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Will the Starliner ever enter service?

When will the Starliner succeed with crewed test? (multiple selections allowed)

  • Before SpaceX Starship enters regular non-crewed service

    Votes: 1 4.5%
  • Sometime after SpaceX Spaceship enters regular uncrewed service

    Votes: 2 9.1%
  • After Starship begins crewed operations

    Votes: 1 4.5%
  • Soon, maybe in June or July of this year (2024)

    Votes: 3 13.6%
  • Not until fall of 2024

    Votes: 2 9.1%
  • Months and months away, maybe a year or more but they'll get there.

    Votes: 2 9.1%
  • Never. Boeing and NASA cut losses and drop the effort

    Votes: 10 45.5%
  • Stick it inside a Starship and pretend that counts.

    Votes: 2 9.1%
  • Option 7, but they revive the effort once Elon Musk's major mental malfunctions destroy SpaceX

    Votes: 5 22.7%

  • Total voters
    22
The fact that SpaceX carries Starlink more than any other freight combined, being grounded is not going to matter much.
 
So far, looks a lot like every other test flight for a space vehicle. They all have problems; that is why you make the flights.Having them in flight is often the only way you figure out how to fix the problem.
Of course I also suspect a lot of people just do not like space travel.
 
The fact that SpaceX carries Starlink more than any other freight combined, being grounded is not going to matter much.

That certainly doesn't follow. It's possible for 99% of Falcon9 flights to be Starlink, and for 99% of non-starlink payloads to be carried by Falcon9. Obviously that's not the case, but it's the latter number, not the former, that matters for whether or not those other payloads will be impacted by this grounding, and what you said has nothing to do with the latter number.

My understanding is that a significant fraction of non-starlink payloads are flown on SpaceX rockets. I'm too lazy to look up the actual numbers right now, but if you think that's not true, that is the meaningful issue, not the proportion that you talk about in your post.
 
When will Starliner come home? Boeing and NASA still don't know

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.
 
Can we send them some duct tape?

Maybe they should do a lot of high-risk, low-reward spacewalks to disassemble, inspect, and reassemble the components until they get it working.

Or just de-orbit the thing, and bring the crew home in one of those scam capsules from the scam company that's totally a scamming scam that does nothing but scams, but somehow has working capsules.

ISS is over anyway, and NASA is going with its own bespoke capsule for Artemis missions, so maybe it's time for Boeing focus on how to keep doors from falling off its planes.
 
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.

ETA: I suck at doing links while posting on my phone but it is Ars Technica that is reporting that. They are also reporting that the next Crew Dragon mission may be delayed by up to six weeks due to this. It needs the docking port that the Starliner may have bricked.

ETA#2: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/...the-launch-of-crew-9-due-to-starliner-issues/
 
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I guess I was wrong about Starliner having entered service for all practical purposes.

I'm bit surprised that neither Boeing nor NASA insisted on having autonomous undock and return software installed, if this was ostensibly a test flight. What exactly was their plan, if the test failed and the crew couldn't use it to come home?

Looks like maybe my sarcasm about high-risk low-reward spacewalks was premature. But hey! At least Boeing isn't a scam company like SpaceX!
 
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.
 
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.

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.
 
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.
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".
 
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.

This merits one of these:

picture.php
 
Let us all pray that the Boeing Executive bonuses won't be affected by this.
 
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Should be remembered this was not supposed to be a test flight, it was supposed to be a final certification flight before entering full service, not another flight to find more issues.
 
Random people on the internet are spouting off ideas, as happens with things like this. (ETA: I'm totally one of those people)

Some of them suggest reviving the effort for the crewed version of the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser. Out of curiosity I looked it up on wiki and found this in the references (from 2015):

GAO denies Sierra Nevada’s legal challenge to NASA space contract

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.”


:rolleyes::boggled::eye-poppi:rolleyes:

Dream Chaser isn't dead, there is an uncrewed test launch of a cargo version scheduled tentatively for early next year.
 
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NASA is about to make its most important safety decision in nearly a generation (Ars Technica)

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.
 
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.

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 be scheduled 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
 
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I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable putting people's lives on the line hoping that the Starliner would be able to return them safely. If it comes down and something goes wrong, it will be a huge relief not to have anyone on board.
 
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.

From what I understand the issues are all with the service module; the capsule itself is fine. The service module is disposed of during re-entry, only the crew capsule is supposed to be reusable.

So if the capsule survives re-entry, then the whole Starliner program may be salvageable. Maybe.
 
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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.

54 years later, and it seems NASA have learned nothing from the lithium oxide cartridge fiasco on Apollo 13. :boggled:

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.

