NASA acknowledges it cannot quantify risk of Starliner propulsion issues | Hacker News Reader

NASA acknowledges it cannot quantify risk of Starliner propulsion issues

arstechnica.com

314 pointsgeerlingguy449 comments

FWIW, a nice comment[1] from forum.nasaspaceflight.com (no affiliation with NASA):

> I'm retired now but did propulsion and systems engineering on the Transfer Orbit Stage (TOS) developed by Orbital Sciences and Lockheed Martin for NASA/MSFC in the 1990's. [...] I'll make a few comments on how/where things might have gone off the rails with the RCS thruster thermal problem.

[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2...

From one of the twitter posts cited in the forum post:

> Curious if the root is someone at Boeing accidentally not relaying vehicle updates to vendors, or if it was a conscious decision to avoid paying for change requests.

Seeing how Boeing "incidents" have piled up in recent years, and reading how most (or perhaps all) of those issues were due to "cost saving" measures, I wouldn't put it past them to have made that decision consciously, lives be damned.

> Almost all problems occurred at interfaces between companies (prime vs. sub, customer vs. prime) or between different groups within the same company, where one group misunderstood what another group was doing, or at actual mechanical and electrical interfaces between components designed and built by different groups.

This is obviously a well-known phenomenon in software engineering and I don't think anyone here is going to be be particularly surprised that it occurs in the aerospace setting. What is a little more surprising, to me at least, is that the systems people over there don't have procedures in place to minimise risks stemming from lack of communication.

It isn't realistic for any sub-team to be fully familiar with the overall system but surely, for instance, if a team is working on component X which interfaces with components Y and Z, then it should be standard practice for the X team to spend at least some time with the Y and Z teams during development?

PRINCE-2 and other methodologies used in these kinds of programs make ample provision for doing this - but like all methodologies the benefits only come from proper application. If the program manager is subjected to political pressure from different stakeholders then the processes and approaches that should catch division and misapprehensions may simply not run.

Yeah. Where are the integration tests? As a total outsider reading headlines, I would assume there's minimal testing framework and sparse QA.

Maybe there should not be 300 subcontractors involved in delivery and contracts should stipulated that work cannot be outsourced? The outsourcing of everything is part of the reason no one is ever held accountable.

The point of outsourcing is because people don’t want to be held accountable.

Stopping outsourcing doesn’t change the fundamental problem of accountability, people just find different ways to avoid it.

>The point of outsourcing is because people don’t want to be held accountable.

Having worked on the public sector (Air Force), there's enormous pressure on groups like NASA to outsource because voters perceive government work as wasteful and expensive, and contracted work as efficient because free market.

> there's enormous pressure on groups like NASA to outsource because voters perceive government work as wasteful and expensive, and contracted work as efficient because free market.

And, those contracts end up being the most wasteful and expensive of all.

The issue is design and development methodology.

> "Spend some time with the other team"

How about design documents? Is that truly a lost art among the latter-day geeks?

Everybody hates reading documentation

I read it but there is less and less available. Presentation and video recordings are more common but useless for the self study and search of information. Writing good documentation and instructions is hard. I try it a lot.

I'm sure that these groups are producing specifications, and I'm sure those specifications are being followed to the letter (and perhaps even being validated as such). The problem is that the spec only ever contains about 80% of reality, with the rest being lost either to implicit assumptions made by the writer, or to requirements that the implementer couldn't possibly hit and can't know (unilaterally) how to trade into something more realistic.

This is why you have to get the humans to talk to the other humans. If that communication happens via a collaborative design document then yes, that's a process, and it's one that can work.

It's also why we could not recreate a Saturn-V today. We have the specs, but we don't have the knowledge and skills of the people who actually built them.

Even if you have the specs, you do not know if there was some important variable that was not referenced in the specs, and then you need a billion dollar research project to figure out what was missing from the original spec. Reference: FOGBANK. https://www.twz.com/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-use...

Another issue is that the same types of nuts and bolts, resistors, and other miscellanea are not manufactured today.

I tried and tried to get two teams who were working on critical-but-independently-developed systems to put together an ICD. Team 2 says "no problem!" and comes back with a document 2 weeks later. Team 1 says "this proposed interface is terrible, here's a much better way to do it". Team 2 replies "oh yeah that's a nice interface but too late the interface in the ICD is the one we built two months ago can't change it now"

Yes

In my current role (high-assurance deterministic code for self-driving cars, one of the top-tier players, a company who claims to be "safety obsessed"), we have close to zero documentation. Every team or department has their own standards for documentation. Documentation is always back-written after coding is complete. Requirements are written after code is complete. For the past year, I've been given tons of praise at department meetings, "look at so and so, they've written so much really good documentation, their docs are the standard everyone else needs to follow", and then when it comes time for promotions my managers tell me "well, you haven't shipped as much code as other people on the team .... absolutely you've done a terrific job with documentation and we totally recognize you caught a ton of problems before they became problems, but promotions are really based on 'results', and 'results' means how much code you wrote ....". So I'm job hunting.

Ah yes, the old “we’re really looking for people who know how to game the metrics rather than wasting time on long term value to the company and our customers” conversation. Sorry to hear it, but wow do I know just what you mean.

Anecdotal personal experience in safety-critical design:

A team was tasked with modernizing their multi-million dollar decades old test stand. The entire time they were cursing previous engineers for their lack of documentation that made reverse engineering difficult. Then when it came time for them to produce the documentation on their own design, they balked at the idea. I had a conversation with them about how they are screwing over the future engineers just like they were screwed over, but they still maintained cost/schedule pressure was too much to comply. We settled on them being allowed to go forward as long as they set aside a fund source and a date to have the documentation complete. When that date came and went, the documentation wasn't done and the excuse was the funding was used up by other projects. I feel like I owe those future engineers and apology.

I don't think I'd be so trusting/naïve today and would push back harder that if they couldn't get their documentation in order when the design was fresh in their mind, they're even less likely to do so in the future.

They should double the teams. For every interface, they should add a team who's sole job it is to design and test that interface.

As labor is a driving cost, wouldn't that almost double the price? They are already uncompetitive in price with spaceX right? I'm not suggesting that profits be valued over lives, but they are clearly doing something wrong beyond having too few employees.

Stock market goes up when we get rid of more employees, that's all that matters...

Until the moment it doesn't.

But by that time, the management whose quarterly or yearly bonuses drove the decision have moved on to bring their skills at increasing stock value to some other company (or retired).

Maybe you are right. Being a public company is a net negative for space.

I am pretty sure you should have marked this comment /s.

The Mythical Man Month surely applies.

We need another team to determine when the Mythical Man Month applies or not

Can I be on the team that ignores the result?

I think we're on that team by default.

Yes. Please put together 100 people to finish the 100 dev-month project next month.

It surely does not.

The Mythical Man Month applies when you task more people to work on the same job with the expectation of faster results.

He is proposing to task more people to work on different jobs with the expectation of higher quality results.

I had a relative who spent years as a systems integration engineer at Boeing. This was his job basically.

What's amazing to me is that it doesn't seem like Boeing did tests with a fully integrated capsule until after the CFT test was in progress.

They did test firings of individual thrusters, and even did some with multiple thrusters, but with many of the systems in the doghouse missing and the insulation taken off.

Having read a good amount about their methods, it really seems like Boeing has relied heavily on component level tests and analysis rather than integrated tests. And it has bitten them many times so far.

>with many of the systems in the doghouse missing and the insulation taken off.

I'm curious where you're getting this? I've read speculation, but I've never seen any authoritative source claim the test hardware configuration was different than the flight configuration. The better sources I've seen tend to indicate it was an inadequate thruster profile in the tests, rather than a configuration issue.

Back when I worked on this hardware/software integration, we often didn't have the hardware to test.

So we coded to the specs. I spent a lot of time reading those and trying to figure out what they meant. It was a little challenging but usually all the information was there. It worked (mostly) and we tested alot. Some stuff was strange, I still remember seeing angles in BAMs (Binary Angle Mesurements)

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

This jibes with the way people compare SpaceX and "old space" development in industry sources I follow:

SpaceX works "hardware rich", building lots of prototypes early in the development process. When Boeing and ULA launch their first "production" launch, the previous test articles generally haven't been anywhere near complete.

I wonder if it's possible to avoid sub-teams of a project at this scale, could everyone working on it have a general understanding of the entire system? even with imperfect understanding, individual contributors would cover the gaps for each other.

Are there full-stack engineers? or are the individual domains too complex compared to coding?

This isn't really possible on a project like this. There are just too many specialties, and you need folks who have deep expertise in each one. Just off the top of my head there's structures, mechanisms, fluids, propulsion, avionics, dynamics, software, integration, systems, instrumentation, test, operations, human factors, and manufacturing, and each one of those has sub-specialties. In avionics for example you've got RF and power (among others); in software there's embedded, flight, ground, and interfaces (again, among others). There's a chief engineer whose job it is to oversee the project but they will be relying on the expertise of the individual teams, and each team has to work closely with and lean on their partner teams. Sometimes you'll have people who are cross-trained - I have experience in avionics, software, and ops - but that's not typical, and it doesn't take much to feel spread thin (I certainly do).

It's like people expect NASA to be infallible.

No, people look at what NASA was able to accomplish during the 1960s and compare it to now, and wonder how the level of competence can be so drastically lower now vs. then. NASA was not infallible during the 1960s, but the level of engineering competence was much higher.

Well my first thought to answer that question is -- how do the funding levels compare between now and then?

The combined Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs cost around $30 billion in then year dollars, which equates to about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's an average of about $25 billion a year over 12 years. That's about the same as what is being spent per year on NASA now.

But it’s now spread across many, many more missions. People sometimes forget that human exploration is just one of multiple directorates within NASA.

NASA was doing plenty of unmanned missions during the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo years: the Explorer, Pioneer, Echo, Ranger, Telstar, Mariner, Lunar Explorer, and Surveyor programs all had multiple missions in that time period. So no, I don't buy the argument that NASA has to spread its budget over many more missions now as compared to then.

