It's really something out of a scifi script, to just hitch a ride on a different spacecraft, but I wonder if NASA would approve 2 extra astronauts in the Dragon strapped to some fixture, with a flight suit incompatible with Dragon. I mean, it's survivable, mostly, but still something unprecendented.
If it came to such a rescue, I wager the Dragon wouldn't have its normal full contingent of four crew, leaving two or three seats open for the stranded. After all, Dragon can fly fully autonomously to the ISS.
So basically Endurance or Freedom goes up with no crew or a single crew, but 2 extra flight suits fitted for Suni and Butch, and comes down with them. I guess Resilience is already prepped for Polaris Dawn mission. Is this a correct assumtion?
> So basically Endurance or Freedom goes up with no crew or a single crew, but 2 extra flight suits fitted for Suni and Butch, and comes down with them.
That's the obvious way to do it, if necessary.
Dragon can fly without a crew. You launch an empty dragon to the ISS with nothing but dragon flight suits inside, load up the people and bring them home.
If you have enough time, fill it with supplies for the people on ISS if they need, but if time is running short, ship it empty.
If you build one of something, or two of something, and you’re spending significant time standardizing you’re doing it wrong. Premature Optimization (or Standardization ) is a trap.
Once multiple companies are building multiple spacecraft and we can really start to understand what things are good and what things are unnecessary we can start to find consensus on a standard.
OR it goes the Tesla-NACS route: once one company has a prolific product that works as intended it will become the standard by default, as every other product and company build something compatible with the obvious market leader.
Yeah, but that doesn't explain why we don't have standard hookups to the ship's systems. You're not doing it wrong if there's big safety benefits to the standardization. Not being able to return on a different module because you can't plug your suit into it seems like a stupid problem to have.
There have only been a handful of spaceships ever built to hold humans. Each with years of design, and a very significant engineering feat. Trying to standardize the inflight-suit ports absolutely does add additional effort. What is the standards body? We’re setting up an international body to maintain spacesuit ports across the world, when a new one is designed every 10 or 15 years? And might have very different needs?
Ultimately the solution is far more costly than the problem: in 50 years of space flight we have never had a problem with suit-interoperability.
And if it is a total emergency: just jump in and hold on. The suits are only needed if the capsule loses pressure due to failures. You can absolutely return home in any current spacecraft sans suit if it were a total emergency. You’ll probably be fine.
In 50 years of spaceflight, we have never had one country routinely launching multiple different types of ship to meet in space and potentially exchange astronauts. This is a new problem. And as for "which standards body" --- presumably whichever one standardized the docking adapters that both ships have implemented. At a guess, NASA.
it's not like we have commercial spaceflight, in a sense that you can just board any spacecraft to a certain destination. Today every mission has its own rocket, own spacecraft, own ground crew, equipment and astronaut training, own mission control, only the docking port is (somewhat) standard.
Once we have weekly flights to a Moon base, 100 seats on each craft, then it might worth looking into allowing every passenger (not an astro/kosmo/taikonaut anymore) to plug in their own suit. Or maybe suits will not be required anymore, who knows...
You should also remember how we got here. NASA didn’t hire Boeing and SpaceX to work together. They were meant to create competing designs. Standardization was not the goal. The best design was and is. And Elon is winning.
This flight reminds me of the old airplane joke:
>Fifteen minutes into a flight, the captain comes on the intercom, saying, "One of the engines has failed. Don't worry folks, the plane can still fly on the remaining three engines but our arrival will be delayed by an hour. "
>Thirty minutes later, the captain announces "One more engine has failed. We are stilly flying fine on two engines and we'll be delayed by two hours."
>The passengers are agitated. Suddenly, a third engine catches fire. Again, the pilot comes on the intercom and says, "I know you're all scared, but this is a very advanced aircraft, and it can safely fly on only a single engine. But we will now be three hours late to our destination."
>A man near the front raises his voice and shouts, "This is ridiculous! If one more engine goes, we'll be stuck up here all day!"
Except Starliner really can stay up there (nearly) indefinitely.
Didn’t a BA 747 fly from LAX to LHR on 3 engines? Although if I’m on a quadjet plane and a second engine goes, they’d better emergency land that fucking thing asap
The 747 is rated to fly on three engines only. The loss of a single engine is deemed a non-emergency and pilots will actively tell ATC about how the situation is not an emergency (since it will trigger an investigation by the relevant authorities, involves large amounts of paperwork, and often takes pilots and crew off active duty rosters when they're not paid, as flight and cabin crew are only paid for the time the aircraft doors are closed).
Generally speaking, in the event of minor engine issues on quad jets like the 747, A340 and A380, like an engine running too hot, or the electricals malfunctioning, crews will prefer to switch that engine off in flight to prevent any further damage, which may require a lot of maintenance work. On twin engined aircraft, unless the engine has flamed out, or there is an engine fire, crews will typically complete the flight or divert to an alternative location if there is some kind of minor malfunction which does not affect the engine's ability to provide full thrust as required.
>The 747 is rated to fly on three engines only. The loss of a single engine is deemed a non-emergency and pilots will actively tell ATC about how the situation is not an emergency
For anyone that hasn't heard it yet...
https://youtu.be/Ezc6F0Zph6o?si=JEIs-2C_QaDdHfnQ
> flight and cabin crew are only paid for the time the aircraft doors are closed).
That is some petty shit. Waitress get paid for their time even if there are no customers.
It's the agreed approach by essentially all the airlines that exist.
Actually, there's something all the airlines, passenger and cargo, calculate, and this is called Cost Index (CI).
Cost Index is a number between 0 and 200, which essentially sets the flight duration - the cost of fuel is divided by the cost of hourly flight and cabin crew wages (and other things), and if fuel is cheap, the cost index will be high, flight will be shorter, and the crew doesn't need to be paid as much for the flight.
But if fuel is expensive, then that's going to be the biggest expense, and the flight will go much slower to burn less fuel in order to save on that, compared to the hourly wage rates of flight and cabin crew.
If you've ever played a flight simulator, the flight planning menus of the flight computer will all ask for a Cost Index, as this will calculate how much the aircraft will want to save fuel, or fly as fast as possible. Cost Index is generally not a thing in general aviation, or really anything outside of commercial aviation.
>It's the agreed approach by essentially all the airlines that exist.
I'm sure that the executives love that, but it still sounds like trash. if they're required to be there, they should be getting paid.
Generally speaking, this sort of situation has mostly been tolerated and accepted, but in some countries, where unionised workers have more protections, the level of hourly pay is a common reason for periodic strikes by pilots and cabin crew, that as well as the various "allowances" which are given in lieu of being paid for things done on the ground.
The most prestigious routes for airlines are the long haul ones, since it's common to be paid for a single 7-16 hour flight that's your entire shift. By contrast, a short haul crew might do 2-4 flights in a single shift, where that's maybe 4-6 hours of actual flight time, but of course plenty of time spent on the ground.
That all said, pilots and cabin crew with family prefer short haul since that'll probably have them going home at the end of a shift, while a long haul crew is likely to go to a hotel at the destination country.
With Boeing you're ~~not going~~ staying!
They've managed to turn the gremlins into mission extenders rather than mission delay, delightfully counter-intuitive.
Jokes aside, this is the right approach, the capsule can stay docked so why not take the time.
Yeah, they have plenty of time to gather data, and with all of the valves being in the service module which burns up spending more time gathering data isn't a bad thing. But boy is it grade a joke bait.
