NASA decides to keep 2 astronauts in space until February, nixes return on troubled Boeing capsule
https://apnews.com/article/boeing-spacex-nasa-astronauts-starliner-e4e81e5a6c23dee2f8f72260ddea011cOpen linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://apnews.com/article/boeing-spacex-nasa-astronauts-starliner-e4e81e5a6c23dee2f8f72260ddea011cOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
60 replies
That's the correct decision. Last time NASA decided to send back astronauts on a known-damaged spacecraft, they all died.
Better to be safe.
When was that?
The space shuttle Columbia in 2003
And the MBA vampires have bled another formerly great company to death.
But think of all the shareholder value they created!
Stock lost 60% of its value with the last CEO.
That's the final phase of the looting where the suckers are left to hold the bag. The vultures will have moved on long before.
All classes of stock?
...and then destroyed. Too bad most of the vultures who gutted the company are long gone.
It's quite the opposite actually.
Yeah, the last thing you want to see enshittified is space flight.
Honestly the entire space industry has been a corrupt money grab from the start.
It's why Johnson even pushed a moon landing to Kennedy, to get pork for his constituents.
It was an inspired way to sell missile design to the public.
thats it then, isnt it. boeing is kinda done with space[craft] for awhile.
Probably for the best.
On the press conference call, Bill Nelson said he talked to the new Boeing CEO, who said they're committed to continuing with the program.
I mean, what else is he gonna say, without tanking Boeing stock?
“We fucked up and we’re not sure how we’re going to fix it”.
If they said that, I would go buy Boeing stock immediately.
the national train company here said this, along with a list of 10 things they're specifically doing to improve service, and i had forgotten how it feels to actually feel positive about a company statement for once
Anything said in a press conference should be taken with a massive spoon of horse shit.
Manned spacecraft, anyway. I will eat my hat if the next Starliner test flight isn't unmanned.
I feel so bad for these astronauts, I can't imagine being told I'd be stuck through the new year. and this puts the dragon crew half staffed for the work they needed to do. Boeing seriously fucked up here.
Glad they can come home on a safe craft, but there needs to be repercussions and answers.
I'd probably be upset to have my return delayed that much, but I'm sure there are people who would be ecstatic that their space trip got extended. Hopefully those astronauts are the latter XD
Astronauts knowingly take on risk, but the risk is usually of a sudden and fiery/icy death.
To know that one’s bone density and god knows what else will be negatively impacted due to upstream fuckups must really suck.
Welp, that's that. I wonder how this will affect future flights. Will NASA require an extra test flight prior to Crew-1? If so, Boeing will be one rocket short, as all of the Atlas Vs have already been allocated.
No way Starliner flies again. This whole thing has been a gigantic fiasco from day one. I hope they pull the plug and spend the money on programs with a future.
boeing's spending the money not nasa, it's a fixed price contract
When has that ever happened?
only for starliner as far as i know, every other boeing thing is cost plus
finally NASA making decent financial decisions
they really dodged the bullet with this one
Yep, it only took 50 years of lessons with the same contractors to learn it am I right?
Starliner and Crew Dragon both, if we're talking manned space capsules.
crew dragon isn't Boeing is it
No, but it is fixed-price, which I think is what @[email protected] was getting at.
I disagree, they have so much time and money investment into starliner, it has to fly again. They can't throw out 15 years of development.
Sunk cost fallacy. Fuck Boeing, why should the government keep funding this?
It's not a usual cost-plus contract, to my knowledge, the government hasn't funded it beyond the initial half billion. Boeing is taking a bath on this capsule development, needs the crew contracts to recoup, and that's why I don't believe they will abandon it.
This whole thing makes me feel so sad.
I don't know. Part of me feels a bit of glee that Boeing is having to foot the bill for their own incompetence.
They definitely should throw away 15 years worth of development if they are unable to deliver. Any more money spent would be wasted
15 years of development, and they didn't manage to build rubber seals that seal.
They're more than $1.5 billion in hole on this contract, but they must be doing some math on how many future contracts they might miss out on if they back out.
Don't throw good money after bad (or the sunk-cost fallacy).
Though it's not like all that development is lost. They retain all they've learned and developed. Just costs a bit to store the data.
I wonder if it's a nightmare or a dream come true for them.
I mean it's obviously terrifying, but they're astronauts in space for an extended period of time who will have a unique story to tell when they come home. If they write books about it, I'd be interested to read them.
Suni is now up to the 33rd most time spent in space and might climb up to 12th by the time this is all said and done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Most_time_in_space
It really sticks for the astronauts who will get kicked off of Crew 9, though.
It does, but I expect there is decent camaraderie among astronauts and they know who caused this.
Surviving the first and perhaps only crewed Starliner flight, getting a full ISS rotation and a flight home on Dragon feels like a bit of justice for crew who put their careers on hold for Boeing. The Starliner assignments got the short straw and hard to imagine other astronauts not being sympathetic.
The helium leaks on the RCS thrusters were a known problem before the Crew Flight Test, and Boeing gave assurances to NASA that the leaks wouldn't be problematic. What were those assurances based on? I don't know much about spaceflight, but it seems crazy to me that CFT was allowed to launch when there was a known issue that could impact docking and undocking with the ISS, and possibly deprive the capsule of a backup means of orienting for deorbit.
A person has to wonder - did Boeing's desire for a commercial success, at any point, impact their assessments of Starliner's safety? Is it possible that running this project at a set price was an impediment to proper, timely, and safe development?
nah the problem wasn't the helium leaks, it's overheating of the thrusters
What are they doing about incompatibility issues between Boeing spacesuits and dragon capsules?
Probably why it’s going to take till Feb— they’ll adapt it and launch the adapted capsule to retrieve them.
Nope, the February return flight is an expedition that was already planned long before this issue, the only change is that they're going to launch with 2 crew members instead of the usual four, so they can bring back the 2 stranded by Boeing.
NASA says they aren't considering any emergency missions, but it sounds that if they thought it was necessary they could ask spaceX for another launch.
Push comes to shove, they could fit everything into the spaceX capsule that's parked at the ISS, but they don't really want to go over 4 occupancy unless it's an emergency.
So they’ll send up 2 extra dragon suits for the stranded astronauts to use? I thought space suits are so highly customized and tailored to each astronaut that they can’t just do that.
At the press conference, NASA confirmed that there is a spare suit on the ISS that fits, and Dragon will bring up another one. Assessment was that this still presented risk, but less risk than the astronauts taking the Starliner back to earth.
They just need to get close enough. There's already one spare Dragon IVA suit on ISS that's a close enough fit to work. They'll send up another. During training, the crews actually use suits that were customized for other people while they wait for their new ones.
I’m sure they can find a way to beam their measurements down
Couldn’t they just send up some Dragon spacesuits?
The Dragon will be half-crewed on the way up, so that's exactly what they're doing
To nobody's surprise.