes through French.
That's arguably a factoid.
We should coax them into using coax instead.
Or, we should ax that co. from supplying space missions.
My eyes get inflamed just reading the word, wondering where it could have come from.
To fix your word, just wrap it in-flammable tape. Not sure it's going to work, thats what they did with Starliner anyways.
Who approved the design, and are the Engineers still employed by Boeing? Curious minds would like to know. Any way to trace this from public documentation?
IIRC it was Kapton tape, technically what they did was fine, Kapton tape is commonly used for things like that. The problem was that they used it in places that might get hotter than the tape was rated for.
Edit: Actually, looking around a bit, doesn't seem like there's any official mention of what kind of tape it was. Kapton tape seems to be the popular assumption but there's no evidence of it.
Digging a little bit on this, it seems it could be a one digit part number difference and fat fingering...
P212. Silicon adhesive with up to 200 C insulation. https://www.nitto.com/au/en/products/e_parts/heat_resistant0...
P213. Acrylic adhesive with up to 155 C insulation. https://www.nitto.com/au/en/products/e_parts/heat_resistant0...
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=gm840m...
It might not even be a fat-finger, they might legitimately use 200C rated tape where it's needed and 155C tape where the higher spec is not needed. I am not a kapton expert but maybe higher temp ratings are less flexible or less resistant to hard vacuum or something like that. This might just be a plain old engineering QA issue. These are complex machines, and these sorts of things happen.
I don't know how space-rated QA works, as I am but a lowly terrestrial engineer, but I imagine there are specs for each portion of the machine calling out electrical ratings, temperature ratings, vibration ratings, etc. If the spec definitions for that section of machine are bad it's hard to do proper QA against those specs.
Accounting.
> It has failed essentially every qualification test in various ways. [...] Their first automated mission to the ISS completely failed and did not make it to the station. NASA finally required a redo from Boeing and their second one did make it to the ISS, but only after experiencing widespread leaks and thruster failures
I don't follow spaceflight news in any great depth - but doesn't SpaceX also have a rocket thingy that keeps exploding?
Isn't "just launch over and over until it stops exploding" the way rockets are made these days?
Different types of tests. The SpaceX ones were mostly supposed to do that.
How do you know what kind of test it was supposed to be?
You follow the news and the public statements on the goals of the test? SpaceX isn't exactly tight lipped about their philosophy and what they hope to learn from each test.
Can you share an example of a pre-launch announcement so I know what they hope to learn? I haven't seen anything about any upcoming test's goals as they approach, but I also don't know where I would look.
Dunno about that exactly but Everyday Astronaut youtube has a lot of stuff. Here on the early starship strategy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM6WqjJCKQo
Usually on SpaceX's X or Musk's X, for example:
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1762237289231757406
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1798692089766805813
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1792629142141177890
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1783929534955589885
Or SpaceX's summaries for after the test:
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
There also tend to be good articles from dedicated space reporters like Eric Berger, Stephen Clark or Michael Shaetz:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/we-know-starship-can-f...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/06/spacex-starship-fourth-test-...
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/spacex-video-teases-po...
The "mainstream" reporting on these tends to be pretty awful and a glaring display of Gell-Mann Amnesia, but the more popular space journalists tend to be pretty good. I provided specific examples because there are also "journalists" known for intentionally distorting the facts to prop up their biases.
The goals for the next flight test seem to be to try to catch the booster (if they can get the necessary regulatory clearances) and to try to perform a controlled reentry of Starship again, this time with an upgraded heat shield to hopefully take less damage than the previous attempts. It'll end up being mainly a control systems and shield material test since future prototypes which are already being built have changes to the fin locations which also mitigate some of the heat shield issues seen in the previous test.
There's also talk of towing it to Australia after splashdown to study (also depends on if they can get the necessary regulatory clearances).
I wouldn't be surprised if the goals change though, I feel like they might decide to do another simulated catch over water for the booster (since while it was technically successful in IFT-4, one engine did blow up), and similarly I doubt they'll have the clearances to tow the ship to Australia as fast as they'd like.