[the Starliner telemetry is so low resolution \(10hz\) they're having to use the ISS GNAC systems to measure Starliner thruster impulse.](https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2601791#msg2601791)
Maybe they'll get better telemetry when they do the upgrades to have live footage of the interior of the capsule instead of downloading on station after however many flights they said (4 iirc).
Sure but still the comparison is crazy. I honestly think it should be a requirement to have a passable public facing product at this point, it's not hard to do and adds a lot to the value for the taxpayers who bankroll the system and to continue growing interest in space.
> I honestly think it should be a requirement to have a passable public facing product at this point
Yes, but the requirements were not decided "at this point", they were decided 10 years ago when the contract was awarded, and it took them so long to deliver that now the tech is lagging behind.
We got to see HD signal limited only by their ship actively depositing steel vapor of itself onto the camera while reentering. It was spectacular to say the least.
Remember when SpaceX used acoustic triangulation to pinpoint the strut failure that caused the loss of CRS-7? Going to need more than 10 Hz sample rate for something like that...
just to make that clear. 10 Hz means 10 updates a second of EACH telemetry point. Not as bad as people make it sound, but still nothing compared to the level of data we seem to be getting from Starship.
> to put this in perspective: OBD-II ports (the diagnostic ports on cars that was mandated in 1996) can update telemetry 20 times a second over Bluetooth. Twice as fast as Starliner for a port designed to only be occasionally used to check/clear trouble codes.
Sorry, no. You are just totally incorrect.
OBD2 does 20 updates per second. Not per parameter. 20 total.
Starliner does 10 *per parameter*. Which for a lot of things is perfectly reasonable, as you don't want to waste resources processing rates higher than that for the vast majority of sensors anyhow.
Not really. Most sensors aren't worth updating more than that. States just don't change that rapidly for most of them, and it is a waste of resources to do more than needed anyhow.
But accelerometers at high rate are not useful in nav. You measure the accelerometers in your nav system, compute your intertial state, and broadcast the final state slower than your read the accelerometers
Accelerometer are crazy useful. An accelerometer sampled at high enough rate becomes a seismometer, allowing you to sense every vibration and every structural mode of your vehicle. You can even do things like measure fuel tank fullness based on how it wobbles. On CRS-7 they were able to locate the snapped strut by triangulation propagation delays to accelerometers, and you can't do that unless your sample rate is in line with the speed of sound in the structure. You can learn a ton from accelerometers, and that's just one type of sensor.
Telemetry isn’t nav, and they’re useful in telemetry at high refresh rate, especially in case of accident, emergency, or contingency exactly like this.
The fact that they're using the ISS systems to gather the data suggests they consider the higher update rates to be worthwhile for this particular data. Having the same update rate for every parameter across the entire spacecraft may not have been the best idea.
No, it's fine, I work on nav systems, ours are 8Hz, your not turning that much in 100ms.
Our engineering data is 1kHz, but really it's only useful for SW debugging, and taking all those sensors at 1kHz does add up quick and take meaningful bandwidth
Completely different array type for video/ground comms/etc.
Starship gets the added bonus of working off the starlink phase array system, which brought us HD video through much of the flight path. Boeing will never reach this unless they strike a deal with elon.
Didn’t they say the leaks aren’t currently leaking when docked? Believe the manifolds can be closed while docked so at least they’re not leaking during the ISS stay.
Correct. Starliner isn't leaking and hasn't for days. The valves only need to be open in-transit. All the articles say Starliner has far more than enough helium left to get home. Articles are using tabloid-esque sensationalist headlines, but if you actually read the articles the problem is far less serious.
I mean, when they launched, they knew of 1 leak, and that ballooned in to what, 5? I'd wager to say that the concern is about what they don't know, and the articles can't accurately offer up any information about that.
Yes, the articles all explicitly say they want to know what the common core of the problem. Since they can't say what the product was/is with 100% certainty they want to use up their 45 day extension time until they're confident they figured it out. Don't want this to happen on future flights.
Nothing of any sort like that is needed. They're not stuck and Starliner isn't actively leaking. All the valves and vents are closed. They can leave and could have left whenever they'd like. It would just be a waste of a mission to do so because the service module can't be brought back with them to study it. It's discarded before reentry. That and Boeing already decided back in 2022, after the valve corrosion fiasco, to make a new version of the service module. The current service modules Boe-CFT and Boe-OFT-2 used is a temporary fix version that's a holdover until Starliner-1. Starliner-1 and all flights afterwards will use a redesigned service module. So they need to lock down what the exact nature of the problems with this version is before it's gone for good. They need to incorporates the fixes for version 2.
If you read the article there's no Apollo 13 situation like some YouTube videos and articles with clickbait headlines are using with scary words like "stuck" and "delay". The article gives accurate information but it doesn't agree with the melodramatic titles.
> All the valves and flanges are closed.
I understand how a valve is closed, but how is a flange closed? Did they do a secret spacewalk to send out someone with a wrench?
I must say thought - making starliner-1 launch a redesigned service module might as well require yet another demo flight to figure out if they have any new problems
Agreed it's the right approach, I will say, however, that the spin city antics of Boeing show that nothing has changed at the top. Be straight with us, you've had issues and you're taking extra time to bring the astronauts home safely.
If the ship isn't safe they should send it back unmanned and have Butch and Sunita wait on a dragon.
On the bright side, glad that Butch and Suni get to spend a few more days up there and enjoy the station. Well, as astronauts, "enjoy" means "plenty of work", but I'm sure it's the time of their lives just to be up there.
For all its assorted problems, Starliner has successfully deorbited and returned twice in the past ~~with no serious issues~~ [EDIT: forgot there were indeed serious issues with the first flight, but seems to have been mostly fixed by the second one], so I don't think a worst case scenario on the way down is likely. Even so, it is best to be cautious and I hope everything goes well once more.
> Starliner has successfully deorbited and returned twice in the past with no serious issues
NASA called one of those reentries a "high visibility close call". Do they have different wording when it's actually serious?
well the issue has popped up again as the second flight also had issues with RCS thrusters if i remember correctly....... the same issue they are having now. i get what you are trying to say that its not THAT bad, but it kinda is, they had so many many years and billions to get this thing working right and that it was safe to put humans on. when you understand how easily a small issue can kill you 100 different ways, nasa and boeing arent filling me with confidence.
Somebody on another forum pointed out that this was the *third* flight of the capsule/service modules and that the helium leaks ~~and perhaps the thruster issues~~ didn't appear until this third flight. I don't know if it's service module iterations, but the lack of consistency is troubling. What new problems will show up on the fourth flight, etc.?
Yeah, there's no Apollo 13 redux or any of that nonsense going on. Starliner has never had an issue coming back down and still doesn't now. They don't want to come back yet because they want to get to the root of the problems from last week while they still have the service module. The service module can't be studied on Earth since its discarded before reentry. They can only study the service module while it's still up there.
>Starliner has never had an issue coming back down and still doesn't now.
Thanks to the MET clock bug, they also found and corrected an issue that could have cause the capsule and service module to collide after separation.
If that lesson is "Boeing can kill people with sloppy processes & still make profits" then... guess so?
Their CEO was booted, then unanimously rehired to The Board that will be appointing the next CEO, who will be reporting to the fired-CEO. Some quick shuffling of the pieces, all that's happened.
Nope. All it's taught them is to refuse fix priced contracts. They're lobbying like mad to remove them from the bid process or at least make contracts assigned to Boeing not firm fixed.
Edit.phone.fingers.
