Boeing's Starliner Crew Flight Test delayed again, path forward unclear | Hacker News Reader

Boeing's Starliner Crew Flight Test delayed again, path forward unclear

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17 pointsresolutebat28 comments

It's now 4 1/2 years since Starliner's nearly-disastrous first (uncrewed) test flight, 4 years since SpaceX's successful crewed test flight, and 2 years since Starliner's second (uncrewed) test flight.

At what point does NASA need to pull the plug on Starliner, and start looking for second-source Earth-LEO passenger service from companies which can actually do the d*mned job?

> At what point does NASA need to pull the plug on Starliner...

At this point, I assume they're not doing so as a punishment. It doesn't cost NASA much to keep Boeing's feet to the fire here.

Commercial Crew is fixed-price contracts, whereas cost-plus contracts has been the norm in the US aerospace industry. Boeing is the one bleeding money here.

Like I said, it doesn't cost them much. It's not zero cost - people have to talk to Boeing, yell at them when things are broken, review fixes and proposals, etc.

If NASA's real goal is to have a reliable second-source provider, and their endless futzing around with Boeing is incompatible with that (due to limited NASA staffing, politics, or whatever) - then keeping Boeing's feet to the fire does carry high costs for NASA.

I suspect they think of it like a lottery ticket - there's a small but slim chance that Boeing eventually spends enough billions fixing it that it successfully flies. All NASA has to do is staff enough folks to go "nope fix that too"; the lion's share of the costs are Boeing's.

Sadly, "it successfully flies" is quite different from "it is a reliable second source, over time".

> The Crew Flight Test of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is no longer targeting Saturday, May 25. We're awaiting official word from NASA and Boeing on the next possible launch date and for more information regarding the path forward on the helium leak.

What happened to good or even okay spacecraft design? A good design would mean this is easy to troubleshoot and would not impact the launch date because it could be fixed well ahead of time. How was the U.S. / NASA so much more successful in space 50 years ago compared to today? It was a scrappier time, to say the least.

NASA has had spectacular success though...just with SpaceX, who got half the money Boeing did to develop a human rated craft.

That's not NASA doing anything, though. In fact it's NASA doing nothing except saying what they want to a genie. Rub rub.

> That's not NASA doing anything

COTS was a risky paradigm shift. And SpaceX continues to extensively use NASA resources, to say nothing of building on its decades of work.

This. COTS was critical. Space Act Agreements are how things get done and optimizing for fixed priced, milestone based SAAs has been great for all "routine" things that NASA doesn't have to do extensive novel R&D to make happen, things like transportation, which is all space launch is these days.

SpaceX lives because of COTS and that's great. But that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005. It's commodity infrastructure and SpaceX, unlike Boeing and others, has a workable commodity style approach so they're eating everyone's lunch. Then SpaceX developed reusability because of its Mars ambitions and re-usable Falcon sealed the deal on industry dominance. No one can touch SpaceX's ~$20M F9 launch cost so SpaceX gobbles up any contracts that aren't locked down by law.

> that's also a signal that space launch is boring and was boring even back in 2005

It wasn’t boring so much as gated. If anything, nobody recognised it had become a commodity outside a couple crazy dudes in Hawthorne and West Texas. The majors still talked about it like they were doing dark magic.

"Why was the U.S./Nasa so much more successful in space 50 years ago compared to today?"

Because they moved fast and broke things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

Also because they had way more money and broad public support.

I was just reading an HN submission yesterday saying the risks for astronauts today are actually worse than what they faced in the Apollo missions 50 years ago.

Unproven vehicles with a human onboard from launch #1 -- hello SLS. Sounds like a real gas.

Here's TFA:

The lunacy of Artemis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410404 - 1 day ago, 487 comments

Did you see this comment in that thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40416267

Artemis is risky, but not to the levels that Apollo was.

It's hard to say, though, because the system is totally untested. Even if it works the first time, That's a very small sample size.

NASA has gotten a lot better at estimating risk, especially after two Shuttle explosions taught them the hard way that they were really bad at it.

Applying those methods to Apollo shows us just how lucky we are that we didn't lose any of them.

NASA claims that their risk of catastrophe on Artemis 2 is 1 in 400. They'd have to be wrong by a couple orders of magnitude to be comparable to the Apollo missions. I might not trust their 1 in 400 number, but I don't think they're off by 2 orders of magnitude.

The endless Starliner delays are another sign of this. They could launch Starliner with the helium leak and everything would probably be fine. But they're not. They've lost astronauts to "go fever" and have instituted a much more risk averse culture.

Eh, it's still untested because they don't really do anything involving humans anymore. So how are they better at quantifying risk? Smoke.

So was Apollo. If I assert that each Apollo mission had a 1 in 4 chance of killing astronauts they didn't do enough flights to prove me wrong.

NASA aims for a 1 in 400 chance. You'd need thousands of flight to prove that level of risk. They have to rely on risk modelling.

No? Apollo ran more than a dozen times and failed one time.

And even then, what's a human life worth? Not a billion dollars, not even my own life is worth that much if we're being honest.

Progress is pretty good. Something has been lost and is missing today with folks more eager to get home before traffic gets too heavy.

If you roll a 4 sided die twelve times, getting a single "1" is a likely outcome. Getting a "1" 3 times is more likely, but not significantly so.

>How was the U.S. / NASA so much more successful in space 50 years

The US is doing great over at SpaceX. It's just Boeing who are kind of crap these days.

Quite a lot is explained if you listen to Musk on the founding of SpaceX around 5:20 where he is talking about a small team of top engineers and not much management. Boeing is I think not like that https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1791029436651102240

Starliner remains the single project that keeps SLS from wearing the stupidest NASA project crown.

SLS is still the king in that respect, IMO. Starliner is only going to waste a couple of billion dollars. If it never flies Boeing will only get paid for half the project, and if it does fly it'll be overpriced but still do something useful.

OTOH, SLS + Orion are likely going to waste an astounding $100B dollars. And not deliver much useful -- Starship is going to the moon from Earth anyways, why not just put the astronauts on Starship to begin with instead of delivering them with SLS + Orion?

I'd award that hotly contested prize to Lunar Gateway.

I see the jobs program continues apace…

This one ain't a jobs program; Boeing has already taken significant losses and continues to do so. The Commercial Cargo and Crew missions were unusual in being fixed cost contracts; they're already almost $2B in the hole. https://spacenews.com/boeing-records-more-losses-from-starli...

They're well and truly fucked here.

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