The trade-off here is: When does it become more embarrassing to bring them home in the competitor's vehicle than to extend the mission further.
When in 1974 the 56 day planned mission on Skylab 4 was delayed by 24 days it was a major event.
With the current debacle we are past 65 days of a planned 8 day mission. In a past world this would have been seen as a the shame with the fact in which vessel the crew returned, being a just a minor sidenote.
whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union, and it doesnt happen to China, but its happened twice to the US now.
Why is the US giving Boeing a free pass for this? it frankly makes the US look pathetic. News stations quit covering it once the cat was out of the bag that this isnt a "routine evaluation" and the crew is actually just stranded.
23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand?
The U.S. has launched more manned missions in the last three years than China has in the last 20.
China has literally dropped rockets on Chinese villages.
The Soviet Union treated its astronauts as disposable, and covered up many of their failed missions.
What do you consider a free pass for Boeing btw?
Say what you will, Russia still has the most reliable launch vehicle that's ever existed.
Proton? It has about 89 percent success, nowhere close to Falcon 9’s 99 percent success rate.
No, Soyuz. And Soyuz has like 4x-5x number of launches of Falcon 9 so direct comparisons like yours don't work.
Soyuz is the most reliable launch vehicle and spacecraft that's ever existed.
Note that your original comment made no acknowledgement of the number of launches by each country. But now when it suites you, it's all important.
What? I was responding to the person saying falcon 9 is the most reliable vehicle we have.
I was merely pointing out that soyuz has like 1500+ launches over Falcon 9 and that there is no comparison.
Not the current variants. If we’re integrating everything called Soyuz we may we well do the same with Long March and every American rocket that uses similar engines.
Falcon is widely considered the most reliable platform you can launch on today.
Widely considred by whom? Elon Musk? Soyuz has like a 98% average success rate over all the variants.
Every statistical audit I’ve seen by someone with a background in aerospace engineering.
Great. You don’t get to fly on “all the variants,” you fly on the most recent. The RD-107A, 108A and Soyuz-2 are not as reliable as Falcon 9.
As I mention in a sibling post, Soyuz might have more launches, but it also has way more launch failures.
Not just more launches, over a THOUSAND more launches. Soyuz has a 98% success rate. Falcon 9 needs to do A LOT more launches before it can be comparable.
You made the comparison first. Are you taking it back then?
Jesus please go back to reddit. I was simply pointing out that Soyuz has had a LOT MORE launches than Falcon 9, literally over a thousand more, so no one can in good faith that Falcon 9 is more reliable given the numbers and statistics.
But they can claim, in good faith, that Soyuz is? Im afraid thats not how logic works. Either the error bars are too large to take a position, or they aren't. You can't have it both ways.
Fact remains that Soyuz has over a thousand more launches than Falcon 9 with an average success rate of 98% over all its variants. It's the single most reliable launch vehicle mankind has ever made.
A thousand more isn't very much when you consider "Soyuz" (the way you're using it) has been around since the 60s.
Falcon 9 had its first flight in... 2010.
Id personally rather ride Falcon, but to each his own I guess.
Looking at the three most recent Soyuz variants:
Soyuz-U had 765 successes in 786 flights. (97.3%) Soyuz-FG had 69 successes in 70 flights (98.5%) Soyuz-2 has 160 successes in 166 flights (96.3%)
Falcon 9 has 362 successes in 365 flights. (99.1%). That includes the partial failure of the CRS-1 mission, which successfully delivered CRS-1 to the space station but released secondary payloads into a lower than expected orbit. It does't include the AMOS-6 fire, which would bring Falcon 9 down 98.9%.
Falcon 9 is more reliable than Soyuz.
Interestingly none of those numbers is enough to give a significant difference between failure rates in a chi-squared test with p < 0.05 - not even if you pool all the Soyuz variants. Though they do all hit p < 0.10.
Thanks for running the numbers, which I think prove that it's impossible to say that Soyuz is more reliable than Falcon, even if you count AMOS-1 (which feels like it should be counted) and CRS-1 (which I don't).
Russia != Soviet Union. That being said, they've been using roughly the same vehicle for a very long time (20+ years if you only consider the latest gen Soyuz, much longer otherwise). I would hope it is reliable by now.