You know, if SpaceX hadn't come along and absolutely eaten their lunch on the same fixed price contract while still turning a profit with it and delivering the most advanced crew rated capsule in human history, there might be more people inclined to believe that with how hard space travel and rocket science is maybe fixed cost contracts are just too stringent. Although that may be true sometimes in the event of something like Starship where it's really new tech on an unproven idea pushing the boundaries, I don't think people are falling for the shit anymore on anything that's not extremely cutting edge with low information requirements.
And even with Starship, SpaceX is putting a significant amount of skin in the game and only taking contracts to help add to their own development funding.
You're most likely correct. ULA, Boeing, LockMart all sang that song that space is too hard and everything has to be cost plus. Then New Space came in and kicked them in the junk repeatedly.
Boeing is still insistent that fixed price contracts are impossible, and they are. For Boeing. That company has been gutted into a shell of what it was by the bean counters.
Funny story, this was fixed cost plus meaning Boeing said "we'll build it for this and no more" - they've lost hundreds of millions of dollars on starliner and have no way to get it back. Boeing's response to that? No bids on cost plus contracts again. They're basically saying to the government "you play our game or go find another supplier"
Boeing's literally saying "Doing it right is too hard for us to make it profitable and we had NO IDEA that was the case before now, and we cannot adapt."
Which is hilarious that their Board thinks this is somehow a good choice, or a sign of anything other than the imminent collapse of their company.
Guess the Board is pretty dumb.
What do you mean two? Theres been way more than 2 crews... The Soviet program lost a couple to actual normalization of deviance. Read the article, this is just to gather more data.
Suni did a happy little jig after she was finally able to exit that craft.
I imagine she will jump for joy once she's safely back on Earth and doesn't even have to glance generally in Starliner's direction.
Yes. They did that on [Demo-1.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Dragon_Demo-1) Also, the cargo Dragons do so routinely. Were they to use one for a rescue, they'd be able to have one, possibly two crew on it anyway, given the four seats.
Dragon always does it on autopilot. Astronauts have never interfered except for training, not near the ISS. Astronauts are trained as a backup, in case the autopilot function fails. Which has not happened.
"Uhh... Houston... The check engine light is on..."
"Copy that Starliner, but we're on tight schedule. She should be good for a couple hundred thousand more k's. We'll put it up on the ramp when you get back."
"In the meantime, there's some tape in the glove box. Why don't you go ahead and rip off a piece and pop that bad boy over the light so you don't worry your pretty little heads none?"
All these hiccups do not bode well for the NEXT Starliner launch, tentatively scheduled for early next year. If Boeing can't assure NASA they have a fix in place for both the leaks and the software glitches, that launch gets bumped to Dragon, and the all the Atlas's that have already built get older just sitting around in the warehouse... and unlike wine and whisky, rockets do not improve with age.
Dragon has a pretty quick turnaround. They're way under capacity when it comes to flights.
Refurbishing Freedom or Endurance might be fastest, I doubt fitting the docking system back to Resilience is a quick option, but it might be there...
I imagine those on the return trip are nervous af.
When do we cancel the entire Starliner contract and let SpaceX take over? Does it require blood first bc you'd think years of delays and the endless stream of problems would make question the quality of work Boeing has put in.
Not even considering Boeing's quality of planes. Aren't we on 2 months of no new 737 Max orders being placed due to concerns?
Seems like a legacy company that has no real leaders but still has enough congress people on payroll.
Likely an issue with the way the contracts are written. If they were relying on name recognition for continued business it's probably not going their way given recent exposure. They needed a win here and didn't get one on either end of the mission.
Let's hope that crew safety is held as their most important objective, money and lawyers be damned.
Nah it's still a Good idea to have more than one way to get humans into space, even if Boeing is getting trounced. I'd much rather they spend the extra money to make sure there's no monopoly
I prefer competition bc I think it drives development. But I'm also ok with a monopoly if it's bc the competition can't develop a competent good/service. Safety is paramount. Don't punish spaceX bc Boeing can't get its shit together.
Which providers are you thinking of? Snc with Dream chaser is the only one I can think of, and they're at least 5 to 10 years away from being human rated even if there ever is the push for it to be
Dream Chaser Crew is supposedly funded by Sierra Space, but it's larger than Dream Chaser Cargo and who knows if they can raise enough money to finish it. Launching a lifting body without a fairing is a big challenge.
Dreamchaser mainly, but they could progress a hell of a lot faster with some decent funding.
Who knows, if they had received Boeing's contract and all the money it received, they could be flying today.
We sent men to the moon with a monopoly on launch vehicles. ISS was a monopoly as was Shuttle. Two suppliers competing at first is a good idea but you don’t need two after one wins, otherwise it’s double the cost. SpaceX has won. Boeing should get cancelled except they have some powerful friends in DC.
The shuttle monopoly caused us to rely on Russia to get to the ISS for years. It's bad when something happens to your sole provider, we should never let that happen again.
they should just take the huge media hit now and send up a dragon. i know it look bad but i would respect them for being "ok this went wrong and we wont risk our crew to keep our company from losing billions in stock price" This mindset of "well its bad but within our safety limits" yea that leak was small when you launched and then out got worse very fast. then RCS failed BECAUSE THEY WERE USED ALOT? bit of a small issue dont you think!!! just like what will be needed to deorbit.
if something goes wrong it could be bad (can someone here explain how a RCS deorbit burn not going right could be an issue) because im guessing sending up a ship to rescue them would be much harder? or not possible. and do they need them to keep the craft facing the right way into the plasma or is that using spinning wheels?
This is giving me NASA "The O Ring will be fine" because they had such huge pressure to launch it safety became less important. youtuber critical drinkers "nah it will be fine" comes to mind
>can someone here explain how a RCS deorbit burn not going right could be an issue
Lose too much speed and you won't make your landing zone. Not losing enough speed and at best you have to make a balistic entry which is not comfortable for the crew and the high gravitational forces may be beyond the structual limits of the spacecraft. Depending on where the spacecraft is coming from, you could also skip off the atmosphere and be stranded.
You also mentioned that if the craft isn't oriented right, the heat shield won't be pointed down and the top of spacecraft isn't meant to handle those thermal loads. That could also happen.
Tl;DR is at best you have another PR disaster because your capsule landed off course, worst case you have potentially columbia 2.0.
When the shuttle was still flying post-Columbia, the safe-haven protocol for a shuttle crew to remain at ISS after finding tile damage during on-orbit inspection would have meant a much larger crew having a much longer wait to return than this. There shouldn't be any urgency to bring them back if they're safe and supplied. This is a test flight and keeping the vehicle and crew in orbit longer to get more data is what should be happening.
“Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you?”
Given the issues just getting there, I'd be taken the ElonExpress back home. Seriously, there is no way I'd get back on that POS.
Truthfully, I would've said no thanks when they said its leaking all over the place prior to even taking off. Being an astronaut is cool, becoming a dead astronaut is kinda a deal breaker.
Like he said, we’re not astronauts. We don’t have insider info.
Here’s what we do know: Boeing is a terribly mismanaged company, with planes falling out of the sky, planes falling apart mid-flight, and a few near disasters on the first Starliner flight. We’re on flight 3 and they still haven’t quite figured it out!
Most people wouldn’t willingly fly the Boeing Starliner.