SpaceX is pretty open about optimizing for many iterations, a bit like the philosophy in software of shipping an MVP to get user feedback sooner for future iterations. Boeing has an established culture that's more like traditional waterfall development. When you watch their launches, they have tiers of objectives that get less and less likely to succeed - they plan to push even if failure is likely tlso they can learn from both their successful objectives and the eventual failure.
It's a different philosophy. Starship (the in-development SpaceX rocket) has taken the "test as fully as you can add often as you can" route, and no people will be getting on it until it's reached a high level of reliability.
Starliner was not developed that way at all. It was supposed to be developed with much more up-front work to make sure that it would work correctly out of the gate. All of the mentioned Starliner tests were certification tests, whereas all of the Starship tests so far have been 100% expected to fail in some way, but with a more ambitious goal about how far it gets.
Putting this more bluntly:
Starship: "We expect this to fail, but we will learn valuable lessons." -> Fails -> "That was fun! Next!"
Starliner: "We expect this to succeed." -> Fails. "Well, shit."
Fundamentally different engineering and design philosophies.
It's not a difference in philosophies, it's different stages of development and testing.
Starship and Starliner are very different things. Starship is the launch vehicle and a novel one (as in, it's not just a rebuild of an existing system, it's got new components and design elements). The failures we've seen so far were all, to some extent, expected though the particular modes of failure may not have been anticipated. They were launched with the intent of discovering the failure modes and responding to them with changes to design and manufacturing.
Starliner is now where Dragon Crew was with DM-2. Both tested with uncrewed flights and various test scenarios before their crewed flights. DM-2 and this flight are flights where nothing should go wrong. Failure, or critical failures at least, are unanticipated events. Otherwise you wouldn't be putting people in them yet (both vehicles are capable of operating autonomously, there's no reason to put a person in them if you aren't confident in the vehicle). The same philosophy applies to both Dragon Crew and Starliner at this stage.
Completely different case, though most reporting doesn't make that clear.
The first time you build a physical rocket and test sending it up, it's almost certain to fail. Seeing how and why it explodes is pretty much the purpose of launching it!
I could say the same thing about software
Yes, SpaceX has a rocket that keeps exploding, which is their new in development rocket Starship. They don't use Starship to launch people yet though; they use their much more reliable Falcon 9 instead. Blowing up rockets while they're in development is fine; blowing up rockets that have people on them is less fine. Boeing's Starliner should not have carried people until all its developmental problems were resolved
"Isn't "just launch over and over until it stops exploding" the way rockets are made these days?"
If the cargo was a bunch of rocks and Boeing paid for the launch, you would have been right.
But this was a manned mission ordered by the US government. At this phase of development, nothing should be left to chance.
The issue is that you don't normally let humans on them until you've proven they don't explode. If Boeing had followed each of those incidents with a re-do where everything went perfectly, it wouldn't be a problem.
That's SpaceX's philosophy, but Boeing operates on a measure-twice build-once philosophy where everything is supposed to be close to perfect in the first place.
Sounds like it might be better if Boeing dropped out if their thing doesn't work properly, costs much more and is mostly in there through political lobbying.
I am certain that if Boeing thought that they could drop this without repercussions, they would absolutely do it.
They said a year or two back they will refuse to take on new fixed-price contracts going forward. Apparently the only way they can be profitable is by scamming taxpayers.
Time for nationalization, then.
If a producer of critical infrastructure cannot make profit without cutting corners, it should be nationalized so that the need to place profit ahead of anything and everything the producer does is eliminated.
There will be businesses cases written about what happens when any organization becomes completely over burdened by risk mitigation. This applies to government as well. One reason nothing can be done. (Also interestingly it correlates nicely with the average age of decision makers as they approach death).
The issue with Boeing isn’t risk mitigation.
The problem is that they have managers that don’t understand basic engineering and manufacturing practices, and that focus entirely on short-term financial engineering.
Case studies for those sorts of mistakes have already been written. For example, look at the US automotive bailout and collapse of Detroit, or read up on IBM and GE’s performance over the last decade.