More than half of Russia's space history is Soviet space history. Russia just happens to be the country that inherited most of the stuff after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Stuff, not capability. Russia’s recent spacefaring attempts have cemented its deterioration.
Capabilities degrade over time for a number of reasons. In this case I assume not only lack of continued investment but also fear management.
The Soviet Union is included in the Russian Federation's history, but not the other way around. Had they said Russia, then sure.
SpaceX has…
I'd argue that a private company, ran by an immigrant, that started with private capital, carrying out the launches makes it more American than if NASA had done it.
Tell that to Vladimir Komarov who launched on Soyuz 1 despite knowing it was a death sentence because if he refused then his close friend (Yuri Gagarin) would have to fly in his stead.
The rocket had several hundred structural problems and they knew it would fail but they launched anyways.
So he died screaming while he burned to death on reentry and he broadcasted it in the clear so that everyone could listen. And they insisted that his remains be shown in an open casket so that leadership would have to look at what they did.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/c...
Or the three backup crew members who flew Soyuz 11 and died of asphyxiation despite the fact that it was a known issue that the cabin pressure valves that led to their deaths did not reliably close automatically. Manually closing them was not part of their reentry flight plan and the only thing they got was a warning from an original crew member to do so because it wasn't safe and they wouldn't add it to the flight plan.
Two space shuttles burned up...
Challenger is 100% on NASA but the Columbia disaster was a perfect storm of small mistakes that could be individually safely mitigated (but not all together) more than a blatant failure on any one person or group in the org's part. Additionally space shuttles had experienced conditions extremely similar to Columbia's time and again without any major damage or risk to crew. It still was a failure but it was a much more complex and subtle form of failure than the Challenger disaster.
But neither of those remotely compares to Soyuz 1 or Soyuz 11. The failure in Soyuz 11 had been seen time and again during trainings and testing but was waived away and the only reason it didn't occur earlier was because of pilots unofficially taking steps to mitigate the issue outside of the flight plan that then weren't performed on Soyuz 11. And the failure in Soyuz 1 was expected from before launch. It wasn't a statistical probability that the team made a risky gamble on (like Challenger) but was a definite death sentence. Soyuz 1 is equivalent to if you had the Challenger failure but on several hundred different parts of the rocket instead of on just one.
Either way the point of my original comment was to dissuade the notion that the USSR didn't have embarrassing crewed failures in space flight, not to try and pick sides on who was worse.
Read The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker. In manufacturing, it’s always a perfect storm because of the variation of Murphy’s Law that’s usually in effect: Everything that can go wrong, usually goes right.
Oh 100%. Columbia was an organizational failure but it wasn't any one person/org's negligence like Challenger was nor was it a gross disregard/disrespect of the lives of the astronauts/cosmonauts like Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 were.
My comment was mainly to address the suggestion that those disasters were equivalent to the gross disregard for life that the USSR put their cosmonauts through.
Reading analysis[0] of the damage caused by a foam strike on STS-119 makes the loss of Columbia feel more "on NASA" to me than not. NASA knew a foam strike could be catastrophic and that the odds of a bad strike weren't astronomically remote. It had already happened on STS-119 and only luck prevented loss of the vehicle.
I didn't have that take initially, but the Causality podcast did an episode[1] on it a few years ago that got me into reading more about it.
[0] https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts119/090327sts27/
[1] https://engineered.network/causality/episode-24-columbia/
As did an early Apollo capsule.
This stuff is still risky even today. It's not like hopping on a flight to Chicago.
this is, frankly, some pretty generous editorializing.
Komarov was selected to command the Soyuz 1, in 1967, with Yuri Gagarin as his backup cosmonaut. refusing to fly has the same consequence for every space program: the backup flies.
as for the "died screaming" claim, thats some malarkey.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a...
What we've learned: American historian Asif Siddiqi has a transcript of Komarov's final moments in the Soyuz. He got it from the Russian State Archive. It goes like this:
Komarov: Activated, activated, don't worry, everything is in order.
Ground: Understood, we're also not worried. How do you feel, how's everything? Zarya, over.
Komarov: I feel excellent, everything's in order.
Ground: Understood, our comrades here recommend that you take a deep breath. We're waiting for the landing. This is Zarya, over.