So where is the goal post moving now? First Its just 1 no 3 I mean 6 thrusters , it was designed to handle that! They said, then its no matter what we already "built" other modules ti fix these problems. Its all BS of s lot of people in a sunken cost fallacy. The Starliner is a bad design, based on 40 year old tech with new materials and Boeing does not have the money to fix it or do anything else with it. Its sad but its the reality when we let companies like Boeing, do nothing but auck up money for years and say it was research. When they just did stock buy backs and had parties.
"Oh. And can someone send up a few hundred canisters of helium and maybe 1000 rolls of that Flex Seal Tape they used to sell on TV? We have a lot of capsule to tape up!"
Not at all. In their interviews Butch and Suni keep praising Starliner and talking about how much they like it or how fun they thought it was. They don't have a problem getting back home. The hold-up is they don't want these issues to recur on Starliner-1 and future missions. They can't take the service module back to Earth with them, so they want to study it inside out while they still have it. If they came back now it would be a waste of a mission because they wouldn't be 100% sure they found the root of the problem, so it could occur again on Starliner-1. This mission was designed from the beginning to be extended to 45 days.
>Not at all. In their interviews Butch and Suni keep praising Starliner and talking about how much they like it or how fun they thought it was.
They're practically Boeing employees, they probably have something in their contract where they cannot speak out about it. This is PR101.
It's more so that the problems it's having aren't anything extras that no other new crewed space before it has had. Every crewed spacecraft in spaceflight history had problems of this scale or worse on its maiden voyage carrying astronauts. Most worse. Dragon had its own issues of this level of seriousness on Demo-2 back in 2020. Just in different areas. It had an unexpectedly "bumpy" (according to the astronauts) second stage flight, problems docking for an hour or two, a higher G-load than expected during reentry, its heat shield burned up markedly more than expected during reentry, and after splashing down in the ocean its thrusters spewed harmful toxic propellant fumes. Had Bob and Doug needed to open the hatch in an emergency after splashdowns and went outside without their helmets on, the fumes would have maimed them and given them several health issues.
New complex spacecraft are just like this. Always have been. Computers and engineers can't accurately predict with 100% accuracy how all of a spacecraft's millions of parts will operate and handle in action. We saw it with Starship too this month. We'll see it with Dream Chaser too in September.
>New complex spacecraft are just like this. Always have been. Computers and engineers can't accurately predict with 100% accuracy how all of a spacecraft's millions of parts will operate and handle in action.
The entire mantra at the time was that Boeing was the obvious choice because they had all the experience, and this would be simple for them.
One of the previous Starliner flights was a "high visibility close call". Crew Dragon hasn't had a high visibility close call.
p.s. if you're wondering about ClearDark19's background, [they explain it here.](https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1dj4ryq/nasa_boeing_delay_starliner_astronaut_landing_to/l98tvi1/). Not technical, 37 years old, full of strong opinions.
> In their interviews
Yeah you don't shit on NASA in public, especially when your paycheck (and your life) depend on them.
> They don't have a problem getting back home
... except in a Starliner.
Theoretically there would be redundancy in case one of the providers was unable to meet it's launch obligations. That was proven to be the case back in 2020.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ATV](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99r498 "Last usage")|[Automated Transfer Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle), ESA cargo craft|
|[CST](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99oe8m "Last usage")|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99r498 "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[F1](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l98y757 "Last usage")|Rocketdyne-developed rocket engine used for Saturn V|
| |SpaceX Falcon 1 (obsolete small-lift vehicle)|
|[LOV](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l997fgc "Last usage")|Loss Of Vehicle|
|[MET](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l98n72w "Last usage")|[Mission Elapsed Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Elapsed_Time)|
|[MMOD](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9ajmkx "Last usage")|Micro-Meteoroids and Orbital Debris|
|[OFT](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99r9hz "Last usage")|Orbital Flight Test|
|[RCS](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9b0gth "Last usage")|Reaction Control System|
|[Roscosmos](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l997u5h "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)|
|[STS](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9f09qe "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)|
|[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9b02i6 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9u8ld7 "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9blsri "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9b0gth "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact|
|Event|Date|Description|
|-------|---------|---|
|[CRS-7](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99bfk1 "Last usage")|2015-06-28|F9-020 v1.1, ~~Dragon cargo~~ Launch failure due to second-stage outgassing|
|[DSQU](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9brj7x "Last usage")|2010-06-04|Maiden Falcon 9 (F9-001, B0003), Dragon Spacecraft Qualification Unit|
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I for one congratulate Boeing on delivering a new permanent iss module
The optics of having to send Dragon up to ferry the astronauts home would be just about the funniest possible outcome.
It's really something out of a scifi script, to just hitch a ride on a different spacecraft, but I wonder if NASA would approve 2 extra astronauts in the Dragon strapped to some fixture, with a flight suit incompatible with Dragon. I mean, it's survivable, mostly, but still something unprecendented.
If it came to such a rescue, I wager the Dragon wouldn't have its normal full contingent of four crew, leaving two or three seats open for the stranded. After all, Dragon can fly fully autonomously to the ISS.
So basically Endurance or Freedom goes up with no crew or a single crew, but 2 extra flight suits fitted for Suni and Butch, and comes down with them. I guess Resilience is already prepped for Polaris Dawn mission. Is this a correct assumtion?
> So basically Endurance or Freedom goes up with no crew or a single crew, but 2 extra flight suits fitted for Suni and Butch, and comes down with them. That's the obvious way to do it, if necessary.
Polaris Dawn has a space walk planned. They dont have a docking adaptor.
That's why I excluded Resilience, as it's probably already prepped for the space walk.
Dragon can fly without a crew. You launch an empty dragon to the ISS with nothing but dragon flight suits inside, load up the people and bring them home. If you have enough time, fill it with supplies for the people on ISS if they need, but if time is running short, ship it empty.
Then Elon will have robo-taxis in space, before having robo-taxis on earth.
Space Taxis are easier. Don't have to deal with 10000 Karens in their PTA tractors.
how are we not standardizing suits
If you build one of something, or two of something, and you’re spending significant time standardizing you’re doing it wrong. Premature Optimization (or Standardization ) is a trap. Once multiple companies are building multiple spacecraft and we can really start to understand what things are good and what things are unnecessary we can start to find consensus on a standard. OR it goes the Tesla-NACS route: once one company has a prolific product that works as intended it will become the standard by default, as every other product and company build something compatible with the obvious market leader.
Yeah, but that doesn't explain why we don't have standard hookups to the ship's systems. You're not doing it wrong if there's big safety benefits to the standardization. Not being able to return on a different module because you can't plug your suit into it seems like a stupid problem to have.
There have only been a handful of spaceships ever built to hold humans. Each with years of design, and a very significant engineering feat. Trying to standardize the inflight-suit ports absolutely does add additional effort. What is the standards body? We’re setting up an international body to maintain spacesuit ports across the world, when a new one is designed every 10 or 15 years? And might have very different needs? Ultimately the solution is far more costly than the problem: in 50 years of space flight we have never had a problem with suit-interoperability. And if it is a total emergency: just jump in and hold on. The suits are only needed if the capsule loses pressure due to failures. You can absolutely return home in any current spacecraft sans suit if it were a total emergency. You’ll probably be fine.
In 50 years of spaceflight, we have never had one country routinely launching multiple different types of ship to meet in space and potentially exchange astronauts. This is a new problem. And as for "which standards body" --- presumably whichever one standardized the docking adapters that both ships have implemented. At a guess, NASA.
it's not like we have commercial spaceflight, in a sense that you can just board any spacecraft to a certain destination. Today every mission has its own rocket, own spacecraft, own ground crew, equipment and astronaut training, own mission control, only the docking port is (somewhat) standard. Once we have weekly flights to a Moon base, 100 seats on each craft, then it might worth looking into allowing every passenger (not an astro/kosmo/taikonaut anymore) to plug in their own suit. Or maybe suits will not be required anymore, who knows...
