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Can someone spell out the consequences of a failed thruster? Eg miss the reentry cone and skip off the atmosphere into space?

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> Can someone spell out the consequences of a failed thruster? Eg miss the reentry cone and skip off the atmosphere into space?

With no thrusters Starliner can’t orient itself during reëntry, which almost guarantees burning up. I’m not sure what the minimum number of thrusters Starliner needs to safely deörbit.

> deörbit

Do you have this set as autocorrect or do you type the ö each time?

isn't this a "new yorker styleguide" sort of idiosyncrasy?

EDIT: "Languages such as Dutch, Afrikaans, Catalan, French, Galician, and Spanish make regular use of the diaeresis" according to wikipedia.

Only for repeated vowels, which deoörbit is not

Excessive diaeresis is usually caused by a vowel problem.

Explosive diaeresis is the woooorst.

It's a diphthong though. Same as the difference between George (roughly dzo:rdz) and Geörge (roughly dze:ordz).

> We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.

> or do you type the ö each time?

It’s easy on mobile and less so on my Mac, so I do it more on mobile. I grew up writing British English (and French), in which reorbit and cooperate are a thing, but they get systematically misread in American English, and re-orbit and co-operate look messy.

I’ve also noticed when I add a diaresis my iPhone has less of a tendency to fuck with the word after it’s been typed.

> miss the reentry cone and skip off the atmosphere into space?

My layman understanding is that this was never an option even for the Apollo trips from the moon - the problem was that a wrong re-entry angle wouldn't slow the capsule down enough to bring it down to the surface, and it would have to orbit several more times before finally slowing down enough to return.

This was a problem for two reasons: (1) the landing site would be unpredictable, and it wouldn't really do to land on the Kremlin, or in the middle of the Sahara, or in the middle of the Pacific. (2) The capsules didn't have enough supplies to keep the astronauts alive for too long, and too many orbits would mean that they'd be dead on arrival.

Incorrect angle also leads to higher temperatures that may exceed design capabilities during re-entry

In Carrying the Fire, in pre Apollo days when they did manual burns for re-entry, this was described as a big worry (burn sending you off into space). But maybe that was mitigated

There are several issues. One is that the craft doesn't properly separate from the station. If it backs away from the station, then dies, it will risk colliding with the ISS after an orbit. (Lower perigee but same apogee = collision potential.) The craft needs to back away from the station sufficiently to reenter or at least conduct a second maneuver to ensure its apogee is lower than the ISS's orbit.

My understanding (which may be wrong) is that they don't really understand how it's failed at this point so it could be anything from "no thrust" to "explodes and sends debris into the ISS".

Or come in too steep and burn up. Or miss the target drop zone and possibly come down in the wilderness or ocean (it's meant to land on flat and level land.)

That's one possibility.

Unfortunately, failure modes are not limited to "the thruster(s) shut down before the desired burn was completed".

Worse case looks kinda like this, but in space: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-explosion-destroyed-crew...

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