Many of those you mentioned are still part of the goal of getting a human on the moon. That's like saying Starliner's Demo flights don't count as human-rated because they were uncrewed. About a one third to one half of NASA's budget is dedicated to exploration and space operations which is a better comparison for what you're driving at. The rest is spread across science, aeronautics, environmental, educational outreach, and other goals.

> Many of those you mentioned are still part of the goal of getting a human on the moon.

Some of them were for getting more detailed information about the Moon prior to sending the Apollo missions there. But most of them were general solar system exploration.

> That's like saying Starliner's Demo flights don't count as human-rated because they were uncrewed.

No, it isn't. The counterpart in the 1960s to these missions would be the uncrewed flights of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft that were done prior to the first crewed missions. I did not include those in the unmanned missions I listed.

Since 2004:

- They sent 4 rovers to Mars, a freaking helicopter, and confirmed water presence.

- They launched 2 telescopes, with Webb forcing us to rethink our model of the universe.

- They made New Horizons do a flyby... of Pluto.

- And they collected samples from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu!

If that's not the demonstration of anything but drastically high competence to you, nothing is.

At this stage, I have to believe you are a troll.

You think a telescope that launched over a decade late and cost 10x the budget is a mark of "high competence"? I don't think being a useful science tool is enough.

What's the other telescope you have in mind?

And those two free telescopes from NRO are still sitting idle. One of them is supposed to finally launch after 15 years, though apparently it's in such a complex and high budget mission it might not be saving any money to use it there.

High competence in unmanned missions. But not in manned missions.

> (no affiliation with NASA)

I've mistaken them for the official nasa webcast more than once before realizing that the two casual dudes talking can't possibly be official commentators. Isn't this some sort of trademark infringement they're doing?

From NSF’s “about us” page:

NSF is not affiliated with and does not represent the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA initials are used with NASA’s permission.

Aha, so they did get permission to use their trademark. That makes them practically official then.

No, that's not right. "NASA" isn't a trademark but the use of the term is governed by federal law. Basically you're allowed to use the term unless you're impersonating NASA. Since NASASpaceflight makes it clear that they aren't NASA, they're allowed to use the term. It's allowed because they're not official.

"NSF is not affiliated with and does not represent the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)."

They don't make that very clear on their webcasts at least.

I don't know if it's supposed to take a rocket scientist to figure out whether Boeing these days has been living up to its 20th century reputation for improved reliability.

From the comments it can be pretty succinct:

>Yes, I know the aircraft and space divisions are separate. Doesn't matter. Shit always runs down hill if Corporate is squatting.

> no affiliation with NASA

I’m shocked they’re able to keep operating like this. Can I walk around Seattle video recording bicycle thieves and call it “Seattle Police Department Video”?

I'm more upset at NASA than Boeing over this for downplaying this issue for months while doing very serious things in the background like hot fire testing. Not transparent at all. You can easily see how public perception thought everything was fine all through July here:

https://manifold.markets/Shihan/will-spacex-dragon-rescue-bo...

I'd love an investigation to see if the public perception matched NASA's perception. I would be money that it doesn't which means NASA has been hiding the truth from the public. How can anyone trust what NASA says after this?

Is "hiding the truth" only a view if the truth is worse than the public think or could you imagine arguing that NASA "hid the truth" that its safer than the public thinks?

Objectively I suspect the only hidden truths here are perceptions/knowlege that its worse than people think. Hiding you think its better is .. unlikely.

Personally I don't ascribe a moral hazard dimension here. Probably, the NASA officials who had the power to state things, were not the ones conducting testing and their PR people were put on hold. I think its a malice/incompetence thing (Hanlon's razor)

> I'm more upset at NASA than Boeing over this for downplaying this issue for months while doing very serious things in the background like hot fire testing. Not transparent at all.

As late as July 28, NASA flight director Ed Van Cise explicitly denied that the Starliner crew was stuck or stranded <https://x.com/Carbon_Flight/status/1817754775196201035>. Even if one quibbles about whether "stranded" applies in this situation (I believe that it does <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ekicol/not_stranded_...>), "stuck" definitely does.

This reads as histrionics. You want an investigation into whether the general public felt the same panic people on the project do? No thanks, I'm alright with letting them get on with it and getting the full picture later.

An investigation into whether NASA's public messaging jived with their internal communications seems like it could be a good idea, since we know previous disasters were in part caused by NASA feeling external pressure to perform even while their engineers were freaking out internally.

NASA is funded with public money they should feel pressure to perform.

Feeling pressure to perform to the extent of tryimg to cover up or ignore serious safety issues raised by engineers is how you get people dying live on TV.

That is obviously a lot worse than a delay as far as the opinion of the public goes.

Feeling pressure doesn't mean giving into that pressure. It's not as though they have a responsibility to the public to be reckless; quite the contrary.

It's sad that you're being downvoted. They absolutely should feel pressure to perform as a taxpayer funded entity.

They're being downvoted because they're intentionally misreading what "pressured to perform" means in this context.

Both space shuttle disasters occurred because NASA was under pressure to 'perform' in the sense that they were under pressure to increase launch rate and cut costs to the extent that safety concerns were overlooked. Potentially serious issues were overlooked in favor of just flying.

Similarly, the concern here is that NASA management felt pressured to allow Boeing to put the lives of crew at risk despite serious safety concerns from engineers. While they would've lucked out in this case since they got to the ISS and have alternate ways to come back, if that turned out to be the case, it'd raise serious additional concerns for NASA's management of other Boeing programs (see: SLS and Orion).

As a taxpayer funded entity, NASA should feel pressured to perform in that they should feel pressured to progress their mission as efficiently as possible. This means taking the time to properly weigh safety risks, as a crew vehicle exploding due to known problems is a waste of taxpayer funds.

As the issues tend to build up at contractor interfaces, I would favor NASA to do more vertical integration, but, then, it'd need more funding, which won't happen if contractors such as Boeing and their own subcontractors don't drop the ball so much and if the press doesn't blame NASA for those.

The problem with that is historically NASA has used contractors to manufacture if not also design virtually all of their hardware. They don't have the experience to do it all on their own.

NASA wouldn’t need to be fully vertical, but it would be wise to have as few nested contractor interfaces as possible. This would make it have more responsibilities in integration of components from multiple vendors, but at least they wouldn’t be shielded from issues and would be able to see them as soon as possible.

Another important thing is that their jobs should be protected from political interference, so that nobody feels compelled to not speak up.

To a certain extent, this functioned exactly as how the Commercial Crew Program was intended. There were NASA engineers raising concerns with both SpaceX and Boeing and they would periodically be told to basically stand down because it wasn’t NASA’s place to direct the design since they were just buying a ride.

I don't understand. What would be the difference if they didn't downplay this? There'd be a massive shitstorm distracting resources at NASA and Boeing from doing their jobs and we wouldn't be any better off. How is that better for anybody?

Why is handling the issue quietly worse? Let the engineers do their fucking jobs.

> I'm more upset at NASA than Boeing

More upset than the company that couldn't build a functioning, reliable rocket? Get a grip, dude.

>What would be the difference if they didn't downplay this?

More confidence in NASA's future statements they make to the public.

And confidence would solve the Starliner problem? Oh come on. NASA can't tell the truth because, you know, just look at the state of social media and the news today. I wouldn't want to tell anybody on HN the truth, much less your average CNN or Fox reader/viewer. You want them to tell the truth? Stop going on idiotic witch hunts first.

The NTSB doesn't comment on ongoing investigations either. That's a good thing. Complete transparency only makes sense once everything has been resolved and investigated. Otherwise you have idiots on the internet chasing the flimsiest of threads and making a big stink about insignificant details.

Curious as to moral in the Boeing division right now. If you designed/built/influenced any part of the design and watching this play out publicly. Leaving astronauts stranded and potentially with a module stuck on the space station.

Do you definitely start looking for a new job? Assume that ultimately nothing will change?

You certainly can't snitch, we saw what happened with that one guy who tried it.

Two Boeing whistleblowers: https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02/1248693512/boeing-whistleblow...

We should concede that its probably hard to do one's job properly, if one "has" to take on the second job of organizing a gangstalking crew or assassins.

How can we fault them for improperly leading Boeing workforce with these extra tasks? /s

>> Curious as to moral in the Boeing division right now.

I'm even more curious about the astronauts. Are they willing to risk it? Are they even part of the discussions? Are they saying "screw that thing, get me a dragon"? I haven't heard a single word about their take on it.

If you listen to the teleconference, NASA was asked and it really seem to be more that they'll do what they're told; which seemed odd to me. And those conferences have not had either the astronauts or Boeing on; which IMHO is just weird. Having said that, I suspect the astronauts aren't actually that worried by that thruster issue. They managed to dock it OK (manually). It's more NASA getting comfortable that they understand the failure.

NASA has strong military roots and astronauts used to as well; the “do what they’re told” fits that’s motiff.

I mean also they seem smart enough to have some intellectual and epistemological modesty. If I’m the guy or woman floating around in space, I have to imagine that the collective brainpower on the ground is better-informed to make that judgment than I am.

Two issues with that approach:

1 - do they have the right incentives, is there colossal pressure to save face from Boeing? Politics? This happened before

2 - lack of accountability - this is not a question of property that can be compensated if they are wrong. they can’t die instead of you. Your family expects to see you again, and you are responsible. There in no prize for being ‘Dead right’

Very true, but am I, sitting up in space, in a position to have enough information to act on either of these concerns?

I can imagine a situation where I have a gut instinct that “this thing is just squirrelly, I don’t trust it.” But if I don’t have that instinctive reaction, how am I to know which return option is more reliable?

They successfully docked despite the anomalies, and it doesn’t seem to have led them to say “like hell I’m flying that deathtrap back.”