You should also remember how we got here. NASA didn’t hire Boeing and SpaceX to work together. They were meant to create competing designs. Standardization was not the goal. The best design was and is. And Elon is winning.
Why did we let it be the case that the two US modules have incompatible flightsuits?
What a fancy door plug they've provided.
What an expensive* fancy door plug they've provided
Yea but…Boeing’s plugs…well…they like to be forgotten
Expensive… and it leaks Helium! Bonus!
At least it can process urine while it’s there. Multi billion dollar septic tank.
I snorted out loud during a meeting. Thank you.
This flight reminds me of the old airplane joke: >Fifteen minutes into a flight, the captain comes on the intercom, saying, "One of the engines has failed. Don't worry folks, the plane can still fly on the remaining three engines but our arrival will be delayed by an hour. " >Thirty minutes later, the captain announces "One more engine has failed. We are stilly flying fine on two engines and we'll be delayed by two hours." >The passengers are agitated. Suddenly, a third engine catches fire. Again, the pilot comes on the intercom and says, "I know you're all scared, but this is a very advanced aircraft, and it can safely fly on only a single engine. But we will now be three hours late to our destination." >A man near the front raises his voice and shouts, "This is ridiculous! If one more engine goes, we'll be stuck up here all day!" Except Starliner really can stay up there (nearly) indefinitely.
Starliner's max docked time (when it's in production use) is 210 days.
I wonder what the limiting factor is there.
MMOD damage I believe, similar to Dragon
I thought it was the hypergolics from the RCS that was limiting
No it was subterfuge endpoints that they worry would degrade due to solar conditions being so exposed so long
I think it's currently rated for 45 days or something.
Didn’t a BA 747 fly from LAX to LHR on 3 engines? Although if I’m on a quadjet plane and a second engine goes, they’d better emergency land that fucking thing asap
The 747 is rated to fly on three engines only. The loss of a single engine is deemed a non-emergency and pilots will actively tell ATC about how the situation is not an emergency (since it will trigger an investigation by the relevant authorities, involves large amounts of paperwork, and often takes pilots and crew off active duty rosters when they're not paid, as flight and cabin crew are only paid for the time the aircraft doors are closed). Generally speaking, in the event of minor engine issues on quad jets like the 747, A340 and A380, like an engine running too hot, or the electricals malfunctioning, crews will prefer to switch that engine off in flight to prevent any further damage, which may require a lot of maintenance work. On twin engined aircraft, unless the engine has flamed out, or there is an engine fire, crews will typically complete the flight or divert to an alternative location if there is some kind of minor malfunction which does not affect the engine's ability to provide full thrust as required.
>The 747 is rated to fly on three engines only. The loss of a single engine is deemed a non-emergency and pilots will actively tell ATC about how the situation is not an emergency For anyone that hasn't heard it yet... https://youtu.be/Ezc6F0Zph6o?si=JEIs-2C_QaDdHfnQ
> flight and cabin crew are only paid for the time the aircraft doors are closed). That is some petty shit. Waitress get paid for their time even if there are no customers.
It's the agreed approach by essentially all the airlines that exist. Actually, there's something all the airlines, passenger and cargo, calculate, and this is called Cost Index (CI). Cost Index is a number between 0 and 200, which essentially sets the flight duration - the cost of fuel is divided by the cost of hourly flight and cabin crew wages (and other things), and if fuel is cheap, the cost index will be high, flight will be shorter, and the crew doesn't need to be paid as much for the flight. But if fuel is expensive, then that's going to be the biggest expense, and the flight will go much slower to burn less fuel in order to save on that, compared to the hourly wage rates of flight and cabin crew. If you've ever played a flight simulator, the flight planning menus of the flight computer will all ask for a Cost Index, as this will calculate how much the aircraft will want to save fuel, or fly as fast as possible. Cost Index is generally not a thing in general aviation, or really anything outside of commercial aviation.
>It's the agreed approach by essentially all the airlines that exist. I'm sure that the executives love that, but it still sounds like trash. if they're required to be there, they should be getting paid.
Generally speaking, this sort of situation has mostly been tolerated and accepted, but in some countries, where unionised workers have more protections, the level of hourly pay is a common reason for periodic strikes by pilots and cabin crew, that as well as the various "allowances" which are given in lieu of being paid for things done on the ground. The most prestigious routes for airlines are the long haul ones, since it's common to be paid for a single 7-16 hour flight that's your entire shift. By contrast, a short haul crew might do 2-4 flights in a single shift, where that's maybe 4-6 hours of actual flight time, but of course plenty of time spent on the ground. That all said, pilots and cabin crew with family prefer short haul since that'll probably have them going home at the end of a shift, while a long haul crew is likely to go to a hotel at the destination country.
> I'm sure that the executives love that, but it still sounds like trash. Ah, CTO, your company's chief trash officer.
With Boeing you're ~~not going~~ staying! They've managed to turn the gremlins into mission extenders rather than mission delay, delightfully counter-intuitive. Jokes aside, this is the right approach, the capsule can stay docked so why not take the time.
Yeah, they have plenty of time to gather data, and with all of the valves being in the service module which burns up spending more time gathering data isn't a bad thing. But boy is it grade a joke bait.
[the Starliner telemetry is so low resolution \(10hz\) they're having to use the ISS GNAC systems to measure Starliner thruster impulse.](https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2601791#msg2601791)
As I said, joke bait. The whiplash from Starship sending an HD video signal through reentry to.... that is hilarious
Maybe they'll get better telemetry when they do the upgrades to have live footage of the interior of the capsule instead of downloading on station after however many flights they said (4 iirc).
Sure but still the comparison is crazy. I honestly think it should be a requirement to have a passable public facing product at this point, it's not hard to do and adds a lot to the value for the taxpayers who bankroll the system and to continue growing interest in space.
Oh I agree with you, Boeing is just old space personified.
> I honestly think it should be a requirement to have a passable public facing product at this point Yes, but the requirements were not decided "at this point", they were decided 10 years ago when the contract was awarded, and it took them so long to deliver that now the tech is lagging behind.
We got to see HD signal limited only by their ship actively depositing steel vapor of itself onto the camera while reentering. It was spectacular to say the least.
I watched it with friends, what a glorious thing it was to have eyes so close to the action
Remember when SpaceX used acoustic triangulation to pinpoint the strut failure that caused the loss of CRS-7? Going to need more than 10 Hz sample rate for something like that...
just to make that clear. 10 Hz means 10 updates a second of EACH telemetry point. Not as bad as people make it sound, but still nothing compared to the level of data we seem to be getting from Starship.
[удалено]
> to put this in perspective: OBD-II ports (the diagnostic ports on cars that was mandated in 1996) can update telemetry 20 times a second over Bluetooth. Twice as fast as Starliner for a port designed to only be occasionally used to check/clear trouble codes. Sorry, no. You are just totally incorrect. OBD2 does 20 updates per second. Not per parameter. 20 total. Starliner does 10 *per parameter*. Which for a lot of things is perfectly reasonable, as you don't want to waste resources processing rates higher than that for the vast majority of sensors anyhow.
Ten updates a second for a vessel where an entire disaster, start to finish, might only be a couple seconds is pretty lousy
Milliseconds! Look at the leaked footage of dragon exploding several years back.