AT&T is another one and you’re seeing the same thing play out in the entertainment sector with Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney and one could argue Google is on the same path.
Financial engineering is a dead end in multiple industries but will continue unabated because of how the management employee lifecycle works — the people who run companies into the ground are long retired with their huge comp packages by the time the company is defunct.
It's fairly obvious at this point that Boeing's problem isn't one of too much risk mitigation.
name one Soyuz operation to the same space station that resulted in a similar failure....
It would seem that Dragon is being held up to the same standard that was set for Soyuz...Boeing is the only one failing....
We are looking at a testing and engineering failure combined of Boeing.
Soyuz MS-22 had to be ditched last year due to its coolant failure.
I think shade needs thrown at NASA for taking too long to make SpaceX a part of this solution. If they are sending up an unproven vehicle, why not have SapceX already on stand by? These astronauts should have been home in June, now they are saying they might not be home until 2025? someone needs fired.
because astronauts being in space isn't a problem. the ISS always has a capsule docked to it in case emergency evacuation is needed
You forgot (IIRC) 1/4 parachutes failing on the landing of second launch and the cables on the remaining parachutes not being within load factor.
This is a highly inacccurate post.
The companies could themselves propose certification and NASA only said if it is ok, if you didnt test you had do more certification work. NASA didnt require an abort test for either company. SpaceX just decided to have one, Boeing didnt.
The parachute test had nothing to do with abort tests.
When I worked at Boeing, I talked with my lead engineer about this. He said there were indeed some excellent engineers who could not live with the possiblity of making a mistake. Boeing would find jobs for them that were not safety critical, like design studies of new aircraft. There they could be productive without the stress.
Personally, I found the stress to be motivating. It meant I was doing something that mattered.
I find the solution of giving non-safety-critical posts to the engineers that care most about safety very indicative of the culture at Boeing.
"engineers who could not live with the possiblity of making a mistake" is not the same as "engineers that care most about safety"
You think they'll be sloppy about safety and then just kill themselves when someone dies?
You think the entire Starliner project is just engineers being sloppy?
Of course not, if there's one thing Boeing is famous for right now, that's their attention to safety.
I believe their motto is "Safety to the Max".
So why do you assume that they'll be slopping and kill themselves? Why is that the only option? Couldn't someone make a mistake? Couldn't the person just be riddled with guilt and just abandon their career.
I'd prefer not to believe they tried to screw up on purpose.
Back when I started engineering school, we tended to add more constraints to systems than what they actually need believing that we were making them more secure and "safer".
"This will make sure we cover edge cases we're not aware of", we thought.
Later we discovered such systems are called "hyperstatic" and that they are actually more fragile and more prone to malfunction. What we should've aimed for are isostatic systems, where less constraints meant more stable systems.
I'm not saying Boeing engineering aren't aware of this. Of course they do. I just wanted to show an example of how trying to avoid mistakes *may* lead to less safe systems.
Sure, but this just assumes they don't know what they're doing (which, well, is probably true). It doesn't refute the point that you want to put people who are obsessive about safety in charge of safety.
I work for a healthcare company, and we definitely put in charge of safety people who stress about a patient coming to harm, not people who are so-so about it.
I read GP as relocating people who were paralyzed by safety.
E.g. the developers who never ship code because they always want to write the better version of the thing, that they thought up while building the current version
At some point you have to look at a less than perfect design and answer the question of whether it's good enough for the requirements at hand.
It's about engineers who are paralyzed by the thought that if they make a mistake, people will die.
It's not about striving for perfection.
It sounds like they'd burn out and quit, and management would rather find them a place where they can stay than lose them.
It's not about burnout. It's about otherwise competent engineers who are paralyzed by fear of making a mistake.
Finding a productive place for them, where their expertise counts, but peoples' lives don't hang on the results, is just good management.
Right. Some want to work on the hard safety issues because they do care about it.
It's space. If you want safe you stay at home. There will always be a risk when you ride a rocket into orbit.
should we apply this to boeing's planes too?