Komarov: Thank you for transmitting all of that. [Separation] occurred. [garbled]
Ground: Rubin, this is Zarya. Understood, separation occurred. Let's work during the break [pause]. Rubin, this is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over. Rubin, this is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over. This is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over ...
From that article... '"I asked Siddiqi if he thought his transcript had been doctored. He said, "I'm 100 percent confident the transcripts are genuine," though there may be other recordings from other tracking locations.When I showed it to Bizony, he said, "An official Soviet transcript of anything, from the death of a cosmonaut to the birth of a healthy baby boy, isn't worth the paper it's written on. ... Given that we at least broadly trust Russayev's recollection of events, we are entitled to believe that Komarov, for all his discipline as a cosmonaut, would have been entitled to some spitting madness and frustration."'
Certainly that was my first thought when I read "Russian State Archive"
Oh, that's what the OFFICIAL Soviet state archives say! Well, I am certain that they were trustworthy narrators, and I'm sure they would have been careful to make an accurate record of anything embarrassing to the Party.
I saw an old documentary (cannot recall where) about the Soviet space program. They could not afford a lot of testing or simulations on the ground but there was immense pressure to make progress, so they would just launch stuff and try to learn from the results, good or bad.
Maybe China and Russia are less risk averse? Americans hate dead astronauts.
The US has far more deaths per flight than any other nation. There have been 19 astronauts that have died during spaceflight. [1] 14 of them have been American, with the US and USSR/Russia having a comparable number of total launches. The USSR/Russia's most recent fatality was in 1971.
NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing which has left 14 astronauts dead, and now these astronauts stranded. There just seems to be a extreme disconnect between the actual engineering staff and the managerial layer, probably exasperated by the fact that political appointees head the organization.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
"NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing"
This paradox is easily resolved. As risk aversion goes to maximum, the only acceptable solution is to do what was done before. Anything we deviate from doing before is something that could fail in a new and unknown way, possibly bigger than before.
This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies. It is one of the major drivers of their inertia and inability to change course. When the penalty for slightly more failure than before (in anything except money spend, that's OK as long as it's done by high level people) is expulsion and scapegoating and the reward for doing slightly better is a pat on the back and a denied request for a salary upgrade/slight promotion, you converge on having an organization full of people where this is the only path forward, no matter how much acknowledgement there is that the current situation is broken by every last person involved.
To take a really big diversion, one of the deeper aspects of the "move fast and break things" philosophy isn't just about directly moving fast and breaking things; it is creating a culture where people have permission to fail at least a little before being evicted from it. Your biggest successes will always involve some failures on the way, so if you rigorously eliminate all failure from your organization, all but the smallest, most basic of successes will go with it. It's not that you literally want to break things or that managers should necessarily create a "broken things" metric and try to keep it in some band above zero but below catastrophe, it's about making avoiding breakage not calcifying and paralyzing your company by making it the absolute number one priority above all else.
Not really, because commercial air travel had problems early on, and the FAA approach was to investigate, determine root causes, and make changes to eliminate or reduce the probability of them happening again. Assigning blame or scapegoating was not part of their process (not that it didn't happen in the media). And now commercial air travel is very safe.
Except commercial and amateur air travel seems to now be stuck in a local maxima deeply similar to what the parent talks about, avoiding risk by doing the same thing. There are good processes to improve the safety of existing operations and good reasons to keep doing proven things, but innovation is deeply choked.
See the decades long process of trying to switch away from leaded aviation fuel. Small aircraft are all running engine designs from the 1960s despite huge advances in internal combustion and fuel composition in other applications. Getting a new engine design or fuel mixture approved has proven effectively impossible, so processes have defaulted to doing things the exact same way to avoid risk.
See also the 737 MCAS debacle. Boeing was highly incentivized to keep the 737 flight characteristics exactly the same to avoid needing to re-certify the airframe or re-train pilots they invented MCAS to mimic the old behaviour and didn't tell pilots about it, leading to deadly results. Rules designed to allow change actually perversely made it a better option to avoid change (or at least avoid the appearance of change), so risk behaviour defaulted to do it the same way as before.
When is the last time that China or Russia tried testing an entirely new launch vehicle? It is my understanding, aside from upgrades, they have not really built anything new.
Edit: also looking at your list of accidents, China has one with 6-100 deaths.
And USSR has 120 deaths in 1960.