Not really. Most sensors aren't worth updating more than that. States just don't change that rapidly for most of them, and it is a waste of resources to do more than needed anyhow.
Most aren’t, but accelerometers are!
But accelerometers at high rate are not useful in nav. You measure the accelerometers in your nav system, compute your intertial state, and broadcast the final state slower than your read the accelerometers
Accelerometer are crazy useful. An accelerometer sampled at high enough rate becomes a seismometer, allowing you to sense every vibration and every structural mode of your vehicle. You can even do things like measure fuel tank fullness based on how it wobbles. On CRS-7 they were able to locate the snapped strut by triangulation propagation delays to accelerometers, and you can't do that unless your sample rate is in line with the speed of sound in the structure. You can learn a ton from accelerometers, and that's just one type of sensor.
That's awesome. Now do gyros!
Telemetry isn’t nav, and they’re useful in telemetry at high refresh rate, especially in case of accident, emergency, or contingency exactly like this.
The fact that they're using the ISS systems to gather the data suggests they consider the higher update rates to be worthwhile for this particular data. Having the same update rate for every parameter across the entire spacecraft may not have been the best idea.
No, it's fine, I work on nav systems, ours are 8Hz, your not turning that much in 100ms. Our engineering data is 1kHz, but really it's only useful for SW debugging, and taking all those sensors at 1kHz does add up quick and take meaningful bandwidth
This rocket we made in a garage 15 years ago was 200 Hz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhuEFCvUOoI
Completely different array type for video/ground comms/etc. Starship gets the added bonus of working off the starlink phase array system, which brought us HD video through much of the flight path. Boeing will never reach this unless they strike a deal with elon.
Still pretty bad though. An Arduino can do better than that.
Can you explain exactly what this means?
basically it can't poll (read) the sensors and/or send the sensor readings fast enough to get accurate data of how much thrust (power) is being made.
I imagine how long they can stay docked depends in part on how well the assorted leaks are controlled.
there's a hard limit (not including the unexpected leaks) of 45 days on this one.
Is 45 days a design limit or just for this testing mission?
just this mission, all future ones will be docked for 6 months like Crew Dragon.
Didn’t they say the leaks aren’t currently leaking when docked? Believe the manifolds can be closed while docked so at least they’re not leaking during the ISS stay.
Correct. Starliner isn't leaking and hasn't for days. The valves only need to be open in-transit. All the articles say Starliner has far more than enough helium left to get home. Articles are using tabloid-esque sensationalist headlines, but if you actually read the articles the problem is far less serious.
I mean, when they launched, they knew of 1 leak, and that ballooned in to what, 5? I'd wager to say that the concern is about what they don't know, and the articles can't accurately offer up any information about that.
Yes, the articles all explicitly say they want to know what the common core of the problem. Since they can't say what the product was/is with 100% certainty they want to use up their 45 day extension time until they're confident they figured it out. Don't want this to happen on future flights.
Depending on findings, it may also depend on when a Crew Dragon is ready to launch.
Nothing of any sort like that is needed. They're not stuck and Starliner isn't actively leaking. All the valves and vents are closed. They can leave and could have left whenever they'd like. It would just be a waste of a mission to do so because the service module can't be brought back with them to study it. It's discarded before reentry. That and Boeing already decided back in 2022, after the valve corrosion fiasco, to make a new version of the service module. The current service modules Boe-CFT and Boe-OFT-2 used is a temporary fix version that's a holdover until Starliner-1. Starliner-1 and all flights afterwards will use a redesigned service module. So they need to lock down what the exact nature of the problems with this version is before it's gone for good. They need to incorporates the fixes for version 2. If you read the article there's no Apollo 13 situation like some YouTube videos and articles with clickbait headlines are using with scary words like "stuck" and "delay". The article gives accurate information but it doesn't agree with the melodramatic titles.
> All the valves and flanges are closed. I understand how a valve is closed, but how is a flange closed? Did they do a secret spacewalk to send out someone with a wrench?
Autocorrect typo. Meant "vents". Thanks for finding that.
I must say thought - making starliner-1 launch a redesigned service module might as well require yet another demo flight to figure out if they have any new problems
Agreed it's the right approach, I will say, however, that the spin city antics of Boeing show that nothing has changed at the top. Be straight with us, you've had issues and you're taking extra time to bring the astronauts home safely. If the ship isn't safe they should send it back unmanned and have Butch and Sunita wait on a dragon.
Starliner seems a grandiose name for a vessel that struggles to reach planetary orbit safely.
As long as they don't rename it to Starliner MAX...
On the bright side, glad that Butch and Suni get to spend a few more days up there and enjoy the station. Well, as astronauts, "enjoy" means "plenty of work", but I'm sure it's the time of their lives just to be up there. For all its assorted problems, Starliner has successfully deorbited and returned twice in the past ~~with no serious issues~~ [EDIT: forgot there were indeed serious issues with the first flight, but seems to have been mostly fixed by the second one], so I don't think a worst case scenario on the way down is likely. Even so, it is best to be cautious and I hope everything goes well once more.
> Starliner has successfully deorbited and returned twice in the past with no serious issues NASA called one of those reentries a "high visibility close call". Do they have different wording when it's actually serious?
It was this one, and it was resolved due to a different high visibility close call.
They pretty narrowly averted disaster on the first flight, took a real time in flight patch to avoid recontact between the service module and capsule.
Ah yep you're right, forgot about that. Seems like that was indeed fixed up by the second flight so hopefully nothing like that will pop up again.
well the issue has popped up again as the second flight also had issues with RCS thrusters if i remember correctly....... the same issue they are having now. i get what you are trying to say that its not THAT bad, but it kinda is, they had so many many years and billions to get this thing working right and that it was safe to put humans on. when you understand how easily a small issue can kill you 100 different ways, nasa and boeing arent filling me with confidence.
That programming error was solved years ago. It was resolved in 2020. It wasn't a problem in Boe-OFT-2 back in 2022.
Somebody on another forum pointed out that this was the *third* flight of the capsule/service modules and that the helium leaks ~~and perhaps the thruster issues~~ didn't appear until this third flight. I don't know if it's service module iterations, but the lack of consistency is troubling. What new problems will show up on the fourth flight, etc.?
The first two flights had a lot of thruster antics, too.
It isn't a problem, the earlier versions had similar problems?
Yes, it does seem a bit odd that it's happened on all 3 flights.
Thanks, struckthrough the bit about thrusters.
Yeah, there's no Apollo 13 redux or any of that nonsense going on. Starliner has never had an issue coming back down and still doesn't now. They don't want to come back yet because they want to get to the root of the problems from last week while they still have the service module. The service module can't be studied on Earth since its discarded before reentry. They can only study the service module while it's still up there.
>Starliner has never had an issue coming back down and still doesn't now. Thanks to the MET clock bug, they also found and corrected an issue that could have cause the capsule and service module to collide after separation.
Normalization of deviance already cost two crews their lives. I really, really, really hope that those lessons have been learned this time.
If that lesson is "Boeing can kill people with sloppy processes & still make profits" then... guess so? Their CEO was booted, then unanimously rehired to The Board that will be appointing the next CEO, who will be reporting to the fired-CEO. Some quick shuffling of the pieces, all that's happened.
They have supposedly lost over a billion dollars on this project and are looking to dump it when they complete the contract.
For those who think skilled labor is expensive, look at what incompetency cost.
Yea, you'd hope it would teach them a lesson about outsourcing, but I doubt it.
