The Great Zaganza
Maledictorian
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2016
- Messages
- 26,433
The fact that SpaceX carries Starlink more than any other freight combined, being grounded is not going to matter much.
Some replacement part for the urine/water recycling system that's urgently required, apparently.
The fact that SpaceX carries Starlink more than any other freight combined, being grounded is not going to matter much.
The absolute latest Starliner could return with Wilmore and Williams, according to Stich, would be mid-August.
"The big driver is the handover that we have coming up between Crew-8 and Crew-9, which is in mid-August," Stich said, referring to two SpaceX astronaut missions to the ISS. "So … a few days before that [Crew-9] launch opportunity, we would need to get Butch and Suni home on Starliner."
Ideally, though, they will come home sooner. "We're really working to try to follow the data and see when's the earliest that we could target for undock and landing," Stich said. "I think some of the data suggests, optimistically, maybe it's by the end of July, but we'll just follow the data each step at a time, and figure out when the right undock opportunity is."
"We do have a lot of confidence in the thrusters as they are today," Nappi said, mentioning an on-orbit thruster test fire that Starliner performed while docked at the ISS.
"What we're doing is just taking the time to make sure that we have looked under every rock and every stone, and just to make sure that there's nothing else that would surprise us," Stich added in response.
Apparently it's broken.
Can we send them some duct tape?
Boeing is just another US company brought low by Capitalism - when profit becomes the only measure of success, and when you have a State-imposed monopoly, customers can go suck eggs.
The Boeing failures are typical of a company that sacrifices long term success for short term gain. It's not entirely that company's fault, either. Corporate raiders target companies that are "underperforming".There is no State-imposed monopoly on space capsules. SpaceX has one, Boeing has one, and Lockheed-ESA have one. That's quite a bit of free market competition, for a product like a space capsule.
Apparently the Starliner that's at the ISS doesn't have the right software for an autonomous undocking and re-entry. And it's not a trivial thing to install that software.
The Starliner on the previous uncrewed test had that software but this one doesn't. It's not clear why not.
There is also concern that if it undocks (crewed or uncrewed) it could experience a thruster malfunction while still close to the ISS and collide with the station.
Reporting on this keeps going from bad to worse.
Boeing’s contract is worth as much as $4.2 billion; SpaceX, which said it could perform the work for far less, was awarded a contract valued at $2.6 billion.
n announcing the GAO decision, Ralph White, the agency’s managing associate general counsel, said that NASA “recognized Boeing’s higher price but also considered Boeing’s proposal to be the strongest of all three proposals in terms of technical approach, management approach and past performance, and to offer the crew transportation system with most utility and highest value to the government.”
In a press briefing last week, Stich said NASA is making progress on a plan with SpaceX to return Wilmore and Williams on a Dragon spacecraft. Recent tests of a Starliner thruster at White Sands, New Mexico, produced some surprising results and left engineers still lacking an understanding of the fundamental cause of the overheating thrusters on Starliner in orbit. The majority view is that the overheating comes from rapid pulses of thrusters inside insulated doghouse-shaped propulsion pods on Starliner's service module.
Inspections of the thruster tested at White Sands showed bulging in a Teflon seal in an oxidizer valve known as a "poppet," which could restrict the flow of nitrogen tetroxide propellant. The thrusters consume the nitrogen tetroxide and mix it with hydrazine fuel for combustion. Despite the tests, however, engineers still don't understand precisely why the bulging is occurring and whether it will manifest on Starliner's flight back to Earth.
This discovery "upped the level of discomfort" among managers responsible for the Starliner test flight, Stich said.
While engineers continue assessing the thruster situation, NASA delayed the launch of the next SpaceX crew mission more than a month, to no earlier than September 24. This bought some extra time for NASA, although Stich said he would like the agency to make a decision by mid-August. That means a decision will likely come this week. Deciding now would allow time for SpaceX to reconfigure the internal cabin of the Dragon spacecraft for two astronauts rather than the normal complement of four crew members.
Oh good grief. The incompetence at Boeing is beyond a joke.
They had a press conference today.
Butch and Suni will stay on ISS until February, and will return on the Crew Dragon 9 craft - in February. When launched Crew Dragon 9 will have spacesuits for Butch and Suni because the Boeing and SpaceX suits are not intercompatible.
That lack of intercapatibleness was sort of encouraged by NASA as a means of encouraging innovation in space suit design, allowing each manufacturer to design their own from the ground up.
Boeing, just leaping from one engineering disaster to the next!It sounds like the Crew 9 mission will go up with just two astronauts, with two being bumped/replaced by Butch and Suni. Crew 9 will be delayed a bit to prepare for this,I don't know how long of a delay that might bescheduled to launch no earlier than Sept 24
Starliner will return uncrewed, I didn't see any dates on when that might happen, but it needs to happen before Crew 9 can launch.
I still don't know how this will impact the effort to mission-certify Starliner.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-starliner-spacecraft-back-to-earth-without-crew
I was listening to the story of the Voyager probes.Oh good grief. The incompetence at Boeing is beyond a joke.
54 years later, and it seems NASA have learned nothing from the lithium oxide cartridge fiasco on Apollo 13.
In this case I believe its deliberate, this a couple of commercial companies making their own designs independently of one another for two separate vehicles. Just be grateful Congress didn't get its way a few years ago and downselect to Starliner as the sole program.
In this case I believe its deliberate, this a couple of commercial companies making their own designs independently of one another for two separate vehicles. Just be grateful Congress didn't get its way a few years ago and downselect to Starliner as the sole program.
I feel like NASA is making a hard choice right. They talk about safety, and but for decades were tied to an inherently unsafe crew vehicle (Space Shuttles), so they suffered two horrible crew fatality mishaps despite all the other safety-related effort.
So now they don't repeat that mistake, despite any loss of face or politics.
NASA doesn't have to worry about losing face or suffering politically from this; this was a commercial test capsule. But it is the right decision, I agree. Some people at Boeing have got to be smarting over it though.
If they're lucky, Starliner returns safely on its own, and then they're free to say in retrospect that it would've been fine.
very best scenario for Boeing. a complete overhaul and multiple unmanned tests before NASA greenlights another manned mission.
probably not worth it for anyone.
Don't forget the Pioneers.I was listening to the story of the Voyager probes.
Their manoeuvring rockets could fire reliably after 30 years in space. The bean counters at Boeing had no idea how important institutional knowledge and culture is.