Yes, there will always be a risk when you ride a 737 into orbit too.
Yes, just like you also do with Airbus too, and any other plane manufacturers. You already factor in risk every time you set foot in a car, too, and a car is a far more dangerous vehicle. Danger from crashing is an inherent danger in travelling faster than on foot, and when you're on foot you're also facing the risk of being hit by those moving in those fast vehicles.
No because we're not talking about that.
Should be applied to aircraft in general, yes.
It is mind boggling just how many things need to work perfectly constantly consistently to maintain safe flight. This goes for both Boeing and Airbus (and Embraer, Cessna, et al.); all of General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, and Rolls Royce; etc.
Yes, there are no degrees of safety, might as well strap yourself to a cannon bomb and ride it!
The whole point, as I read it, is that those engineers could not handle "degrees of safety".
That's not remotely what he said.
Very interesting insight. Thank you!
Right now, I’m sure Starliner engineers are under a lot of stress. But I really believe that the program will get through this and end up being successful.
It's a bit like finals in college. I knew that without the stress from the threat of failing the finals, I wouldn't apply myself to learning the material. Stress brings out the best in people.
It's like "angle of attack" in a wing (funnily enough, given the topic).
Increasing it works up to a point (increasing lift) but at the cost of increased drag and, at a certain point, a stall. I've found myself, at different points, "coasting" (gliding) and "stalling" (pulling up too hard when I'm not in the right conditions). Long-term burnout is like being "behind the power curve" and gradually losing energy.
It's hard for me to imagine... I've been in a position to work on training software for some aerospace equipment and maintenance, but even that was well defined before I touched it. The closest I've come to that level of stress was working on security provisioning around financial systems. Hard to imagine being responsible directly for people's lives, not just livelihood.
Maybe. I don't believe that's true, but let's assume it is.
They SHOULD be held to a higher standard. Of the 16 US astronauts that have died in the space program, 14 died on the shuttle which was Boeing. That, coupled with Boeings recent deterioration and demonstrated disregard for human life, makes it clear that Boeing needs to be kept on a short leash.
As opposed to SpaceX with literally no history of human rated spaceflight? Neither of these companies have earned reduced standards...
Edit: To clarify, this applies to the certification process, not current performance.
They've launched 12 crew missions in the last 44 months putting 46 people in orbit.
Right, but first they certified it for human-rated spaceflight by scrutinizing it very closely and testing it very rigorously.
They certified a modification to an existing spacecraft that was already proven. Starliner is a bespoke from scratch vehicle.
Are you suggesting they did or should have relaxed the human-rated spaceflight certification standards for Crew Dragon?
No, they actually have made them go through more rigor than Starliner has been subject to.
What I'm saying is that Dragon was built upon an existing proven platform. The effort needed to convert the cargo module for human spaceflight is less than the effort Boeing needed to create a module from scratch. AND SpaceX still had to go through more rigor with Crew Dragon than what Boeing has had to do with Starliner.
The certification standards for Starliner have been reduced compared to Dragon, and Boeing is asking for them to be reduced further still.
You're aware that SpaceX routinely performs crewed missions, right? There's been at least a dozen now.
How many of those happened before testing and certification was completed?
If you count the ones from before certification was complete, then there was one more than I counted. A baker's dozen instead of an even dozen launches.
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasa-and-spacex-complet...
“The Crew Dragon, including the Falcon 9 rocket and associated ground systems, is the first new, crew spacecraft to be NASA-certified for regular flights with astronauts since the space shuttle nearly 40 years ago. Several critical events paved the way for this achievement, including grounds tests, simulations, uncrewed flight tests and NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 test flight with astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley earlier this year.” [from 2020]
Dragon did test flights demonstrating that the systems worked, Starliner has so far only done test flights demonstrating that the systems do not, plus a pinky promise that it'll work the next time. We do not know if, say, the abort system works, because the only time it was subjected to a full test, it failed. This is not a matter of SpaceX not having experience building human-rated craft and trying to get unearned credit for competence, this is a matter of Boeing trying to use their history to get unearned credit.