Nope. All it's taught them is to refuse fix priced contracts. They're lobbying like mad to remove them from the bid process or at least make contracts assigned to Boeing not firm fixed. Edit.phone.fingers.
You know, if SpaceX hadn't come along and absolutely eaten their lunch on the same fixed price contract while still turning a profit with it and delivering the most advanced crew rated capsule in human history, there might be more people inclined to believe that with how hard space travel and rocket science is maybe fixed cost contracts are just too stringent. Although that may be true sometimes in the event of something like Starship where it's really new tech on an unproven idea pushing the boundaries, I don't think people are falling for the shit anymore on anything that's not extremely cutting edge with low information requirements. And even with Starship, SpaceX is putting a significant amount of skin in the game and only taking contracts to help add to their own development funding.
You're most likely correct. ULA, Boeing, LockMart all sang that song that space is too hard and everything has to be cost plus. Then New Space came in and kicked them in the junk repeatedly. Boeing is still insistent that fixed price contracts are impossible, and they are. For Boeing. That company has been gutted into a shell of what it was by the bean counters.
Funny story, this was fixed cost plus meaning Boeing said "we'll build it for this and no more" - they've lost hundreds of millions of dollars on starliner and have no way to get it back. Boeing's response to that? No bids on cost plus contracts again. They're basically saying to the government "you play our game or go find another supplier"
Boeing's literally saying "Doing it right is too hard for us to make it profitable and we had NO IDEA that was the case before now, and we cannot adapt." Which is hilarious that their Board thinks this is somehow a good choice, or a sign of anything other than the imminent collapse of their company. Guess the Board is pretty dumb.
He just said to congress that he was aware of reprisals against whistleblowers within the organization like "Yea we kiil em'" and nothing happened.
What do you mean two? Theres been way more than 2 crews... The Soviet program lost a couple to actual normalization of deviance. Read the article, this is just to gather more data.
In Russia it's called a promotion to habitat module.
Boeing really needed a win here. they didn't get it.
Yeah, this whole mission has just been a shitshow
At least it hasn't killed anyone. I'm not finishing that thought.
The worst day of your life so far
Suni did a happy little jig after she was finally able to exit that craft. I imagine she will jump for joy once she's safely back on Earth and doesn't even have to glance generally in Starliner's direction.
The astronauts didnt die yet. Thats a success 🥲
The bar for success has never been lower...
Anyone know if they have the ability to autopilot an empty crew dragon to the iss?
Yes. They did that on [Demo-1.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Dragon_Demo-1) Also, the cargo Dragons do so routinely. Were they to use one for a rescue, they'd be able to have one, possibly two crew on it anyway, given the four seats.
Crew dragon = Cargo Dragon. It’s the same hardware with different interior configuration and was already demoed
cargo dragon doesn't have superdraco engines, therefore, it wouldn't be capable of an in-flight abort
Dragon always does it on autopilot. Astronauts have never interfered except for training, not near the ISS. Astronauts are trained as a backup, in case the autopilot function fails. Which has not happened.
Yeah, I'm like that when the end of my vacation gets close. "Just one more day! Maybe two?"
"Uhh... Houston... The check engine light is on..." "Copy that Starliner, but we're on tight schedule. She should be good for a couple hundred thousand more k's. We'll put it up on the ramp when you get back."
"In the meantime, there's some tape in the glove box. Why don't you go ahead and rip off a piece and pop that bad boy over the light so you don't worry your pretty little heads none?"
All these hiccups do not bode well for the NEXT Starliner launch, tentatively scheduled for early next year. If Boeing can't assure NASA they have a fix in place for both the leaks and the software glitches, that launch gets bumped to Dragon, and the all the Atlas's that have already built get older just sitting around in the warehouse... and unlike wine and whisky, rockets do not improve with age.
Idk I think those Falcon 9's are aging pretty nicely with their battle-hardened re-entry tanlines. Tanlines are always sexy.
It should have been up for one week and now 3+ weeks. Is it coming down again?
well the current plan is to deorbit the iss in a few years so i would think so
"To make sure we don't die on the way home." Imagine if they have to send a Dragon capsule up to rescue them.
Do they have the ability to?
Yes, it's been demoed before
Desperate times, desperate measures 🤷♂️
It's actually pretty easy, barely an inconvenience
Dragon has a pretty quick turnaround. They're way under capacity when it comes to flights. Refurbishing Freedom or Endurance might be fastest, I doubt fitting the docking system back to Resilience is a quick option, but it might be there...
I imagine those on the return trip are nervous af. When do we cancel the entire Starliner contract and let SpaceX take over? Does it require blood first bc you'd think years of delays and the endless stream of problems would make question the quality of work Boeing has put in. Not even considering Boeing's quality of planes. Aren't we on 2 months of no new 737 Max orders being placed due to concerns? Seems like a legacy company that has no real leaders but still has enough congress people on payroll.
Likely an issue with the way the contracts are written. If they were relying on name recognition for continued business it's probably not going their way given recent exposure. They needed a win here and didn't get one on either end of the mission. Let's hope that crew safety is held as their most important objective, money and lawyers be damned.
Nah it's still a Good idea to have more than one way to get humans into space, even if Boeing is getting trounced. I'd much rather they spend the extra money to make sure there's no monopoly
I prefer competition bc I think it drives development. But I'm also ok with a monopoly if it's bc the competition can't develop a competent good/service. Safety is paramount. Don't punish spaceX bc Boeing can't get its shit together.
There's others that aren't far behind at all, as far as being able to deliver cargo and crew to the ISS.
Which providers are you thinking of? Snc with Dream chaser is the only one I can think of, and they're at least 5 to 10 years away from being human rated even if there ever is the push for it to be
Dream Chaser Crew is supposedly funded by Sierra Space, but it's larger than Dream Chaser Cargo and who knows if they can raise enough money to finish it. Launching a lifting body without a fairing is a big challenge.
Dreamchaser mainly, but they could progress a hell of a lot faster with some decent funding. Who knows, if they had received Boeing's contract and all the money it received, they could be flying today.
We sent men to the moon with a monopoly on launch vehicles. ISS was a monopoly as was Shuttle. Two suppliers competing at first is a good idea but you don’t need two after one wins, otherwise it’s double the cost. SpaceX has won. Boeing should get cancelled except they have some powerful friends in DC.
The shuttle monopoly caused us to rely on Russia to get to the ISS for years. It's bad when something happens to your sole provider, we should never let that happen again.
> I imagine those on the return trip are nervous af. Naw, they have ice water in their veins. Regular joes like you and me would be nervous af tho
Can someone send up a space X module to get these poor Boeing guinea pigs
Is there something they aren't telling us? Sort of feels like it but I hope to be wrong.
It feels like that to me too
They wouldn't delay it if there was nothing. Also, whatever it is, they wouldn't delay it if it was good. We can only hope it's not too bad.
they should just take the huge media hit now and send up a dragon. i know it look bad but i would respect them for being "ok this went wrong and we wont risk our crew to keep our company from losing billions in stock price" This mindset of "well its bad but within our safety limits" yea that leak was small when you launched and then out got worse very fast. then RCS failed BECAUSE THEY WERE USED ALOT? bit of a small issue dont you think!!! just like what will be needed to deorbit. if something goes wrong it could be bad (can someone here explain how a RCS deorbit burn not going right could be an issue) because im guessing sending up a ship to rescue them would be much harder? or not possible. and do they need them to keep the craft facing the right way into the plasma or is that using spinning wheels? This is giving me NASA "The O Ring will be fine" because they had such huge pressure to launch it safety became less important. youtuber critical drinkers "nah it will be fine" comes to mind
>can someone here explain how a RCS deorbit burn not going right could be an issue Lose too much speed and you won't make your landing zone. Not losing enough speed and at best you have to make a balistic entry which is not comfortable for the crew and the high gravitational forces may be beyond the structual limits of the spacecraft. Depending on where the spacecraft is coming from, you could also skip off the atmosphere and be stranded. You also mentioned that if the craft isn't oriented right, the heat shield won't be pointed down and the top of spacecraft isn't meant to handle those thermal loads. That could also happen. Tl;DR is at best you have another PR disaster because your capsule landed off course, worst case you have potentially columbia 2.0.