At some level aren’t everyone’s incentives, including Boeing’s, aligned around getting everyone home alive?

Sure Boeing’s risk appetite may look different, but wouldn’t even Boeing rate the loss of the return capsule as a catastrophic outcome? Wouldn’t I, as an astronaut, have priced Boeing’s incentives in to my decision not to put my foot down? And don’t I have to trust the ground team with my life before I let them strap me onto a space rocket in the first place?

If you listen to the teleconference, NASA was asked and it really seem to be more that they'll do what they're told; which seemed odd to me.

It seems vanishingly unlikely that NASA is free to decide on their own solution. Orders along the lines of "Don't get any astronauts killed before the election" wouldn't be all that surprising, balanced against the problem of making the newly-GOP-friendly Elon Musk look like the hero of the day.

Bottom line, those astronauts aren't going anywhere for a few more months.

Do you have any proof that NASA is making decisions to avoid making republicans look good or is that good old-fashioned biased editorializing?

Please don't lower the value of conversation on HN with tacit politicizing like that, thank you.

Proof? No. But higher echelons in NASA are political creatures by necessity. You can bet that the coming election is factoring into their behavior.

> Having said that, I suspect the astronauts aren't actually that worried by that thruster issue. They managed to dock it OK (manually).

Watch the Starliner crew entering ISS. Williams is very, very, very happy to have survived the ascent. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsURePrNTx0>

That or she's just happy to be back in space for the 3rd time. I know i would be. That and i'd be thrilled to get to spend 9 months on the ISS instead of two weeks.

> That and i'd be thrilled to get to spend 9 months on the ISS instead of two weeks.

Yes, flying in space is cool. No, most people don't want to do this indefinitely. Astronauts retire all the time even when they are 100% guaranteed more flight time if they didn't retire; a whole bunch did that in the 1960s and 1970s (some, like Frank Borman, 100% guaranteed to walk on the moon), and more during the shuttle era.

It's one thing to have a mission extended by a day, as happened to the shuttle routinely because of bad weather at the landing site. Skylab 4's mission I believe got extended by 28 days, but that was a known possibility before launch. To have an eight-day mission be possibly extended to eight months is in no way shape or form OK.

Wilmore is going to miss his 30th wedding anniversary and other family events <https://www.wvlt.tv/2024/08/09/family-reacts-tennessee-astro...>. Do you really think he is thrilled by that? Really?

> Williams is very, very, very happy to have survived the ascent

That is quite a bit of projection. I see that Williams is happy. I give you that. But what gives you the idea that she is happy "to have survived the ascent" as opposed to "happy to see her colleagues" or "happy to be in microgravity" or "happy to be back at the ISS"?

If the crew publicly suggest they would rather not join their Columbia forebears on the list of incinerated spacefaring heroes their careers at NASA (and opportunities afterward at Boeing or another contractor) would be over. And until the engineering decision is made there is no need to take that risk now.

If they're are worried for their lives, then a career at Boeing may not be that important. They're extremely skilled engineers/scientists. It's unlikely they'd have issues finding serious work.

But few opportunities to go to space

Based solely on age this is probably their last hurrah in space

Really?

They're both about 60. Since they're both fit enough to be astronauts, I think we can say their life expectancy should be at least 85. Perhaps substantially longer with some medical advancements or age reversal.

Look at what SpaceX is working on these days (Starship), consider that AI & robotics will likely accelerate progress, and I would say that you can definitely expect affordable and perhaps even relatively comfortable space travel within their lifetimes.

Sure - but paying for that on an astronaut's pension??

I've no doubt that the astronauts are involved in the decision making. They are highly intelligent and highly trained individuals. They are unequivocally part of a team that also includes hundreds of highly skilled people on the ground. This is quite literally their job. Talking about all of this publicly is not their job. At least, not right now.

They've been standing by the process in the statements they've made. I'm sure they're confident they're going back on a Dragon by now so their personal risk is minimal.

Astronauts, first and foremost, want to fly. They have been known to hush up health issues, safety issues, vehicle issues if it gets them closer to flying. I'm guessing Butch and Suni are having the time of their lives watching the surface of the Earth fly by outside the window. They will chomp at the bit to manually fly a Starliner home good valves or no just to show their colleagues how awesome they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly:_NASA_and_the_Crisis...

I dunno, they cover up health issues and etc _to get into space_. They're in space now, might as well drag it out as long as they can.

> health issues, safety issues, vehicle issues if it gets them closer to flying

I would take a risk driving experimental motorbike, would not risk driving a normal motorbike on a highway where mechanic checking it was sloppy and stupid.

Even if risks were, hypothetically identical, risk A is honourable, risk 2 is someone’s incompetence or greed.

They're also perfectly eager to cuss out bureaucrats who get them killed by forcing them to fly known faulty vehicles.

  > One report describes the crew as "infuriated" that Mission Control Center seemed unconcerned. When Gibson saw the damage he thought to himself, "We are going to die"; he and others did not believe that the shuttle would survive reentry. Gibson advised the crew to relax because "No use dying all tensed-up", he said, but if instruments indicated that the shuttle was disintegrating, Gibson planned to "tell mission control what I thought of their analysis" in the remaining seconds before his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27#Tile_damage

So, you know, it's one thing to be a badass cowboy with the risks inherent to exploration. But maybe don't romanticize the political and technical incompetence in this particular situation.

Its worth noting that NASA astronauts are gifted, but often more working class than equivalent organisations. I wonder if their humble social status (relatively speaking) makes it easier to coerce them into doing dangerous things?

IMO it is probably more that people that work their entire lives to be astronauts and then wait years, sometimes decades, to get a flight slot are not the type to be risk averse. Lots of them were test pilots as well. So, these types of folks are naturally risk takers and I am sure have full trust in their supporting teams.

I doubt they need to be coerced into doing dangerous things. All space flight is inherently risky.

It's probably cooler to fly back on a different vehicle instead of re-using the same one.

What's the problem? The vehicle mostly worked. It's like your app shipped but had a spinning cursor issue and users had to manually clear cache. It's an overwhelming success by standards of software industry.

Watch the Starliner crew entering ISS. Williams is very, very, very happy to have survived the ascent. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsURePrNTx0> Does she seem to think that the craft merely had a spinning-cursor issue?

Yeah?

I interpreted it as she was very happy to have completed the first manned mission on a new spacecraft type

Maybe not everything is just like apps all the time.

You can treat spaceflight like software and work out the bugs by trial and error. Lord knows spacex did.

You just can't put people on the vessel while you're doing that part

The software industry literally has no standards.

Software isn’t an industry. NASA has amazing processes to diagram software before a line of code is written.

>Curious as to moral in the Boeing division right now.

As long as the paychecks don't bounce they're probably more worried about their individual KPI than the actual results.

*morale

I wonder sometimes whether NASA should lean into the high risk of spaceflight instead of trying to minimize it. If they could get the public to pay attention, their budgets would go up. Highlighting the risk--without exaggerating--would be a good way to get people to care. People love (maybe even crave) drama.

Astronauts accept an amazing amount of risk, even when using proven systems like Soyuz or Dragon. ISS is one unlucky micrometeoroid strike away from total catastrophe. And yet hundreds of astronaut candidates are jostling with each other (another great drama) to be next on the rocket.

Even uncrewed missions are filled with drama. Imagine devoting 20 years of your scientific career on a probe to Mars and having it blow up on take-off or smash into the Martian surface--so close, and yet so utterly useless.

I think NASA fears that highlighting risk leads to bad press. NASA doesn't want headlines like, "NASA ignores safety concerns--story at 11". But ironically, when NASA minimizes risk, they lower the threshold for how much risk the public will accept. The more they minimize risk, the less risk the public will let them take.

I don't have any good suggestions, though. Highlighting risk inevitably invites the question of "why are we taking the risk at all?" And that's also a hard conversation.

The ISS can tank micrometeorites just fine. They could put a hole straight through the ISS but the station is only pressurized to one atmosphere; the leak would be slow and easy to patch. It wouldn't even be the first time they had a leak..

I assume that depends on the size of the micrometeoroid. Though I suppose any meteoroid large enough to destroy ISS would not be "micro". But maybe not.

Why doesn’t that trigger explosive decompression? Just because it’s so small?

You easily fire several bullets into the skin of a typical airline fuselage and have no problems beyond air getting out. Explosive decompression requires much higher pressures or sufficiently weak materials. One atmosphere is not much of a difference. The only real danger is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hammer which scales with volume of air escaping.

Is explosive decompression of a human occupied area of a space ship ever actually a concern then? Seems like the pressure difference could only ever be 1

Well, if you end up with a hole large enough for explosive decompression, you're already screwed. Doesn't apply to planes because there is air outside. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

> I think NASA fears that highlighting risk leads to bad press. NASA doesn't want headlines like, "NASA ignores safety concerns--story at 11". But ironically, when NASA minimizes risk, they lower the threshold for how much risk the public will accept. The more they minimize risk, the less risk the public will let them take.

> I don't have any good suggestions, though. Highlighting risk inevitably invites the question of "why are we taking the risk at all?" And that's also a hard conversation.

I think it's fine for NASA to take risks doing truly new things, and even then it should do everything reasonable to minimize those risks (e.g. extensive testing, validation, and good engineering). But launching a space capsule and returning it to Earth with its crew alive? That's not a new thing.

Also, it's film at 11 ~not news at 11~ (jokes from when people understood the idiom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbjZEoXQjCM).

I don't think you're right about the idiom being wrong. I've always read and heard "news at 11".

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_at_11

> "Film at 11", "Pictures at 11" or "News at 11" is a US idiom from television news broadcasting, in which viewers are informed that footage of a breaking news story will be screened later that day. The word "film" in the phrase dates back to the early decades of TV news when footage was regularly recorded on film.

Film, here, seems especially dated. Sometimes anachronistic idioms get modernized rather than remaining static.