In the context of standards used for certification, I would count only flights from before certification was complete.
There was one flight with two crew to the ISS: the same test Starliner is currently attempting.
I agree with your analysis that Boeing does not deserve to have lowered standards. I'm suggesting that neither did Crew Dragon before certification. I'm not suggesting their systems or records are comparable, I'm simply arguing that unproven systems should be tested rigorously before being certified for human-rated spaceflight.
Boeing didn't make the space shuttle.
Boeing did largely design build the orbiter, which is the reusable spacecraft that's commonly referred to as the space shuttle, although it was only a part of the entire space shuttle program. Both disasters though were not the fault of the orbiter but caused by failures of the boosters and tank, neither of which were built by Boeing, but these projects are supposed to be designed holistically and so I'd say all the companies involved in that project share responsibility for the shortcomings of the design.
Rockwell International made the orbiter. Unless they were later merged into Boeing and now perhaps involved in Starliner?
In the early 1970s, NASA had three contractors helping it to design the Space Shuttle: Rockwell, Lockheed, and a Boeing-Grumman joint venture. So Boeing definitely played a role in designing it, although exactly how big its role was in the design, as opposed to the other contractors, I don’t know.
https://www.spaceline.org/united-states-manned-space-flight/...
However, Boeing was not originally one of the main contractors for the actual construction/operation/maintenance of the Space Shuttle. It later became one by buying Rockwell’s space division
Yeah, Rockwell was broken up and that part of the company is now Boeing Defense, although i do think Boeing was directly involved in designing of the shuttle back then. Now you've got me wondering if I'm mistaken about that.
In the case of the Challenger accident, the actual orbiter wasn't the problem. The seals on the solid rocket boosters were. That said, I don't know who was responsible for their design/manufacture.
The teams responsible for their design and manufacture were sounding the alarm about the o-rings being out of their operational envelope. It was management at the manufacturer and NASA that decided to proceed.
Thiokol[1], who were later bought out by ATK who in turn were bought out by Northrop Grumman.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiokol
They love to claim they did as part of their legacy.
While I don't disagree with you, I think it's important to point out that 3 american astronauts died during the Apollo 1 ground test.
Apollo 1 was built by North American Aviation, which was acquired by Rockwell, which is now part of Boeing.
Certifying a vehicle based on a test/qualification flight that was such a failure that it was considered too risky to let the crew fly back on the vehicle sounds about as reasonable as letting Boeing self-certify their airplane safety (instead of FAA oversight), or adding an automated nosedive-the-plane system with a non-redundant sensor just to avoid some training.
Sure, it is cheap, but when, not if, it results in deaths, it will be really hard to justify why someone thought it was a reasonable choice.
An unmanned flight back still significantly narrows the ban of what the risks are and if the return is successful, the returned craft will certainly be inspected in extreme detail.
The returned craft is going to be hard to reassemble from the pieces scattered across the surface of the planet, whether there were people in it or not.
It's unlikely to actually fail, just not unlikely enough to send the astronauts in.
The problem is in the service module which will be jettisoned and burn up in the atmosphere.
Clearly NASA should wait until Starship is available to return the entire thing to Earth in once piece (I'm assuming it will fit or could be made to fit.) :)
Ah, I see.
So long as the crew capsule makes it back properly, that means the service module was good enough to get the job done.
They'd also have data collected during the return voyage.
There is also a risk with Dragon, just estimated to be lower. But both are still space capsules, there is a risk involved with both.
They're safer than the Shuttle was, though. Capsules are designed (I believe) to survive total loss of control on entry, although a purely ballistic entry can have decelerations of up to 15 gees, IIRC.
The capsule will survive, the strawberry jelly on the inside, not so much.
This is a semantic failure. There's risk to everything. But there is a qualitative difference between the risk something might malfunction and that something which has already malfunctioned might be dangerous.
A house full of fire hazards which is nevertheless not on fire can not be directly compared to a house that is currently on fire.