I think you need to look at deaths beyond just Astronauts here.
The only reason the US had so many more fatalities is because the Shuttle carried a larger crew in the first place.
China, at least Modern China is extremely risk averse. Basically if anything bad happens (not necessarily a death) the whole team would go through a lengthy close-looping quality management process. It is only after the success of SpaceX that things seem to loosen up a bit.
I found Xi Jinping’s HN account!
He’s got a lot of them here.
How sure are you about there being no issues or delays?
To be fair, that we know of. It's entirely possible that their re-entry vehicles also had issues that they decided were an acceptable risk, and were proven correct - without publicizing them.
You're right, China and the Soviet Union would never allow a public discussion of technical problems in their governmental programs.
Didn't happen in the Soviet Union, nope sure didn't. they just let the cosmonauts die.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/01/chin...
I agree it makes the US look pathetic.
It was bad behind the iron curtain, so bad, that in ukraine half a million man are willing to fight and die to not go back behind one. The propaganda posters hanging on the wall, had nothing to do with the reality behind it.
At this point, now that the SpaceX alternative has been officially acknowledged, I really don't see how anyone at NASA would be comfortable risking the return on Starliner. If they do and it fails and the astronauts die, everyone will be (rightly) outraged that a viable rescue plan was available and not used. It could become an existential crisis for NASA.
My belief is that the fact that they're publicly "considering" the SpaceX plan means that they've probably already decided to do that and what we're seeing in the media right now is NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.
I hope you're right, but at the same time it would be quite sad if this is all theatrics to preserve the feelings of Boeing fanboys (how do those still exist?)
I doubt Boeing fanboys are part of the equation.
NASA is an executive agency, the President doesn’t like the head of SpaceX, and it’s an election year.
NASA is a huge fan of SpaceX. Look at the Artemis programme and the amount of technology risk concentrated with them. They’d similarly defer to SpaceX if Crew Dragon had an issue.
NASA certainly is deeply entwined with SpaceX, but that relationship predates the Biden/Elon animosity.
Biden has the authority to say that he’s not going to give Elon this gloating opportunity ahead of the election.
Biden also has the authority to make SpaceX catch a seal, strap it to a board, and make it listen to rocket noise through headphones to see if it becomes distressed.
Biden can also fire every right-leaning defence contractor. SpaceX is the darling child of American aerospace. If your media diet is saying anything to the contrary that’s the carrier signal.
There are still fans of Boeing's ability to make money, no matter how bad they are at making aerospace products.
They exist because Boeing gives their voters jobs.
They exist because “real engineering” is something people think ex-software people can’t do. And because some people have a reflexive dislike of Elon Musk.
This is real engineering, folks. By the experienced real engineers at Boeing. Not the idiots at SpaceX whose stuff keeps blowing up.
I gather that they're also worried that the Dragon option turns into another can of worms due to a risk that an automated return of the Starliner could result in bricking the ISS's docking port. Something about how they removed the automated docking/undocking software from Starliner for the crewed mission, for reasons I'm guessing I could not begin to fathom.
It isn't that they removed autonomous undocking. IIRC autonomous docking/undocking were part of the requirements for the commercial crew program. Starliner even did attempt an autonomous docking to the station.
The issue is that of fault handling. If the software detects a malfunction when a crew is onboard, the best option is to switch to manual control. But if a crew is not onboard, the craft should handle the failure on its own in the safest possible way.
So, what happened is that they loaded in software which expects the crew to be available. Now, obviously with thruster malfunctions already happening, they can't assume that a fault won't be detected after undocking, so they have to switch the software over to the configuration where it can no longer rely on the crew as a fallback.
Right, but “switch the configuration” isn’t trivial, they’re estimating something like 4+ weeks of work. IIRC it’s essentially equivalent to reflashing the whole thing and revalidating the install was correct.
I agree, what I'm trying to emphasize is that the current software is able to undock autonomously, it isn't able to handle failures autonomously. Many people seem to be thinking that Starliner had been capable of autonomous docking/undocking and the functionality had been removed for seemingly no legitimate reason. But, if we understand that autonomous undocking is present, but autonomous error handling is not, the engineering reason becomes obvious, that when you have a crew available, they're the better option for error handling than the software.