What's particularly interesting is that idiom is not just anachronistic, but that it's been through several evolutionary obsolescences: film -> tape -> digital -> internet / social / streaming / VOD.

> Film, here, seems especially dated. Sometimes anachronistic idioms get modernized rather than remaining static.

I don't think that's a modernization, it's a misunderstanding. The idiom makes no sense as "news at 11" (though the "story at 11" from the op does make some sense), since to even deploy it idiom, you must have already given the news.

I feel like "news at 11" is a case where an idom is twisted when it's not understood to try to make sense of it. There's probably a name for this linguistic phenomenon.

I always understood "news at 11" to mean that a fuller report of the event that was just briefly introduced would be provided at 11.

> I always understood "news at 11" to mean that a fuller report of the event that was just briefly introduced would be provided at 11.

That feels like a retcon, for lack of a better word. I'd like to see a clip of "news at 11" being used that way by an anchor in a news broadcast (especially pre-1980).

Edit: I think the term that covers what I'm talking about is folk etymology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology:

> Folk etymology – also known as (generative) popular etymology,[1] analogical reformation, (morphological) reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation[2] – is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one through popular usage.[3][4][5] The form or the meaning of an archaic, foreign, or otherwise unfamiliar word is reinterpreted as resembling more familiar words or morphemes.

My theory is that:

1) Delayed available of footage due to film technology created the "film at 11" idiom, which became so ubiquitous it was the basis of jokes.

2) "The phrase was used in many TV shows and movies from the 1960s through the 1980s."

3) Film was replaced by video at some point prior to 1980 (guess). The idiom ceased being used in news broadcasts, and became unmoored from its foundations but continued to drift around in popular culture.

4) People ignorant of the origin use "folk etymology" to mis-correct/twist "film at 11" to "news at 11," which fits the pop culture formula.

5) "News at 11" gets repeated all over the internet all the time.

It's an incredibly new thing. The total number of manned space launches ever is less than the number of commercial flights that take off in 15 minutes.

It’s not new. It’s _infrequent_ but not new.

It might backfire. Manned space missions are risky and expensive, and the interesting discoveries seem to be coming from unmanned missions. Are there enough microgravity experiments left to justify the risk and expense of the ISS?

> It might backfire. Manned space missions are risky and expensive, and the interesting discoveries seem to be coming from unmanned missions. Are there enough microgravity experiments left to justify the risk and expense of the ISS?

I think NASA loses the funding game if they try to justify themselves based purely on "interesting [scientific] discoveries."

I agree. I would rather expand the discussion on benefits so that we see that the risk is worth it. I just don't know how to do it.

But I think we need professional storytellers and dramatists to tell the story of space exploration in order to really sell the benefits. After all, we enthusiasts love space exploration not because it will lead to zero-G medicines, but because exploring space is freaking cool.

We need to tell an emotional story, and emotional stories have risk and conflict (even if it is conflict with physics).

High and low are quantifiable risks. Starliner risk is a divide by zero error NaN instead of a value.

. . . as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.

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

NASA incidents that result in loss of life tend to result in public congressional inquiries. See Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia.

Considering NASA's budget and project list are at the whim of Congress, making the US government look bad is something they select against.

Agreed--my suggestion isn't to take more risk, but to highlight the current very high risk that NASA is already taking. Both Starliner and Dragon have a loss-of-crew risk of at least 1 in 500. That is unbelievably high, and I think NASA could drive interest in the space program if they (appropriately) highlighted that risk.

NASA is a fundamentally political organization. Given that it's political the risk isn't worth it. Risk only happened early in NASA's history (Apollo) because the alternative geopolitical risk (Soviets landing humans on the moon) was so much higher. Once that driving force was gone there was no longer an appetite for risk.

And even look today, look at the relatively small risks (minor environmental rule edge skirting) SpaceX takes with unmanned test vehicles (Starship) and how much they're completely and constantly raked over the coals for it. The media in the modern era only knows how to attack and criticize.

Imagine the alternate reality where the media is getting excited about new ventures and celebrating successes. Wish we lived in that world.

Why is NASA covering for Boeing? Jettison that shit and let it crash into the ocean as a burnt hunk as their infinite hemming and hawing indicates is apparently overwhelmingly likely to happen.

Political reasons maybe. Both NASA and Boeing are effectively arms of government.

My suspicion is this is also why they won't let SpaceX rescue the crew prior to the election.

Part of the problem is they don't know whether they can jettison Starliner. The software that's intended to undock without crew aboard was removed.

Can you guarantee that hitting the "undock and re-enter" button right now would result in Starliner safely leaving the ISS and then clearing its orbit?

Even if that had an acceptable level of risk, that still leaves two extra crew on the ISS with no seats home in case of an emergency, and NASA's policy in recent years has been to always have emergency return capacity for every crew member onboard.

I'm not saying there isn't a path forward that involves sending Starliner back empty, there are just a lot of considerations going into that decision right now.

They removed the autonomous flying part for this mission, so they can't jettison it without a human inside. They are supposedly working on adding that feature back in. It also cannot be attached to the canada arm so they can't even clear it away from the port its using.

At some level by covering or Boeing they are covering for themselves. They were the ones putting the astronauts on it, after all.

But there is another level: there some kind of a background hate directed toward Musk and Space X. Someone in government agencies is asking themselves, how could we put some sticks in Musk's spokes? Some ask him to kidnap seals and put headphones on their heads [1] or calculate what's the chance his rockets would hit whales in the Pacific Ocean [2]. So it's not that they particularly love Boeing that much, but if Boeing's success makes Musk's company look worse, fine, then they'll support Boeing.

Imagine a scenario, for a moment, that the situation is reversed. Space X is the capsule with the issue and Boeing is the one with the cheaper and working version. There would be no hesitation to pointing fingers and accusing Space X make a large media stink about it instead of covering up.

[1] https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-4-transcript/

> Whether the seals would be dismayed by the sonic booms. Now, there’ve been a lot of rockets launched out of Vandenberg and the seal population has steadily increased. So if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac, based on the evidence, if you were to correlate rocket launches with seal population. Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures.

[2] https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-4-transcript/

> Now, again, you look the surface, look at the Pacific and say what percentage of the Pacific consists of whale? I could give you a big picture and point out all the whales in this picture. I’m like, I don’t see any whales. It’s basically 0%, and if our rocket does hit a whale, which is extremely unlikely beyond all belief, fate had it, that’s a whale has some seriously bad luck, least lucky whale ever.

Just to make it clear, I don't like Musk, I don't have any stock in his companies, and don't buy his cars or use twitter/X. But it's still interesting to observe this effect of cover up and strange push against Musk.

It's also strange that ULA continues to get more rocket launch contracts from the US military despite SpaceX charging less money.

It is not strange at all the inefficiency of the government has compounded to an extent such that even the military can not produce weapons to standards. SpaceX is one of the few shinning beacons of the Pax Americana if they kill SpaceX and continue to support these dying businesses without stringent reforms or refuse to allow their competitors China will overtake us. You can already see this happening where NASA of today just moves money from the government to private companies(but the ones truly doing innovation and delivering are the private companies) the technical capabilities of NASA now exist in the past while the China National Space Administration has been steadily improving their technical capabilities while also supporting a burgeoning private space industry. The financialization of US economy is making it such that those that produce money with the least actual value are being prioritized, while it different in China. The engineering legacy is already gone substantially, we cannnot even produce naval destroyers to spec even after multiple delays and after being overbudget, while China is cranking out better and better ships and using the engineering legacy of ship building to make naval destroyers. The Naval battlefield has changed whereby the previously overpowered aircraft carriers are now a huge liability with a missile costing less that $200k can destroy it (while there was a lot of spending on counter measure like the phalanx) the future is no longer of large ships.

What's the cause of this development?

The whole thing speaks to complete mismanagement on every level. That they still haven't made any kind of decision 3 months in is absolutely laughable.

Now they are saying the astronauts could be up there until MARCH. They miscalculated by EIGHT MONTHS. These people are complete clowns.

Dump that pile of junk, cancel the program, and fire all the managers involved in this cosmic fiasco.

If anyone here's familiar with how these decisions are made, I'm curious about why NASA says they need another week to choose their path forward. Given that we're already over two months into a week-long mission, what information don't they have that they would have in another week?

They and their partners (Boeing) are running more tests as we speak - probably expecting more data that could answer some questions.

Well, they said they would do more modelling. Since they've definitely already done a pile of modelling, the remaining modelling is probably running down a list of alternate assumptions and approaches in whatever modelling system they've been using. Most likely they've already gone ahead modeled out all of their most likely and high confidence assumptions and approaches. Likely the modelling results haven't quite converged, leading them to be unsure.

In parallel, my pet theory is that NASA has probably already made up its mind (astronauts are not going to return on Starliner), and have been dragging this out mostly to make it look like they aren't just going to throw their contractors under the bus (even if they deserve it). Boeing has declared cold feet over fixed cost contracts (in general, not just with NASA), and I think NASA wants to keep the rest of the contractor pool at least at ease that, okay maybe NASA might start being stingier with the money and contracts, but they aren't going just throw you under the bus when issues appear.

Modeling is irrelevant when you don't know the cause of the failures or even have an idea. 5 thrusters failed and 4 came back and apparently they don't know why in either case.

> or even have an idea.

They have an idea. "Tests of a similar control jet on the ground suggested a Teflon seal in an internal valve could swell at higher temperatures, restricting the flow of propellant to the thruster." That is the idea they have and they are checking if it matches with the measured signals / explains the observations.

If they know what is/was wrong, they can model what happens if the problem reoccurs even if they don't know why it occurred, disappeared, or might reoccur.

But yeah, about the only thing more irritating than having a problem occur for reasons you don't understand is having it disappear for reasons you also don't understand.