You should read about Apollo 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_6
Apollo 6 was an uncrewed test flight of the Saturn V. It was almost a disaster. Pogo oscillations almost tore the vehicle apart. And after staging, two engines shut down early and the rocket had to go into a lower orbit than planned.
But that flight was enough to certify the Saturn V for human use and they launched 3 astronauts to the moon on the next Saturn V flight, Apollo 8.
And pogo oscillations continued to be a big problem for the Saturn V rockets...
One of the interesting things about testing is how you interpret the results.
e.g., you have to run three test cases with passing results to pass the overall test and certify the system.
So, you run the test. All three test cases pass with flying colors, but during test #3, something that you hadn't thought of came up and it could be a problem.
What do you do now? You've reached your stated qualification for passing the test but now there's this wrinkle. Which one should take precedence in certifying the system for use?
It's not NASA's job to keep Boeing in the running. It's completely up to Boeing to produce a vehicle that can safely and reliably get crews to and from orbit, and to do the appropriate amount of testing beforehand. If they can't be bothered to do that with the understanding the cost of failure, that's on them.
It certainly is part of NASA's job to consider long term space travel needs. And supporting a competitor to SpaceX now as a long term strategic benefit has a lot of value as opposed to being held hostage to monopoly pricing in the future.
Companies invest in their supply chain and invest in not being beholden to a single supplier (unless they control that supplier) all the time.
Surely we can agree though, that given Boeing's recent track record and how they've handled calls for improved processes, combined with NASA's typical standard of safety and care, they aren't a good strategic long-term choice, right?
Like, I understand what you're saying here, and I agree -- if the US wants to have serious private-sector competition in the space sector, that's arguably a good thing. SpaceX's advances in reducing launch costs by implementing launch vehicle reusability to a degree that was never seriously approached before are objectively a good thing for the sector. Some of the work Firefly appears to be doing is really interesting, and could lower the cost of much of the work around launches substantially. Blue Origin also exists and may at some point be more than a billionaire's vanity project.
Boeing isn't the only competitor in this space, and some of the smaller companies are hungrier. They're actively innovating, and because their existence is on the line, they do the work to make sure their projects are beyond reproach by the time they're picking up NASA work or sending people into orbit (usually with a pretty high degree of success).
I mean, Boeing is certainly a good strategic long-term choice today for an alternative because they are one of 2 companies that have the capability to launch people into orbit. If you are saying that a different company should have been chosen 10 years ago, that's different. If you're saying that NASA should also invest in smaller companies, possibly.
I'm sticking to my guns here -- Boeing and NASA being in this position is not an excuse to go easy on them, cut corners, or otherwise lower any standards. If the US wants to use taxpayer money to prop up the crewed spaceflight sector (which I would agree with in principle despite it not being my tax dollars -- this is IMO an investment in the future and a way to stay competitive on the world stage), then they should reevaluate their approach to a public sector crewed spaceflight option where fewer parts of the process are profit driven.
SLS was a flop but that doesn't mean that the next thing has to be, and while public spaceflight projects absolutely do subcontract work out when it comes to building components, there are big, traditionally-expensive parts of the project that can be offloaded to public agencies where profit isn't a consideration.
That feels completely like an excuse used after the fact to justify keeping Boeing around rather than a principled stance, considering that NASA and Congress were pretty set on just giving Boeing the sole source contract for crew transport to the station.
It's pretty well documented by Lori Garver, one of the people involved in pushing Commercial Crew, how strong the opposition was from both NASA and Congress.
At this point it'd probably be money better spent raising up a Blue Origin commercial crew program than propping up the corpse of Boeing.
It would probably be cheaper still for nasa to employ all of starliners engineers outright, sans management and shareholder profit making. Plus they’d have their own in house rocket design arm building stuff at cost.
If NASA, and more importantly its budgetary oversight (congress) sufficiently values an additional supply chain, it can invest more money in additional tests to get that additional supply chain.
If the value of the additional supply chain does not justify paying more, they can let boeing pay out of their own pocket, or let them drop out. The whole reason Boeing was given a fixed price contract at the beginning was so that this option could be exercised.
Lowering the bar is not making an investment.