Sorry, but if this is what NASA has said, or is implying, its a load of crap and I don't buy it. There is no reason why they could not have been built from the ground up and still have been compatible. Aircraft designers and manufacturers build their aircraft from the ground up, but they are made compatible with all the other systems that other aircraft use (fuel types, instrumentation standards, navigation equipment etc). Even on rocketry this happens.. for example, the SpaceX Falcon 9 can launch crew capsules, cargo modules and satellites. They publish a set of standards that satellite manufacturers must follow to make their payloads compatible with the second stage and the payload adapter.

There is no reason whatsoever that NASA could not have told Boeing and SpaceX to work together to create a standard for interoperability for their spacesuits with Dragon and Starliner, after which both suits could be designed and build independently but still meeting that stardard.

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 be scheduled 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
Boeing, just leaping from one engineering disaster to the next!


ETA: "It sounds like the Crew 9 mission will go up with just two astronauts, with two being bumped/replaced by Butch and Suni."
Not sure why they even need to bump two astronauts from the Crew 9 mission. The Dragon capsule has capacity for seven astronauts. Why can't they install two of the available extra three seats, fly them empty to ISS, and bring the six astronauts home on the same return.
 
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In fact they knew, with absolute certainty, that the skills and experience of employees below senior management were of no value whatsoever, and that anyone off the street, any street in the world, could do any of those jobs. Cheaper, which was the only thing that actually mattered.
 
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'm guessing that it was also a political compromise. NASA wanted to improvement. Boeing wanted to stick with what they already knew. Boeing probably lobbied to be allowed to keep the old system as was used in the shuttles.

So Boeing stuck with the older design which can be difficult and clunky. SpaceX designed a newer one connection system from scratch, which is simpler and works better, with the connections more in the field of view of the wearer (on the thigh, not the torso).
 
US crewed spaceflight is at an inflection point. This is the ideal time to challenge competing aerospace contractors to independently develop new and innovative space suit designs.

Later the pendulum will swing the other way, and reasonable people will expect contractors to conform to a single proven standard.

But right now? Right now we want to see what's possible, from people who aren't bound by their competitor's vision or lack thereof. And if Boeing can't keep up? Well then **** Boeing. Don't take your Boeing frustration out on the contractor that actually does the job.
 
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.

That may be so, but that doesn't mean it wasn't short sighted of them to do so. As I said earlier, they could easily have told Boeing and SpaceX to allow for crew interoperability between capsules. If nothing else, it would allow crews to go to the ISS on on Starliner and return on Dragon, or vice versa. Both suits could still have been designed and built independently while meeting an interoperability standard.

NOTE: Just to correct an error I made earlier. I said the Apollo CO2 scrubbers were "lithium oxide cartridges". They were in fact "lithium hydroxide cartridges"
 
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.
 
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very best scenario for Boeing. a complete overhaul and multiple unmanned tests before NASA greenlights another manned mission.

probably not worth it for anyone.
 
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.

And look how long NASA...

a. Got away with unsafe SRB field joints until it finally bit them in the arse and killed seven of their astronauts.

b. Got away with unsafe foam shedding until it finally bit them in the arse and killed another seven of their astronauts.

I too think NASA made the right decision, and I would hope that Boeing would understand that, because can you imagine the ****-storm that would come crashing down on their heads if they decided to bring back the two astronauts on Starliner and then something went seriously wrong? For example, a thruster firing gets out of control and causes the spacecraft to miss the entry corridor low (angle too steep) resulting in a break up on re-entry, or in some ways even worse, missing the corridor too high, (angle too shallow) causing them to remain in orbit, or even going into a new orbit, with the thruster fuel spent and possibly no way to re-enter safely.
 
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very best scenario for Boeing. a complete overhaul and multiple unmanned tests before NASA greenlights another manned mission.

probably not worth it for anyone.

I'd have to say that SpaceX's decision to make the Crew Dragon basically a variant of the Cargo Dragon was something of a master stroke. It allowed them what amounts to multiple test flights where the only thing at risk was cargo, to test important aspects such as heat shield integrity and automated operations. They were up to CRS-20 before they launched their first crewed flight, Demo-2.
 
But sure let's tie SpaceX's development process to Boeing's, slowing down both, choking innovation, and dragging down the contractor that's making the most progress. /s

---

I still think this is the right time to let each contractor do its own thing, free from the constraints of what other contractors are trying to do.

---

And also the parts incompatibility between Apollo LMs and CMs was not a fiasco then, nor now.
 
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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.
Don't forget the Pioneers.
 
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