I think they're just being great manager-engineers just as they should be. The root-ish cause so far determined is Teflon seal soaking in rocket fuel and bulging, constricting flow. Downstream it is creating improper oxidizer/fuel ratio and excess heat at thrusters which is triggering alarm and automatic shutdown. These were all explained in plain and accessible English in NASA press conferences and I've watched it online.

I'd been a space fan for long enough that I know "improper O/F ratio" usually goes under a picture of a fireball or an artist's impression file image. There were multiple spacecrafts that at least blew off engines that way. The JAXA SLIM mission just this January had it that way. The fact that NASA/Boeing Starliner team keep triggering it and getting away with it is probably technically magnificent.

With that prior knowledge, one way I can interpret those corpospeak is "we aren't sure if we can continue to do that and not finally kill the engines, or worse yet, turn everything into a bomb with people inside or around". Many are instead receiving "we technically know such and such [unintelligible] but we aren't sure of anything and we have no idea". That's a great demonstration of public relations skills.

They're running with the theory of it being the teflon seals, but IIRC the problem is that it doesn't explain why the thrusters appeared to be operating relatively normally in a test at the station. The seal deformation should be permanent, in which case the thrusters shouldn't have recovered on their own, meaning that they might not have caught the real issue.

That's what's making the risk difficult to quantify.

> In parallel, my pet theory is that NASA has probably already made up its mind (astronauts are not going to return on Starliner), and have been dragging this out mostly to make it look like they aren't just going to throw their contractors under the bus (even if they deserve it).

The longer NASA pushes out a decision on what to do with Starliner, the more it becomes likely that people within the Biden administration don't want to go with the obvious choice of bringing home the crew on a Crew Dragon, because they don't want the resulting headlines shouting "Elon Musk rescues astronauts from space".

I hadn’t thought of a political angle for this, but that does make sense. Announcing “Elon saves NASA” certainly helps the GOP more.

It clearly helps SpaceX, Musk mostly indirectly, and GOP not at all.

Elon is the maga crowd's newest talking head so it helps the GOP at least a little.

Why does this kind of partisan bickering only ever go one way on HN? Why does every decision have to be a careful calculus when one political party instead of another might get credit? Do people not realize how blatantly biased and partisan they sound?

Maybe because there’s a larger overlap between HN demographics and those of the Democratic Party versus those of the GOP?

That’s beside the point, though. NASA is an agency of the United States Government. The idea that politics do not come into play is naive at best.

It’s my opinion that you have been unfairly downvoted on this comment. This was a reasonable and astute analysis, but I suspect peoples political allegiances and Musk opinions create knee jerk downvote reactions on here. Your comment is probably a casualty of that.

Dead austronauts would hurt Biden/Harris 10000x more.

I think the likely delayed return in February is just because NASA want to make this seem as routine as possible, so will have them come back as part of a planned Dragon trip rather than scrambling an unnecessary and expensive unplanned one sooner that screams "rescue" and "we messed up".

NASA is paying SpaceX something like $200 million per launch. They won’t want to do that unless they have to. And if they did they still need to figure out what to do with Starliner. If they pay SpaceX and then later manage to get Starliner to work then that’s a lot of money down the drain.

Dead astronauts are way more expensive.

The cost isn't the issue here: the problem is you still have to undock and dispose of the capsule without it running back into the station.

The current outlined plan does not require an extra SpaceX launch, so that argument doesn't make sense.

200 millions usd for NASA is relatively small no ??? still a lot of money yes but for space exploration project ???? probably more than enough people (taxpayer) happy to pay that

At this point they are probably not going to succeed in certification. It is a damage limitation exercise. They can...

1. Return uncrewed and burn up. Nasa complemented for its caution.

2. Return uncrewed successfully. Nasa complemented for "excess of caution".

3. Return crewed successfully. Major concern remains over the craft. People continue to question the decision making for years.

4. Craft kills the crew.

Either way you are not getting a certified spacecraft out of this.

Of course there is a further possibility that the departing craft will cause risk or damage to the iss.

What does this sort of modeling look like? I guess I kind of naively assumed there were people gathering information on the current state, collecting different ways to get the astronauts back with detailed cost/benefit, quantification of risk, etc. and then some executive was collecting this to make a decision.

I mean I'm sure that's still happening to some degree but this process of modeling sounds a lot more formal.

I believe the article contains the answer to your question. It says "engineers will attempt to model the behavior of the valve with the bulging Teflon seal over the next week and its effects on thruster performance."

>Given that we're already over two months into a week-long mission, what information don't they have that they would have in another week?

As an Ars commenter observed <https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/nasa-acknowledges-it-c...>, it is possible that the real issue isn't whether Starliner is safe to return with humans. If that were the question two months of debate are, as you said, by itself enough to say "no". Return Wilmore and Williams on Crew Dragon. Done.

The commenter posited that the real issue is that NASA does not trust Boeing's software to undock Starliner autonomously. We know that Wilmore had to take manual control on the way up because of the thruster issues. NASA may fear that if thrusters fail again, Starliner software may again not be able to handle them, and the spacecraft might ram ISS. Thus, the agency wants a human to be able to take over if necessary. *That* is the dilemma. This is something that I and others had mentioned over the past couple of weeks, but the Ars commenter is I think the first outside NASA to put it so starkly.

That comment confuses me slightly. NASA always has the ability to take over the controls of a spacecraft operating around the ISS, even remotely by command from the ISS itself. The software should certainly be able to handle this.

Apparently not.[1] Although better sources for this are needed.

[1] https://simpleflying.com/boeing-starliner-undocking-software...

Eric Berger—Ars Technica reporter who wrote the article SimpleFlying cited—initially reported that Starliner needs a software update that will take four weeks, and NASA (I believe Ken Bowersox) worded it in the penultimate media event as reverting back to the 2022 software, but we now understand from context that in this case that means reverting to the 2022 parameters; NASA was very specific about the software itself not having changed.

The SLS[1] stans (as Berger described on Twitter) are now focusing on how parameter change != software update thus Berger was wrong all along. It'd be one thing if said changes took a day or two to do. But assuming that it is the four weeks Berger reported, that absolutely means that it is the same thing as "software needs replacing"/"functionality was removed". To the client, NASA in this case, it doesn't matter whether the weeks to implement a new feature is (one week of uploading parameters and three weeks to validate said parameters), or (3.5 weeks of uploading new software and 0.5 weeks of validating said new software). The end result is needing four weeks.

[1] Space Launch System, intended to return the US to the moon. Cost: $24 billion and rising fast

Now the problem is that the Boeing space suits aren't compatible with the Space-X seats.[1]

[1] https://futurism.com/stranded-astronauts-spacex-boeing-space...

I am not a lawyer or a rocket scientist but the fact that at least ONE defect went undetected/unreported/mis categorized/something at launch makes me think now everything else that Boeing did here is suspect as well and you can't take Boeing for its word at all anymore.

If I were a decision maker at NASA and I simply "trust" Boeing at its job and something goes wrong, I would likely end up fired at best.

They can take control over the spacecraft, the issue seems to be that the software is configured to expect crew control to be available. So, say Starliner detects an anomaly at some point, it will disable automatic control and expect crew to take over manual controls. This might cause a problem when returning without crew, even if they might be able to override that remotely.

The software currently loaded in Starliner is for manual flight. There is a different package that needs to be loaded (& verified) for autonomous flight, which seems to be what they are planning to do.

This is not entirely correct, after all, Starliner was attempting to dock autonomously before the thruster issues hit near the station. The software is configured for autonomous undock, but not autonomous fault handling (since if a crew is available, they're better for fault handling). The software update is to enable the autonomous fault handling that is needed when a crew is not available.

"Essentially, what we're asking the team is to go back two years in time and resurrect the software parameters that are required to give automatic responses to breakouts near the ISS should we have a problem in close to ISS, which the software now allows them to do manually," Stich said. "The team is always updating these mission data loads as different things change."

- https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/nasa-official-acknowle...

That doesn't sound good! So the current "autonomous" capability isn't fully autonomous, and is less capable (at least in this near-ISS maneuvering regard) than what they had 2 years ago?!

I mean, it makes sense that if you have a crew onboard, you want to make the crew handle the cases when the software thinks something is wrong. Similar to how plane autopilots will disengage for many kinds of faults.

If you don't have crew onboard, you don't have any choice but to rely on the software's judgement.

I think the big problem is that the changeover is going to take several weeks, since Starliner should be able to fallback to flying autonomously if the crew happens to become incapacitated for some reason. The changeover should've just been a matter of sending a command from the ground or via a relay satellite.

Well, unlike in web software, very real people could die if they screw up, and they aren't exactly pressed for time right now, so what's wrong with being careful?

I think for part of your question (why do they specifically say a week), the length isn't all that meaningful. As in, if they want to more time to make a decision, they'll just announce another week's delay.

They have weekly status update conferences, and just cancelling those conferences might be more of a PR risk than just keeping the conference and announcing that they're delaying making a decision.

An additional week ensures they stay compliant with their rich tradition: a time estimate being off by an order of magnitude.

They may still be chasing down some loose ends. While additional time allows for some more models and theories, I think it becomes exponentially less likely that it will alter the safe course of action.

If the system is so complex that an extra week does yield some major new insights, that’s way too complex to use.

It's intriguing to me that they seem to be prioritizing information collection to determine whether Starliner is viable, as opposed to definitively announce a return via SpaceX and making preparations for that.

It's like if I have a service outage, maybe I might spend a few minutes to collect debugging information, but my priority would be to bring the service back up via rollbacks or whatever to restore a previously known good state. Currently they are debugging Starliner with people stranded, but maybe they should prioritize on getting those people back home first.

Or maybe everyone involved don't consider being stranded for months in space as a bad state.

How is Boeing so consistently terrible nowadays?

Theyre going to kill people at some point.

>> They already did with the 2 737 Max crashes.

They put business people in charge with the last merger, instead of people with technical backgrounds.

As for killing people, they have already done that with the 737 Max.