In theory it is not. The reality is that a lot of NASA's budgeting and decisions are made based on the pork-barrel politics of the ones who hold the purse strings -- congress.
To me this gives a strong impression of history rhyming with itself. Back in the early 1980ies NASA engineers "close to the hardware" were raising warning, above warning about reliability issues of the shuttles, ultimately being overruled by management, leading to the Challenger disaster.
Then in 2003 again engineers were raising warnings about heat shield integrity being compromised from impacts with external tank insulation material. Again, management overruled them on the same bad reasoning, that if it did not cause problems in the past, it will not in the future. So instead of addressing the issue in a preventative action, the Columbia was lost on reentry.
Fool me once …, fool me twice …; I really hope the engineers will put their foot down on this and clearly and decisively overrule any mandate directed from management.
If the concerns aren't addressed then there's a defined process by which the NASA Administrator (Nelson) has to sign it off.
NASA has learnt from the bad days of blind Mission Management teams.
Nelson. The guy who thinks the far side of the Moon is in eternal darkness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daZyPwCQak8&t=153s
If one wants to be generous, maybe he means dark "to us" because we never see it from the earth.
How many times have engineers been safely overruled?
It doesn't matter when there are lives needlessly at risk. The answer should be zero.
Until management is held accountable and put into prison for their conscious unreasonable decisions against all advice, which led to the loss of life, nothing will ever change in megacorps.
Scott Manley mentioned an interesting twist on this in a recent YouTube video of his: Kamala Harris, chair of the National Space Council, becoming a candidate in this year's Presidential election. The NSC is supposed to guide policy, so she wouldn't normally be involved in this kind of nitty-gritty, but there are people all up and down the hierarchy who would be well aware that this isn't how the media or her political opponents would think about it in the event of disaster.
Given the many organizational failures that Boeing has had in recent years leading to safety problems (cough Dreamliner cough), I'm quite sure that Boeing's engineers have no way to put their feet down.
Afterwards one might come out as a whistleblower. But the fact that the last two whistleblowers wound up conveniently dead (no really, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/boeing-whistleblower-di...) is likely to have a chilling effect on people's willingness to volunteer as whistleblowers.
Except in this case, according to Steve Stich, it is NASA engineers vs. Boeing engineers. And the Boeing engineers are the ones who are "closer to the hardware", while the NASA engineers are just overseeing it.
I have no idea who is right in this case. And even if the crew comes down on Starliner successfully, it doesn't mean that it was the right call. Maybe they just got lucky.
My sense from the call is that, if NASA engineers insist on a Dragon return, NASA management will support them.
Even if Boeing thinks that the chance of a catastrophic failure is infinitesimally small, they probably still can't ignore what a failure would mean for their already bad reputation. So returning the capsule without a crew is probably the safer option overall: if it's ok, it can still be certified; in the unlikely chance of a failure, NASA and Boeing can at least say that they were cautious and didn't succumb to the same wishful thinking that led to the Columbia disaster - and the damage for Boeing in the public opinion would be far smaller than if human lives were lost.
You are ignoring the probabilities though. Risk is probability*potential damage amount, so the lower the probability of damage, the lower the risk. This can result in a low risk even if the potential amount of potential damage is high (when the probability is sufficiently small).
All predictions have a margin of error. Both "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns". Given they don't really understand the cause, we're nearer the "unknown unknowns" area.
It's better to analyze this in terms of the incentive of the particular project managers at Boeing making this decision, since Boeing itself isn't a person making decisions. They might rationally conclude that it might go well and get them promoted but if it goes badly the worst they're looking at is early retirement.
I imagine so indeed, not in the least because all Atlas V launch vehicles are already assigned to missions. The booster for another non-operational flight would thus have to come from either their operational missions, or they'd have to pay someone else to give up their scheduled Atlas V payload. If they fail to buy someone else's Atlas V, they'd have to integrate Starliner onto a new (i.e. non-Atlas V) human-rated launch vehicle, or they would fail to deliver the contracted 6 operational missions.