I'm not trying to make the excuse that's going around about how they don't need to change the software, just the configuration. It's absurd that they need 4 weeks for this change when switching from manual to automatic fault handling should be a basic safety contingency (it'd be necessary if the crew had become incapacitated for any reason).
I'm still not convinced this is sound engineering? Shipping two different versions of the software, instead of having some sort of switch you can flip, seems sub-optimal precisely because it increases your exposure to risks like this where you're less able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances because as soon as you wander off the happy path you're in completely uncharted waters. This feels more to me like yet another example of Boeing cutting corners without the benefit of a full understanding of the implications of the decision because their left, right, top, bottom, front, back, charm and strange hands all have no idea what the others are doing.
Someone on X was saying that NASA's definition of "flight software" includes config files. So it isn't actually the code that needs to be changed, just the config.
I think the need for 4 weeks for a config change is the requirement to test the new config in a simulator (against a long list of scenarios) and have it reviewed and approved by various engineering teams, both Boeing and NASA. Plus likely some margin added.
The people making this decision are not 5 year olds. They're not "letting everyone get used to the idea." That may be a nice side benefit of their decision process but the driver is crew safety and data on thruster performance. If they find a rationale for the failures that makes them confident in Starliner they'll use it. That's what the delay is about, not "letting everyone get used to the idea."
In PR terms they are managing the Overton window. As a strategy it is sometimes called gradualism or incrementalism.
Five-year-olds do not use this technique, they do what they want when they want to with no regard for their public image, which is what you are stating NASA will do.
I don't see why NASA would need to manage any "Overton window." NASA loses very little if they decide to send the astronauts back on SpaceX. At worst, and this is very possible, Boeing uses this as an excuse to just ax Starliner, and NASA would be left without a secondary crew vehicle, but they won't lose funding, and their image would probably only go up since they would have made a choice in the interest of safety.
Boeing, on the other hand, stands to suffer a lot of PR and financial damage should NASA make that decision. They have an interest in managing this window. They've been lobbying NASA and tweeted something about how confident they are in Starliner, but they appear to really be on the backfoot.
The whole point is that NASA isn't "letting people get used to the idea." It's really no skin off NASA's back if they send them home on Starliner.
They may not be 5 year olds, but they understand the general public are 5 year olds and may be setting a message to account for that.
They don't answer to the general public.
I want to agree, alas cannot.
I would like to believe you, unfortunately previous events show that decisions are not driven primarily by crew safety and data on thruster performance. Politics plays heavily in most decisions.
(e.g., the Shuttle was sold to Congress as a multipurpose vehicle that could support military, scientific, and commercial missions. However, the need to gain political support led to compromises in its design, particularly the decision to make it a reusable vehicle with an orbiter that could carry large payloads, which led to safety issues. The political drive for cost-effectiveness also led to the program being underfunded, contributing to the Challenger disaster in 1986.
The 'Journey to Mars' program was designed to sustain NASA's long-term goals but lacked a clear timeline, partly due to political hesitance to commit to a specific date or strategy that might not align with subsequent administrations' priorities. The program was influenced by political leaders' desires to show progress in space exploration while avoiding the high costs and risks associated with a definitive Mars mission plan.)
I wonder if the astronauts themselves get some say in this. What if they decide, since it is their lives, that they're not getting into the starliner, even if NASA decides the risk is acceptable?
At the end of the day NASA administrators can't actually force the astronauts into Starliner. Clearly they get some say in it if they're willing to push hard enough.
I'm sure if they have opinions they would share them with NASA and probably their families, and of course if it comes out that NASA ignored their concerns and they perished that would be pretty bad.
However, I imagine that part of becoming an astronaut means that you really have to get comfortable with trusting others to make critical, ultimately life-affecting decisions on your behalf all the time. So perhaps their mindset is more of "we trust that all the smart people on the ground are doing their best to make the safest decision for us, and we'll go with what you say".
If I were one of them stuck up there, though, I'd probably want to get on a video call with the Boeing engineers and look them in the eyes, show them pictures of my family, and ask if they are confident their vehicle will bring me home safely.
NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.
If they are doing comms like that, it's telling, they need to cut it out and focus on their real issues.
NASA's real issue is, and has been for decades, not getting their funding taken away. Not embarrassing themselves is a big part of that.