Insane. MBAs are a menace

A professional management class is a menace. Managers with experience in the domain they’re managing are key. Engineers-evolved-into-managers should lead engineering firms, etc. If you don’t understand what your underlying business is, you’re doomed to fail. Likewise, businesses should be predicated on selling products, not on boosting stock prices. There are at least two very wrong things: the Jack Welch-ification of companies, and professional MBAs.

case in point, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su. Both I think are excellent run engineering tech firms that would be ruined by an MBA. See Intel as an example..

They didn't have a choice. When Airbus developed into feasible competition Boeing suddenly had to start making money.

The aviation industry wants cheap, fuel economic and reliable "air busses". A brilliant name indeed.

> The aviation industry wants cheap, fuel economic and reliable "air busses". A brilliant name indeed.

Ah, so that's what went wrong with the Bombardier CSeries.

They could have put business people with technical backgrounds in charge, instead of business people with no technical skills whatsoever.

"How is Boeing so consistently terrible nowadays?"

They are a publicly traded corporation. The enshittification is inevitable.

They already killed a few hundred people.

Bean counters are notoriously poor engineers...

But they're great at financially justifying and ordering hits on whistleblowers.

Aren't there a couple of unalive whistleblowers?

afaik 2 so far as we know, John Barnett from "suicide" and Joshua Dean from "illness".

Boeing merged with Lockheed/Martin when L/M was in serious trouble and rumors say it was pushed by the DOD because of all the L/M defense contracts involved. This then lead to the worst parts of L/M (management over engineering) gaining a foothold at Boeing (Engineering over Management).

The rest is a long, slow, decline into Boeing being what L/M was when they needed to be rescued.

I thought the real damage of management over engineering was done when they merged with McDonnell Douglas, and it was the MDD managers who got put into all the cushy higher level jobs?

Or did that happen twice?

I think his post is correct, except that he unfortunately got M-D confused with L-M and is probably outside the edit window now.

I'm pretty sure Boeing did not merge with Lockheed Martin. In this alternate history was it because of the F-35 contract?

ULA (Boeing and Lockheed's spaceflight division) is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed. Maybe they're referring to that?

I think they're confusing Lockheed Martin with McDonnell Douglas.

At some stage capitalism/free market needs to happen to those companies. If they can't perform they should die and the military contracts moved on.

rather comically, the military is not taking boeing's word for it. they strip down and inspect the entire aircraft before acceptance.

I think the key is to have leaders that have passion for the product and aren’t just interested in making profits and increasing stock price.

When you look at people like Gates, Jobs, Musk, Huang, they are cutthroat businessmen but they also have passion for their products. When I listen to interviews with a lot of US car CEOs, they seem to be interested only tangentially interested in cars, it’s just all numbers.

> Theyre going to kill people at some point.

developed by Boeing that became notorious for its role in two fatal accidents of the 737 MAX in 2018 and 2019, which killed all 346 passengers and crew among both flights.

I don't think anyone should return on Starliner.

Use Dragon, Starliner can be a test.

It's an obvious conclusion at this point but there's a lot of pressure to decide otherwise because of the financial and political stakes. The core issue is that NASA and Boeing know this and don't want to sign off on this. But they also don't want to sign of on the failure of the mission just yet; having signed off on the launch already. So, they are a bit stuck here.

Fortunately, running down the clock makes this a foregone conclusion. A lot of the components and systems on this thing have expiry dates. So, they are running down the clock. And of course the longer that lasts, the more potential for new problems there is.

By simply running down the clock, they get to land the thing without passengers and without having to do so because of the original failure. So everybody saves face (somewhat). My guess is they'll try to land it normally without passengers to "validate" it at least worked as advertised. But without risking astronaut lives. And then dragon swoops in and it's business as usual and nobody died.

The difference between Dragon and Starliner is that Nasa used Dragon for years without passengers so they knew the thing worked as advertised. And then the first launch with passengers was a non-event in terms of safety as it was just another launch for them. It's what SpaceX does: iterate lots until they can nail it every time.

The issue with Starliner is that launching it is too expensive to do this. No reusable rocket means they need a new one every time. So, this is only the third launch they've attempted. And the previous unmanned launches had lots of delays and issues. Technically they've never had a flight without problems.

They never had a lot of confidence building launches without passengers because the cost for that would have been astronomical. So, it's a big question mark in terms of safety. And all the constant incidents involving Boeing aren't instilling a lot of confidence.

So, they are simply running down the clock until failure is a foregone conclusion. The pressure is on Boeing to guarantee safety to NASA. And there's no way that either of them is signing off on a manned return of this thing because they'd never hear the end of it if it goes wrong. Which is why we're getting all these euphemistic statements about hard to quantify risks to explain why they can't sign off.

Yeah, and the fact that is gone on so long without them throwing a bunch of shit into Starliner and sending it back down with a whole lot of telemetry shows just how much clothing the emperor doesn't have. If NASA and the rest of the USA had an Engineering Culture, it would be a forgone conclusion that if the experiment went sideways you'd figure it out and continue on.

They went and made it political.

This isn't directed at you, for you, I wish could actually pay you for your response.

SpaceX has one thing going for it and it is iterate and gather data. NASA used to have this, and then they lost it. When shit becomes "important" it also becomes ridiculously stupid. We need to figure out how to make things not important.

Do we more or less know how many days worth of supplies they have to keep both up there if needed?

I don't know the specific answer, but I would double-check we got the same number of astronauts back down as we sent up.

Totally on point.-

PS. There was a nice movie released 1979 about that :)

IIRC they usually keep an extra 3 months worth of supplies available at the station, to allow for delays to resupply missions. A resupply mission also arrived at the station recently, which would have had additional supplies for them.

If they decide to go with the plan of sending a reduced crew in Crew-9, they'll probably add extra supplies to that too. So, supply wise there shouldn't be any concerns.

> Do we more or less know how many days worth of supplies they have to keep both up there if needed?

Not sure, but a Cygnus resupply mission (NG-21) launched on the 4th of August, so I'm sure they have plenty of supplies.

Supplies aren't an issue - they send up more every couple of months, and just did so a week or two ago.

There is a slight inconvenience in that the ISS has 6 bedrooms and 7 astronauts, so now one of them will be sleeping on the couch for 8 months rather than 8 days.

> sleeping on the couch for 8 months rather than 8 days.

Wonder what that actually translates to, in space

Is there an extra "guest" specially-adapted "zero gravity sleeping bag" or such?

All I read was that the "couch" is a sleeping bag in the Japanese module. I think the real sleeping quarters provide privacy as well as strapping down the occupant as some semblance of gravity.

Given alternatives, if the risk cannot be quantified, the risk is too high.

And what's the actual cost here? Some productivity loss in the ISS (2 less astronauts on the new rotation) and missed opportunity for Boeing to save some face by bringing them back?

Boeing saving face is worth nothing. The productivity loss is something, but nothing in comparison to stranding (or worse) 2 astronauts.

We should be re-framing this entire thing - what is the best case scenario? The stranded astronauts return safely as soon as possible. Do that however you can and be happy you don't actualize some far worse reality. That is the real path to Boeing saving some face.

As for productivity, right now they have an extra couple hands that are well experienced in ISS operations.

Hopefully NASA hubris does not kill more people like it did during Challenger and Columbia.

Can it fly back unmanned?

Apparently, not in its current configuration. The previous, unmanned, mission could do that (obviously), but Boeing changed the configuration and now Starliner can only undock with people inside of it (as far as I understand it, it can do everything else unmanned).

Boeing can change the configuration, and I guess they're in the process of doing so, but it takes four weeks to run all the tests on that configuration and make sure everything works as it should.

As a big SpaceX fan, I appreciate the innovation and success that SpaceX has brought to space exploration. However, it's crucial that we have multiple reliable launch and crew providers to ensure the safety and sustainability of space missions. While SpaceX has been a game-changer, relying solely on one provider is risky. The ongoing issues with Boeing's Starliner highlight the importance of diversity in our space program. We need to support and develop multiple providers to maintain a robust and secure presence in space.

> However, it's crucial that we have multiple reliable launch and crew providers to ensure the safety and sustainability of space missions.

The keyword here is reliable and I would add the word competitive. Having an expensive, late, unreliable provider may in fact be a net negative. I think Starliner in it's current form isn't helping the industry. I hope they get their act together, or that we fund a reliable and competitive alternative to SpaceX.

IMHO, Starliner is too big of an MVP

That's because Starliner isn't an MVP. It's a vehicle designed to transport humans. You don't send humans to space in an MVP.

To be clear, you can have multiple and iterative MVPs

Then at least one of them isn't M or at least one of them isn't V.

Min Viable .. sure you can do that. I guess I am thinking of a different definition than you of viable

I'm saying that if you do multiple MVPs, then at least one of them isn't Minimum or one of them isn't Viable.

A lot of people get that wrong. It’s certainly not how we treat MVPs in my particular industry.

“ Yet what is often missed is that a minimum viable product isn’t merely a stripped down version of a prototype. It is a method to test assumptions and that’s something very different. A single product often has multiple MVPs, because any product development effort is based on multiple assumptions.”

Article on the topic: https://greg-satell.medium.com/heres-what-most-people-get-wr...

  > It is a method to test assumptions and that’s something very different.

Products shouldn't test assumptions, that's what the PoC is for. Proving (or disproving) a concept.

I will disagree. You are building a product and you need to know if you are building the right thing. So you build it using a set of MVPs. Another way to call it is Objectives

You still get it very wrong.

MVP focuses on developing a product with just enough features to satisfy early users and provide feedback for future iterations. This means that the full vision of the product is sacrificed in favor of speed and minimalism. Key word: sacrificed. You don't sacrifice in a system humans are reliant on to live.

You can find this described on Wikipedia in a similar manner [0].

Compare this to a Waterfall approach - an approach that has been used in developing rigor in critical systems for decades. Waterfall emphasizes a complete and well-documented design upfront, ensuring that the final product aligns with the original vision and objectives. The end result is a fully-featured product, even if (and it will) take longer to develop.