It's doubtful they actually get awarded 6 missions before the ISS is de-orbited at the present rate.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper comsat constellation which is
targeting our first full-scale Kuiper mission for Q4 aboard an Atlas V rocket from ULA.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/inside...
I'm fairly certain that sources from NASA have said the opposite regarding scrutiny.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/boeing-starliner-...
As it turns out, the official that admitted this was the same Steve Stich.
Dragon was held to a higher standard, they were the newcomers and the corrupt snakes in Congress were looking for any excuse to justify canceling commercial crew and just giving Boeing a blank check again.
For development, you're right. I think NASA considered Boeing a known quantity and trusted them to develop Starliner, while they scrutinized SpaceX because they were worried that they were too cavalier.
But I meant a higher standard for how much risk NASA is willing to take in this instance. If something had gone wrong with Dragon Demo-2, there was no other way to bring down the astronauts. They would have accepted relatively high risk because they had no choice.
But with Starliner, because they have Dragon, they don't need to accept that risk. The risk NASA will tolerate is lower now, because they have an alternative. That's what I meant by a higher standard.
Boeing has burned enough of its reputation at this point that I wouldn't trust their assessment one bit. Bringing back Starliner without the crew seems like a no-brainer, and is the only way to restore some of Boeing's credibility.
So many weeks of anti-Musk cope on Twitter about this issue. People really can't think clearly even about factual issues anymore.
Finally a good summary.
I also picked up on the potential to at least payout Boeing if starliner comes down in good order (which seemed likely). I think that solves Boeings issue and would make them relax on forcing crew.
The problem here is they have a seemingly somewhat safer option going up and down regularly. That is making taking risk MUCH much harder because the downside risk (2 crew trapped in space potentially for a long and slow death) is pretty disastrous especially if a safer option was sitting right there and it turns out the decision to send them down was contract driven.
Given the history of thruster issues that go way back (and keep on repeating despite "fixes") I feel like they'll collect about as much data sending starliner back uncrewed, and then they'll need to be doing fixes for things like the helium issues etc that are compounding the risks. Be great if they could do ONE uncrewed flight more trouble free before putting astro's back on, but their solution is a more expensive with longer lead times than crew dragon (the entire service module is dumped on every launch I think, the rocket is also totally dumped etc)
As a mountaineer, you play with this dichotomy safe/not-safe continuously and simultaneously.. but there comes a point sometimes where close calls add up the stammering indecision enters in, and at that point, in my opinion, you have already been defeated by the mountain. The indecision itself will consume too much of your energy and attention to perform the task even at a risk you could normally tolerate. Your judgement is too compromised to trust, and hubris and self-promising gets people killed.
I think it’s very unlikely that Starliner will ever fly again, regardless of the ultimate outcome of this mission. In its three flights, Starliner has had so many serious problems, it’s obvious that it hasn’t been sufficiently engineered. Why take the risk when there’s an alternative that has been essentially trouble free?
Wat? Have any Dragon missions encountered the number and severity of issues experienced by Starliner?
Maybe they have and are not public knowledge because NASA is less than transparency about its safety predictions and findings. But until the same confidence sapping mission performance is established it is not honest to say that Starliner is held to a higher standard.
Yet another Boeing vehicle to avoid ...
Considering the 'optics' of this, I imagine they will/should certify Starliner not with or without a crew, and at least not after 'enough' time has passed for any audit to be meaningful and for Boeing to prove that they are getting things right. Imagine 'ok-ing' the Starliner, and on the very next mission, the same (or different) critical error happens. Then I bid the NASA folks who ok-ed the Starliner a good start on their next jobs.
If there is one profession with zero tolerance for errors it's the 'space-stuff' because 1) good luck repairing things in space, 2) "in space no one can hear you scream" (profanities because you ended up staying x10 or x100 the time planned)(and I do understand that capacity planning, food, toilets, etc. etc. have been calculated to ensure that they won't be running out of food, toilet paper, etc.)
It would be fun to have a Season 3 of Space Force, and this time instead of Malkovich yelling at Microsoft, to be yelling at Boeing!