NASA chose to give 2/3rds of the funding to ULA, and seemed pretty reluctant to include SpaceX - it seemed like they were forced to at the time.
They mismanaged the space shuttle, racking up huge costs on a vehicle that put people's lives at risk, while lying to congress and everyone else about how reliable it was. Feynman's report is a good read. Here's an HN thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989483
In school we learned this is called a “trial balloon”
The messaging from NASA has slowly shifted from "They're returning on Starliner" to "They're returning on Starliner, and we're considering contingencies" to "We'll make a decision whether they return on Starliner or Crew Dragon".
It does kind of seem like NASA is giving Boeing as much time as they can to try to pull a rabbit out of a hat, with the understanding that if they don't deliver, that the Astronauts are going back on Crew Dragon.
Unfortunately, a couple astronauts dying isn't an existential crisis for NASA, especially considering their incompetence in the years after the WW2 German rocket scientists died off.
Or NASA caving to outside pressure to look, relook, and look once more for any possible way to make a Starliner return possible. Likely the same pressure that called for Starliner in the first place.
I find it odd to shame NASA for what is a Boeing failure. They hired Boeing to ferry people to the ISS and back. Boeing built a spacecraft that broke down and is considered too dangerous to carry people on the return leg.
Why are we blaming NASA here?
NASA is to blame for their part as responsible steward of public funds. The agency has bent over backwards, to a fault, to hand a contractor a cherry deal, papered over quality issues, performed dubious acceptance testing, made them look good for PR spinning all the failures, all while paying double vs the other (successful) vendor.
All government procurement is fraught with industry and political pressure which looks like it happened here, yet again.
Lest it looks like a one time thing, have a look at the OIG report about the SLS program perforance from Boeing, in a disastrous condition.
The agency has bent over backwards, to a fault, to hand a contractor a cherry deal, papered over quality issues, performed dubious acceptance testing, made them look good for PR spinning all the failures, all while paying double vs the other (successful) vendor.
Yes, we know NASA has been propping up SpaceX, but how does that relate to Boeing?
Oh wait, NASA has been doing the same thing with Boeing that is has been doing with SpaceX? Giving both companies the opportunity to redeem themselves from (sometimes explosive) unexplained errors while paying them hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to do all of it? It's almost as if NASA is trying to create a launch industry instead of a launch monopoly controlled by an erratic individual who has no issues with just randomly blowing stuff up because he feels like it.
No.
SpaceX delivered. And SpaceX hasn’t been called out in a NASA OIG report as having mismanaged a critical programme (SLS Block 1B) [1].
Boeing brings nothing to the table in launch diversification. Crewliner isn’t a launch programme. It is currently the stupidest aerospace programme on the planet, and that would still be true if it actually worked. (Zero redundancy given its dependence on a deprecated launch vehicle.)
[1] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-015.pd...
SpaceX delivered. Eventually.
Boeing will deliver. Eventually. They always do.
Boeing brings nothing to the table in launch diversification. Crewliner isn’t a launch programme. It is currently the stupidest aerospace programme on the planet, and that would still be true if it actually worked.
Boeing provides a counterbalance to an Elon Musk controlled SpaceX. If Elon were sane, this wouldn't be necessary, but right now he's inflaming race riots in Europe.
At half the cost, pretty much on time and without stranding a crew.
With infinite time and resources anyone can.
As the OIG’s report spells out, Boeing’s mismanagement is material and unusual. It’s wild to ignore that to justify a false equivalence.
In the way a rubber duck counterbalances a battleship.
There is nothing Boeing is working on that challenges SpaceX launch monopoly. Starliner doesn’t challenge Dragon’s monopoly because it only has seven launches left in its lifecycle. (Again, I’m ignoring that it does not work.)
I’m not arguing we go all in on SpaceX. I’m saying we need a second space provider, and Boeing isn’t it. Continuing to bet on Boeing cements SpaceX’s lead.
At half the cost, pretty much on time and without stranding a crew.
SpaceX lost a lot of expensive government equipment in its early days, including DoD satellites estimated to be collectively worth in the billions. (We don't know the actual value because the DoD won't say.)
With infinite time and resources anyone can.