Again... Wikipedia [1].

So, no. You don't build a mission critical system by stacking MVPs like Lego block on top of each other and then calling them "objectives". It's clear you've never built or been involved with building systems that are classified as "Safety of Life Critical System". Feel free to go review some relevant standards (e.g., ISO 26262, IEC 61508, DO-178C) and then feel free to re-justify how MVPs could be used for space vehicles that transport humans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model

“ It's clear you've never built or been involved with building systems that are classified as "Safety of Life Critical System".”

That couldn’t be farther from the truth. I have worked on safety critical aircraft systems for the past 10 years. We incrementally have built MVPs and have been very successful. I won’t say which but it’s one of the most successful aircraft projects in development today.

Wow. The comments don't align. This is absolutely terrifying to me.

I suppose that he was working on MCAS on the 737 Max.

so whats it good for. sending monkeys?

> That's because Starliner isn't an MVP.

> You don't send humans to space in an MVP.

You are technically correct given that minimum viability for Starliner is sending humans to space AND returning them to earth.

At this point I'm not sure anyone at NASA would agree that Starliner should have been used to send humans to space even.

I mean, I wish that didn't need to be said, but after the whole submarine-controlled-by-an-xbox-going-to-the-titantic thing, who am I to say what bucket of bolts people might jump into entirely on their own accord

So what do you call and MVP of transporting humans?

The ability to return, alive.

So there IS an MVP of transporting humans. (Which is the point.)

> IMHO, Starliner is too big of an MVP

Maybe.

But it's a lot simpler than NASA's previous vehicle, the Shuttle.

If you read the selection statement[1], it seems clear in retrospect that NASA put too much weight on Boeing's Shuttle experience (via Rockwell), and not enough emphasis on SpaceX's Dragon 1 experience. But I think, at the time, it was difficult to know which factor was more important.

---

1. https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/cctcap-sourc...

>> IMHO, Starliner is too big of an MVP

Keep in mind that Starliner is NOT the entire launch system. It is only the crew capsule. It rides on top of an existing rocket. The same is true of SpaceX Dragon which rides on top of Falcon 9 that already existed.

To your point, Starliner could have started as cargo-only to prove out as much as possible. That's what Dragon did.

A cargo-only starliner still would have suffered the same problem and had the same risk of ramming the station.

Seems like it would be best to test approaching an imaginary or decoy space station when proving a new vehicle.

Or before trying to do it all including a bellyflop

That test was scraped as a cost saving measure. 2016 or 2018 if I recall correctly, after it had been delayed several times.

Yes, we need multiple providers and the proper way to do that is not by bailing out poor designs by incumbents. Instead, we should be setting lucrative incentives for new entrants.

Given how vehemently the Senators were in forcing NASA to create a second award for HLS, I wonder why there is no backup for SLS+Orion.

Starliner /could/ be a backup however it does not have those Moon requirements

Starliner is a completely different vehicle designed for completely different requirements. The only thing that they have in common is that they can both operate in a vacuum.

That's like saying that a motorcycle could replace a semi, because both have wheels and a motor.

Yeah, Orion is a huge bottleneck to future moon missions, because it is the only way to get off the moon back to earth. Everything else has multiple solutions. The entire idea behind the lunar gateway was to make it possible for CLPS companies to reach NRHO with underpowered rockets instead of only a hypothetical launch vehicle such as the lunar Starship, which does not even exist as of today.

Lockheed Martin is building a cislunar transporter for getting fuel to NRHO. What is needed is a cislunar crew transporter in addition to the fuel transporter.

Was this written by an AI? Christ, this is the most empty diplomatic platitude-spewing I've seen all week.

I'll say what you hopefully mean: SpaceX needs solid competition but the old-school contractors are broken. Pending an analysis of their impotence, they may need thorough fumigation before we rely on them for anything.

ChatGPT comment?

It is, and I'm curious what dang and HN's plan is wrt this issue going forward. On one hand, the "assume good faith" has been a core tenet of this community. At the same time, LLM-generated walls of text aren't good faith. And they're not going to get less common from here on out.

I'm also surprised by how many human replies these comments get, seemingly unaware what they're responding to, given that it's HN and how long it's been since the release of GPT-3, I thought a larger percentage of readers would notice.

>> ChatGPT comment?

> It is

What? Huh? How did you determine this?

It's truly a rorschach test of sorts. I agree with you that there isn't enough information to say, but reading through the comment history of the commenter in question does not make it seem more likely that they are GPT. Reminds me of Fallout 4 with everyone suspicious of each other being synths.

On the contrary, the comment history makes it very clear.

Pages and pages of relatively short comments, not a single one written in a remotely LLM-reminiscent style. Then, within a very short period, multiple very long comments in exactly the default style that GPT writes in.

The chances of someone waking up some day and entirely changing their writing style might as well be zero, I've never seen it. It would be a gradual process if everyone.

I read HN every day and I think this is only the 2nd time I've come across clearly generated content. If suspicion is the issue, that should be much more frequent. On Reddit it's already more common, and I've already had multiple people admit to it when pointed out, asking "How did you know?".

It does help that I've spent the last 1.5 years building LLM-based products every day.

Is the redundancy giving you the hint it’s GPT? I would love to know what it is that has convinced you but seemingly cannot explain.

A few weeks ago I had a eureka moment to describe it: GPT writes just like a non-native speaker who has spent the last month at a cram school purely aimed at acing the writing part of the TOEFL/IELTS test to study abroad. There, they absolutely cram repeatable patterns, which are easy to remember, score well and can be used in a variety of situations. Those patterns are not even unnatural - at times, native speakers do indeed use them too.

The problem is dosage. GPT and cram school students use such patterns in the majority of their sentences. Fluent speakers/humans only use them once every while. The temperature is much higher! English is a huge language grammatically, super dynamic - there's a massive variety of sentence structures to choose from. But by default, LLMs just choose whichever one is the most likely given the dataset it has been trained on (and RLHF etc), that's the whole idea. In real life, everyone's dataset and feedback are different. My most likely grammar pattern is not yours. Yet with LLMs, by default, its always the same.

It also makes perfect sense in a different way; at this point in time LLMs are still largely developed to beat very simplistic benchmarks using their "default" output. And English language exams are super similar to those benchmarks; I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually already included. So the optimal strategy to do well at those without actually understanding what's going on, but pretending to do so, ends up being the same. Just in this case it's LLM's pretending instead of students.

I should probably write a blog post about this at some point. Some might be curious: Does this mean that it's not possible to make LLMs write in a natural way? No, it's already very possible, and it doesn't take too much effort to make it do so. I'm currently developing a pico-SaaS that does just that, inspired by seeing these comments on Reddit, and now HN. Don't worry, I absolutely won't be offering API access and will be limiting usage to ensure it's only usable for humans, so no contributing to robotic AI spam from me.

I'd give you concrete examples, but in the comment in question literally every single sentence is a good example. Literally after the second sentence, the deal is sealed.

There's other strong indicators besides the structure - phrasings, cadence, sentence lengths and just content in general, but you don't even really need those. If you don't see it, instead of looking at it as a paragraph, split them up and put each sentence on a newline. If you still don't see it, you could try searching for something like "English writing test essay template".

I remember that there were "leaks" out of OpenAI that they had an LLM detector which was 99.9% accurate but they didn't want to release it. No idea about the veracity, but I very much believe it, though it's 100% going to be limited to those using very basic prompts like "write me a comment/essay/post about ___". I'm pretty sure I could build one of these myself quite easily, but it'll be pointless very soon anyway, as LLM UIs improve and LLM platforms will start providing "natural" personas as the norm.

> I'd give you concrete examples, but in the comment in question literally every single sentence is a good example. Literally after the second sentence, the deal is sealed.

I dunno. I believe you see that in it, but to me it just reads like any other Internet comment. Nothing at all stands out about it, to me. Hence my surprise at the strong assertions by two separate commenters.

Genuinely fascinating! I'd show you the instances on Reddit of similar comments where people admitted it after I pointed it out, but unfortunately I don't really want to link my accounts.

You're also free to confirm in my HN history that in hundreds of comments (and tens of thousands read), this is the single one time I've pointed it out. I did do a cross-check of their profile to confirm it, just in case it was a false positive - don't want to accuse anyone if I'm not 100% sure, because it's indeed technically possible that someone simply has the exact same writing style as the default ChatGPT assistant.

Here's the entire comment, dissected to make the structure and patterns clearer.

> As a __, __.

> However, it's crucial that ___.

> While __, ___ is risky.

> ___ highlight the importance of __ in __.

> We need to ___ to __.

Any single one of these sentences on their own wouldn't be enough. It's the combination, the dosage that I mentioned.

If you're interested in hard data that explores this phenomenon (although outdated/an older version of GPT), here's an article [1]. In a year or so, if you do the same analysis on "However, it's crucial that", you'll discover the same trend as the article showed for "a complex and multifaceted concept". Maybe the author would be open to sharing the code, or rerunning the experiment.

[1] https://blog.j11y.io/2023-11-22_multifaceted/

As you said earlier:

> It does help that I've spent the last 1.5 years building LLM-based products every day.

it could be an exposure thing. I don't interface with this AI stuff at all, much less every day. So I'm not going to pick up on patterns like that.

I've used ChatGPT extensively and this stuff is extremely obvious after you have read literally thousands of ChatGPT responses. Immediately recognized it and called him out. Boilerplate AI template response. ChatGPT has a very distinctive way of answering questions.

Thank you for the lesson!

Very obvious ChatGPT style and structure. Here's another one of his comments copy/pasted from ChatGPT. Many others have called him out on this. He is a pathological liar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274200 and then his later reply in the same thread, also written by ChatGPT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277573

Unfortunately, the demand for space missions is tough to justify starting a new company with that goal in mind. It will require heavy government funding to make it sustainable.