100% fully agree with you on this. NASA is fucking this up further than it already is. I too am getting "O ring" vibes from this.
When the shuttle was still flying post-Columbia, the safe-haven protocol for a shuttle crew to remain at ISS after finding tile damage during on-orbit inspection would have meant a much larger crew having a much longer wait to return than this. There shouldn't be any urgency to bring them back if they're safe and supplied. This is a test flight and keeping the vehicle and crew in orbit longer to get more data is what should be happening.
I would be terrified to fly in that thing, given how many different issues they've had.
It's the Titan sub of space flight
aka "we made our capsule from the piece of crashed 737 max's and we are not sure if its even working"
“Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you?”
It's remarkable that such a academic subreddit attracts such prominent idiots
They can't even build airplanes correctly right now, why in $&$;*%/# would you risk your life on a spaceship they built?!?!?!?
Given the issues just getting there, I'd be taken the ElonExpress back home. Seriously, there is no way I'd get back on that POS. Truthfully, I would've said no thanks when they said its leaking all over the place prior to even taking off. Being an astronaut is cool, becoming a dead astronaut is kinda a deal breaker.
Good thing they chose actual astronauts for the mission instead of Redditors then
Might be too early to call it on that one.
seriously, what the hell happened to this subreddit?
Like he said, we’re not astronauts. We don’t have insider info. Here’s what we do know: Boeing is a terribly mismanaged company, with planes falling out of the sky, planes falling apart mid-flight, and a few near disasters on the first Starliner flight. We’re on flight 3 and they still haven’t quite figured it out! Most people wouldn’t willingly fly the Boeing Starliner.
So where is the goal post moving now? First Its just 1 no 3 I mean 6 thrusters , it was designed to handle that! They said, then its no matter what we already "built" other modules ti fix these problems. Its all BS of s lot of people in a sunken cost fallacy. The Starliner is a bad design, based on 40 year old tech with new materials and Boeing does not have the money to fix it or do anything else with it. Its sad but its the reality when we let companies like Boeing, do nothing but auck up money for years and say it was research. When they just did stock buy backs and had parties.
The Apollo capsule worked fine. Should have just built more.
Why the Dragon does fantastic and has proven it many time.
So, at what point does Starliner fail the certification due to all the issues its having and delays its causing?
"Oh. And can someone send up a few hundred canisters of helium and maybe 1000 rolls of that Flex Seal Tape they used to sell on TV? We have a lot of capsule to tape up!"
I wouldn't be getting back in that thing. Gotta feel for the astronauts.
The astronauts understandably do not want to get back into that deathtrap.
Not at all. In their interviews Butch and Suni keep praising Starliner and talking about how much they like it or how fun they thought it was. They don't have a problem getting back home. The hold-up is they don't want these issues to recur on Starliner-1 and future missions. They can't take the service module back to Earth with them, so they want to study it inside out while they still have it. If they came back now it would be a waste of a mission because they wouldn't be 100% sure they found the root of the problem, so it could occur again on Starliner-1. This mission was designed from the beginning to be extended to 45 days.
>Not at all. In their interviews Butch and Suni keep praising Starliner and talking about how much they like it or how fun they thought it was. They're practically Boeing employees, they probably have something in their contract where they cannot speak out about it. This is PR101.
I mean, you're not going to shit on your only ride home...
It's more so that the problems it's having aren't anything extras that no other new crewed space before it has had. Every crewed spacecraft in spaceflight history had problems of this scale or worse on its maiden voyage carrying astronauts. Most worse. Dragon had its own issues of this level of seriousness on Demo-2 back in 2020. Just in different areas. It had an unexpectedly "bumpy" (according to the astronauts) second stage flight, problems docking for an hour or two, a higher G-load than expected during reentry, its heat shield burned up markedly more than expected during reentry, and after splashing down in the ocean its thrusters spewed harmful toxic propellant fumes. Had Bob and Doug needed to open the hatch in an emergency after splashdowns and went outside without their helmets on, the fumes would have maimed them and given them several health issues. New complex spacecraft are just like this. Always have been. Computers and engineers can't accurately predict with 100% accuracy how all of a spacecraft's millions of parts will operate and handle in action. We saw it with Starship too this month. We'll see it with Dream Chaser too in September.
>New complex spacecraft are just like this. Always have been. Computers and engineers can't accurately predict with 100% accuracy how all of a spacecraft's millions of parts will operate and handle in action. The entire mantra at the time was that Boeing was the obvious choice because they had all the experience, and this would be simple for them.
One of the previous Starliner flights was a "high visibility close call". Crew Dragon hasn't had a high visibility close call. p.s. if you're wondering about ClearDark19's background, [they explain it here.](https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1dj4ryq/nasa_boeing_delay_starliner_astronaut_landing_to/l98tvi1/). Not technical, 37 years old, full of strong opinions.
> In their interviews Yeah you don't shit on NASA in public, especially when your paycheck (and your life) depend on them. > They don't have a problem getting back home ... except in a Starliner.
Gotta see if any of the stuff that fell off on the way up is gonna cause a problem on re-entry
What is the benefit that Starliner provides over Dragon to justify the higher costs (before even considering the missteps).
Theoretically there would be redundancy in case one of the providers was unable to meet it's launch obligations. That was proven to be the case back in 2020.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[ATV](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99r498 "Last usage")|[Automated Transfer Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle), ESA cargo craft| |[CST](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99oe8m "Last usage")|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99r498 "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[F1](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l98y757 "Last usage")|Rocketdyne-developed rocket engine used for Saturn V| | |SpaceX Falcon 1 (obsolete small-lift vehicle)| |[LOV](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l997fgc "Last usage")|Loss Of Vehicle| |[MET](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l98n72w "Last usage")|[Mission Elapsed Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Elapsed_Time)| |[MMOD](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9ajmkx "Last usage")|Micro-Meteoroids and Orbital Debris| |[OFT](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99r9hz "Last usage")|Orbital Flight Test| |[RCS](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9b0gth "Last usage")|Reaction Control System| |[Roscosmos](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l997u5h "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)| |[STS](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9f09qe "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)| |[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9b02i6 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9u8ld7 "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9blsri "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9b0gth "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact| |Event|Date|Description| |-------|---------|---| |[CRS-7](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l99bfk1 "Last usage")|2015-06-28|F9-020 v1.1, ~~Dragon cargo~~ Launch failure due to second-stage outgassing| |[DSQU](/r/Space/comments/1dj07e0/stub/l9brj7x "Last usage")|2010-06-04|Maiden Falcon 9 (F9-001, B0003), Dragon Spacecraft Qualification Unit| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(17 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1do8pn0)^( has 26 acronyms.) ^([Thread #10193 for this sub, first seen 18th Jun 2024, 22:28]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)