It's a good thing the DoD was willing to keep working with SpaceX after those expensive failures. It's great to have the DoD's unlimited resources on your side even when your CEO fails a drug test that should have gotten your company barred from government contracts. (For those not in the know, Musk openly abuses marijuana, which was still illegal at the federal level in SpaceX's early days, and openly uses ketamine and other psychotropic drugs.)
In the way a rubber duck counterbalances a battleship.
Is SpaceX the rubber duck, because of all of the explosions? The Boeing is built like a battleship, and that's part of the problem: it's too complicated to diagnose from far away. Maybe if they resorted to the rubber duck method of just launching stuff and seeing what doesn't explode?
I’m not arguing we go all in on SpaceX. I’m saying we need a second space provider, and Boeing isn’t it.
Boeing is the only realistic American competitor unless Northrup and Lockheed decide to participate, but those two companies only know one way to do R&D: spend 3x your budget, then come back and ask for more. (And all of the other traditional aerospace vendors are already partnering with Boeing on this project.)
He's probably talkin about how Boeing is multiple years late and still has a shoddy product.
I don't understand the venom here. SpaceX bids on contracts, does the job, and goes home, no drama. Most recently, they split a bunch of contract wins with ULA.
They can’t. They are under political pressure from Congress.
Which, in part, is a good thing because it makes NASA into a technology development government agency that creates jobs in sometimes unlikely places and trains people on skills that are very valuable in other fields.
In an ideal world, NASA would be immune from political pressures the same way the military, which are equally ineffective, seem to be.
The thing about reality is that it always exposes PR spin, cheating, and fraud, eventually. Often disastrously. A lesson that seems difficult to learn, for some reason.
All this is true, but NASA at least deserves some credit for finally moving to fixed-price contracts instead of just shoveling endless dollars at their contractors for nothing to get done. The fact that Boeing is so dysfunctional that they can't deliver anything on fixed-price contracts is their fault, not NASA's, and they will have to either shape up or exit the sector.
Surely, the answer to your question is right there in your comment.
Today everything is noncommittal trial and error it seems… oh sorry, I think I’ve spelled “agile” wrong…
A surplus of agility is the last of Boeing's problems.
In my experience, agile methodologies do not have a a strong correlation to agility.
Boeing (especially Boeing ITDA) did indeed have a run-in with Agile SAFE. It went predictably.
“a waterfall pig with agile lipstick”
Was not an optimistic introduction to the industry...
But there were still some good people, and good teams. But yea there were times where the importance of agile methodology in being preached by an executive agile coach before an emergency task force meeting while planes are falling out the sky.
Boeing's bean counter management seem more concerned about cost saving than quality.
https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...
Oh yes. I worked at Boeing until recently.
What does this have to do with anything? Are NASA or Boeing using Agile for any project related to this mission?
No. Not at all. SpaceX is much closer to “agile” than Boeing or NASA, and I don’t think their success is a strike against agile.
GP just seems to have beef with agile and seems to be trying to loop any random failure, whether or not agile was involved, into the discussion.
Here is a past HN thread discussing exactly this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856590
My beef is with selling incompetence to plan as agile… not with agile done properly (which is rare).
Quite the opposite. Agile is about testing ALL THE TIME and building incrementally. They have flown humans right after a single successful cargo mission. Did they have no further anomalies in the second mission? I seriously doubt it. Now they have a bunch of issues on the RCS and reentry rockets that can't possibly be entirely new (unless someone changed something and people have flown an untested critical component). Worse for Boeing, those components are procured from a third party which now they must be questioning how much QA went into them.
Based on previous articles[1], it's either return them on Starliner or bring them home as part of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission[2].
So the timeline is irrelevant to embarrassment. The Crew-9 mission has been rescheduled to 24 September, a decision needs to be done way beforehand. If the decision is bring them down using SpaceX, the Starliner crew will then stay until the end of the Crew-9 mission in March.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-boeing-starliner-decision/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-9
I thought the 24 September date was for them to return using that Dragon capsule within days, was it not? They would have to send two less people on Crew 9 mission, then wait the entire mission duration to return? That's so odd.
I'd imagine they would just change the mission to send an empty Dragon in March to get them, but use the launched September Dragon to return those Starliner astronauts right away.
That is the date they will send up a half full Dragon for Crew 9 Mission, which will return home in February. They aren't changing its return date, just how many people it launches with. Crew 9 can't take off until there is a free docking port so Starliner needs to be gone (crewed or not) before Dragon can launch (with 2 or 4 people depending on how Starliner leaves).
