Sounds like they worked through it, so docking was successful. I imagine that much like SpaceX in a similar situation, there are lessons learned that will be applied to the next iteration.
So even though it worked in the end, I would assume that this is still a quite serious incident and will require some examination.
Also it seems that these problems are not well understood, which is not the kind of problem you want to have on manned spacecraft:
> Some notes from the post-docking news conference on Starliner: Engineers found a fourth helium leak after capture. The thruster issues were similar to those observed on OFT-2, and are still not fully understood.
FWIW, like many previous astronauts, both crew members are US Navy test pilots. They've literally made a career out of solving complex problems and navigating ultra-sticky situations.
Test pilots are closer to an integration test in software. You expect the unit tests to pass green before you expect the related integration tests to work.
Multiple failures of maneuvering thrusters is technically a mission failure (in the flight plan sense), despite having nothing to do with the parameters of the mission, nor anything to do with adding humans. Maneuverability is the difference between a craft and junk.
I wouldn’t find this acceptable in a project I was managing or funding. Just sayin! Still impressed as hell.
The astronauts may have to be "rescued" with a different capsule returning the departing astronauts to earth.
IIRC, SpaceX also had some sort of glitch when docking with the station, on a crewed mission. Related to the thrusters, too, if memory serves.
Which was a problem, but it was a backup in case of a leak that broke, it had 0 effect and it was a cargo mission not a people mission. Starliner's failure today did have a significant mission effect and had people.
SpaceX had a bunch of rocket landing failures on real missions, but that didn't matter because landing was a bonus, basically nobody had done that before and everything was just fine if a rocket blew up trying to land.
SpaceX has also done a bunch of test launches with new vehicles, this also doesn't matter if they fail, they're specifically launched to find failures instead of expending tons of engineering effort which is more expensive than blowing up test rockets.
Those things are quite separate from "there's people on board and several thrusters broke requiring unexpected manual pilot intervention", this was not expecting or allowing for failure by design but a serious anomaly that has to be researched how the problems weren't caught in human certification.
No doubt they were lucky several times, but so were others, and most space institutions have much longer fatality lists, especially when adjusted to total flight volume.
> The 2023 records, newly disclosed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, also show that injury rates at some SpaceX facilities grew worse than those the company had reported in 2022. At its manufacturing-and-launch facility in Brownsville, Texas, for instance, SpaceX reported 5.9 injuries per 100 workers, surpassing its rate of 4.8 injuries in 2022 and topping a space industry average of 0.8.
That's 7x the industry average.
Ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2024-04-22/exc...
Fatalities certainly aren't the whole story, but they do have one "advantage": they cannot be hushed away, at least not in the Western world. (In China or Russia, well...)
That is why, in an analogical situation, crime and public safety of individual countries is often compared using murder levels. It is expected that most developed countries cannot really suppress/fudge murder statistics, even though they can do a lot of shenanigans around registration of lesser crime.
I can see a similar situation with individual corporations and their diligence when it comes to reporting injuries.
Maybe that's why there's 20 thrusters instead of 5.