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Comment by chrisandchris | Hacker News Reader

I agree it shouldn't have happened.

> Boeing removed the Starliner’s autonomous undocking feature from its software. The aerospace manufacturer wants to push a software update to the spacecraft in orbit, but NASA fears it could do more damage.

I'm very far away from NASA internals, but as I've seen them in the "older" days was that just a _finished_ product went into space and they would not allow to go into space with something they _knew_ required updates in-mission to complete the _original_ mission.

So it seems like a management issue on both sides.

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I think its dumb they couldn't have both software profiles available and be able to choose manual or auto, but the original mission did not call for autonomous undocking.

NASA may be taking a different approach, but in civilian aerospace it is prohibited to have code that doesn't run or doesn't trace to a system requirement. I assume that was their rationale for removing it.

This same base capsule design is also supposed to operate autonomously. It previously attempted an autonomous docking. The code was written, it was approved for flight previously. It is not like "autonomous docking" was never a part of the specification for this model of craft; it just wasn't the expected process for this particular mission.

Boeing just didn't bother to make it so the mission could potentially be changed in-flight, they just decided they'll load a software profile on the ground and that missions will just never change.

No, it's really stricter than that in my experience. You verify your software against the requirements. There shall be no deactivated code, even code which as previously flown before is not safe. See the first Ariane 5 launch for a reference. I assume that is why they removed it.

Of course, this isn't to say that Boeing doesn't have much more serious problems going on, they clearly do.

Starliner was already suffering delays at every step. They probably thought they could shave off a couple weeks by only qualifying the parts of the software absolutely needed for the mission and removing everything else

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