Does that mean SpaceX needs to wait for Starliner to be gone before trying anything? What happens if Starliner somehow messes up more? God I can't fathom...
IIRC the Crew 9 mission was postponed for exactly this reason. At some point, Starliner needs to be kicked out because they need the docking space. They can't keep postponing ISS missions as they please.
What's really scary is what if Starliner fucks ISS up during the undocking process...
Exactly right. If a bunch of thrusters don't fire up again you now have a huge piece of debris at risk of colliding with the ISS. This probably gives NASA the most pause before doing an unmanned Starliner exit. Having people on board Starliner might be able to recover from more thruster problems but then there'd also be people on a death trap. So an unmanned Starliner might be risking as much life as a manned Starliner and NASA has no idea how much.
As for your earlier question: yes. Starliner has to leave before Crew 9 can dock. And their rules are it won't launch Crew 9 until there is a port for it to dock to.
On the ISS there are 4 ports on the Russian side only compatible with the Soyuz / Progress ships and 4 for the US side. 2 are "Common Berthing Mechanism" (CBD) used by Cygnus cargo modules (and the original Dragon 1) and 2 are "International Docking System Standard" (IDSS) used by newer Dragon 2, Starliner, "and future" vehicles.
The result is that before a second Dragon can launch Starliner must leave. If Butch and Suni aren't on it then Crew 9 arrives with 2 empty seats and 2 new space suits. The contingency exit plan in between Starliner leaving and Crew 9 arriving is for Butch and Suni to lay on the floor of Crew 8 Dragon without pressure suits below the 4 Dragon crew members (their Starliner suits can't plug into Dragon's systems).
Man this really doesn't look good. I wonder if they have to eventually use the Russian option.
Or using Russian Soyuz craft. Not politically viable, but a choice nonetheless
It's NASA's call, not Boeing's, and what'd make NASA look bad is getting the astronauts killed.
NASA have dual launch providers for a reason, and now is the time to take advantage of it.
I'd be amazed if these guys don't come back on Dragon. What's the benefit to NASA on having them coming back on Starliner if the risk level is seen as higher?!
Although, second order effects: if they use the 2nd launch provider option now, that might bring about an immediate and permanent end to the 2nd launch provider option.
Government spending is just about jobs right? Don't you get more jobs if you give money to many different companies instead of one company?
I don't see that. From NASA's POV, they'll want to keep the dual provider setup, and the government doesn't generally seem too happy on having to rely on Musk for more than it "has" to.
I'd like to see the day where Blue Origin replaces Boeing as 2nd provider though.
There is no tradeoff. NASA has no horse in the race. Starliner is made by Boeing. Both Boeing and SpaceX are NASA contractors.
I'm guessing Boeing, even if it's just by virtue of having been around so much longer than SpaceX, has greased a lot more pockets than SpaceX. Consequently, while NASA has no horse in the race, I'm guessing plenty of well connected people in and around NASA have a horse in the race.
the horse they have in the race are their 2 stranded astronauts
and to be honest, if spacex had made the shuttle that was assigned to boeing they would probably have made it work. no plan survives contact with the enemy and no engineering design survives its own prototype. the people working at these companies and managing the teams is what made the difference, not nasa's original design
They also may have to consider for all of the issues that Starliner might have the only way to have competition in the space is to have more than one company that can create spacecraft. But, I agree that this debacle never made any sense and it started to be obvious to have to use another service .
It’s not really that costly or inconvenient to extend their stay on ISS compared to Skylab though. With Skylab 4 you had to somehow figure out how to support food and water for half-again as many astronaut-days as planned but ISS has routine supply ships and a big enough permanent crew that adding two extra people isn’t a strain. From the perspective of ISS operations, having an extra two crew members more than you planned also means you can get more work done. And if you’re one of the astronauts, who has worked hard for the dream of going to space, getting a bunch of extra space days is not exactly an unwelcome surprise either. So not only is it not actually a big deal to keep them on the ISS for longer, but I bet a few people are happy to have an excuse to keep them there.
In 1974 we were less used to the paradigm of giant companies receiving twice their proposed budget and accomplishing nothing with it.