And to your comment about SpaceX, this is a Boeing problem and you’re just throwing SpaceX under the bus for the other company’s troubles. SpaceX is the alternative provider. How many more do you think is feasible?

I didn’t read the parent comment that way, who did give due deference to spacex. This is hard stuff, as I was reminded when the dragon capsule exploded during very early testing. But spacex is such a beast that it overcame that ridiculously fast.

>> this is a Boeing problem and you’re just throwing SpaceX under the bus for the other company’s troubles.

That is what happens. If a company wants to play in this sort of arena, it will not be treated "fairly" and will suffer for the mistakes of others. In a narrow two-company industry, the mistakes of either party will always impact the industry as a whole.

Think of that company that lost a submersible at the Titanic. Undersea tourism is also very narrow industry. All companies involved are dealing with the repercussions of that accident from diminished demand to potentially stricter regulations, not to mention increased insurance costs. That isn't fair, but that is how such industries work.

I am not throwing SpaceX under the bus. I am saying that we can’t rely only on SpaceX. We need to fix Boeing or fund another provider.

Give Dream Chaser another chance. It is already going to be necessary as an escape pod for large commercial space stations. If it does double duty as capsule backup, it will achieve greater amortization.

Did you copy and paste this from ChatGPT?

Edit: Low IQ downvoters are too stupid to recognise obvious ChatGPT replies. I checked his comment history and found that he uses ChatGPT here regularly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41274200

> Low IQ downvoters

This is not necessary.

"We need to support and develop multiple providers to maintain a robust and secure presence in space"

~by feeding boeing even more government cash and looking the other way when they get "rid" of whistleblowers, yeah.

What does SpaceX do differently than Boeing to be so reliable?

It’s hard enough to get to space even after checking everything twice, now you need to do it on a damaged craft in reverse and you can’t check

Why don't they store a bunch of thrusters at the space station. Sounds like a tool you want to have handy when up there.

In launches / outer space: The answer to any question "why didn't they have X" is always weight.

thrusters are also likely not a "field replaceable unit" in current designs

That is a great point, I can't even imagine the headache to design for that capability.

But due to recent events we can all imagine the headache to not have that capability ;)

The spacecraft's already built with a (large) surplus of thrusters—the extra thrusters are all right there, pre-attached. It's because of that safety margin that NASA relaxed their requirements and launched with thrusters exhibiting high failure rates in testing.

Redundancies don't help you if you have a safety culture that treats redundancies as consumables. The more one team widens a safety margin in one place, the more another leans on that safety margin, and relaxes their own.

I think you'll find that they have more thrusters on the spacecraft that they actually need - they can control attitude even if they lose one or more thrusters. So the possibility of the failure of them is already in the design.

The fuel lines aren't plug-and-play rubber hoses—they're cleanroom-welded exotic metals that pipe toxic, explosive fuels that corrode (and can explode on contact with) most materials. Remember the SpaceX Dragon craft that blew up on a test stand? That was a failure of their analogous subsystem–hypergolic oxidizer ignited a valve, which was machined from solid titanium, and exploded.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-crew-dragon-explosion-titan... ("SpaceX says Crew Dragon capsule exploded due to exotic titanium fire")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20445725

I don't think it's practical to try to make this part user-serviceable.

Just an aside, but im amazed they can even reliably pinpoint the root cause for these explosions. How do they do this? Some mixture of live sensor data and just general intuition (oh the explosion started here and we know x is a limiting factor, etc)?.

They have a lot of sensors on everything, plus they'd be filming from a lot of angles, and the additional benefit of ground testing is that they can look at the debris. You can piece together where the explosion happened based on the charring and where the parts broke and how.

If I recall correctly, the Dragon explosion was especially interesting because the reaction was previously unknown. So, it wasn't just a design flaw that allowed NTO to leak into a helium line, it was also a new discovery that titanium can react with NTO under high pressure and ignite.

Four microphones will let you pinpoint the location of any sound in a 3D volume.

I'm sure they have more sensors than that.

What’s wrong with just extending it to next year? Is ISS at capacity? Money/budget issues? NASA reputation?

ISS is at capacity. There are only two docking ports IIRC.

All docking ports at ISS are occupied, and the two additional astronauts need to eat. The crew will need supplies before next year.

The only risk returning the capsule unmanned is to their reputation. This is an easy decision.

They are also worried that it can't actually return autonomously, that it might fail to un-dock properly or that it might crash into the ISS.

They have a lot to weigh up.

Didn’t read, you don’t have to based on headline.

They still don’t know root cause(s). That’s real bad Frank.

How did this thing get into space with people in it?

I'm somewhat surprised that, after the SpaceX / Boring Company "rescue submarine" offer a few years ago, Elon Musk hasn't personally suggested (over X, of course) that SpaceX send up another Dragon inside of some compressed timeframe. I'm assuming there must be some other limitations at play - maybe one can't be readied that fast, or there's some other regulatory reason?

Isn't SpaceX already scheduled with the next vehicle there? With likely enough space on it and no rush on the space station? SpaceX is already next, already in the news as the safe solution.

As the article mentions, but is discussed in more detail in another article [0], the alternative that is being considered (and that SpaceX was already paid $266,678 to study, though that contract was not necessarily awarded because of this situation where it might become necessary) is bringing them home on the dragon already up there.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/yes-nasa-really-could-...

> the alternative that is being considered (and that SpaceX was already paid $266,678 to study, though that contract was not necessarily awarded because of this situation where it might become necessary) is bringing them home on the dragon already up there.

It's a little more nuanced than that.

If NASA decides to bring the Astronauts home on a Crew Dragon, there will be a short window of time between when Starliner undocks and when the next Crew Dragon docks that there will be 6 International Astronauts on the ISS and only 4 seats.

If an emergency happens during that time, NASA would jerry-rig some extra seats in the existing Crew Dragon and bring all 6 home that way. But that's a very short period of time - just a couple of weeks.

The next Crew Dragon will only have 2 Astronauts aboard, and will contain suits for Butch and Sunny, so that all 4 of them can return normally on that vehicle at the end of the next rotation.

Just as likely, Elon Musk (dead at 52) posts saying the Boeing astronauts can go fuck themselves.

The limitation is both ISS scheduling (it's very busy now and has been for a while) and number of available docking ports.

It's part of why the next crew dragon mission is being delayed, it needs to use the docking port currently occupied by Starliner (and Starliner can't leave until Boeing updates and uploads software for full autonomous operations).

As others have mentioned, he hasn't needed to suggest it because that's the official alternative anyway.

The next Dragon crew rotation is coming up in September, so the current proposed plan is to only send 2 people up, along with the Dragon IVA suits for Butch and Suni, and bring them back when that crew rotates back out in February.

SpaceX (afaik) also doesn't have any spare Dragons available for an extra rescue mission right now. One is set to fly their EVA test flight in a week or so and does not have the hardware to dock with the ISS, instead replacing it with an EVA port. A second Dragon is being prepped for a crewed polar flight sometime later this year, and a third one is likely in the process of being refurbished for the crew rotation in February.

But also, they can't dock a second Crew Dragon at the station until they undock Starliner, and that is its own can of worms right now (needs a few weeks to update the software for uncrewed operation).

I don’t think they’re coming down until after election day. All the money and time devoted to this cannot result in any further failure. It’s an easy narrative for the GOP to spin with themselves as the only party that can beat China in the new space race over the failures the Biden/Harris administration, even if they’re only at arms length through NASA.

its amazing how long the corruption festered before planes started falling out of the sky.

The trade-off here is: When does it become more embarrassing to bring them home in the competitor's vehicle than to extend the mission further.

When in 1974 the 56 day planned mission on Skylab 4 was delayed by 24 days it was a major event.

With the current debacle we are past 65 days of a planned 8 day mission. In a past world this would have been seen as a the shame with the fact in which vessel the crew returned, being a just a minor sidenote.

Today everything is noncommittal trial and error it seems… oh sorry, I think I’ve spelled “agile” wrong…

A surplus of agility is the last of Boeing's problems.

In my experience, agile methodologies do not have a a strong correlation to agility.

Boeing (especially Boeing ITDA) did indeed have a run-in with Agile SAFE. It went predictably.

Boeing's bean counter management seem more concerned about cost saving than quality.

https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...

Oh yes. I worked at Boeing until recently.

“a waterfall pig with agile lipstick”

Was not an optimistic introduction to the industry...

But there were still some good people, and good teams. But yea there were times where the importance of agile methodology in being preached by an executive agile coach before an emergency task force meeting while planes are falling out the sky.

What does this have to do with anything? Are NASA or Boeing using Agile for any project related to this mission?

No. Not at all. SpaceX is much closer to “agile” than Boeing or NASA, and I don’t think their success is a strike against agile.

GP just seems to have beef with agile and seems to be trying to loop any random failure, whether or not agile was involved, into the discussion.

Here is a past HN thread discussing exactly this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23856590

My beef is with selling incompetence to plan as agile… not with agile done properly (which is rare).

Quite the opposite. Agile is about testing ALL THE TIME and building incrementally. They have flown humans right after a single successful cargo mission. Did they have no further anomalies in the second mission? I seriously doubt it. Now they have a bunch of issues on the RCS and reentry rockets that can't possibly be entirely new (unless someone changed something and people have flown an untested critical component). Worse for Boeing, those components are procured from a third party which now they must be questioning how much QA went into them.

Based on previous articles[1], it's either return them on Starliner or bring them home as part of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission[2].

So the timeline is irrelevant to embarrassment. The Crew-9 mission has been rescheduled to 24 September, a decision needs to be done way beforehand. If the decision is bring them down using SpaceX, the Starliner crew will then stay until the end of the Crew-9 mission in March.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-boeing-starliner-decision/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-9

Or using Russian Soyuz craft. Not politically viable, but a choice nonetheless

I thought the 24 September date was for them to return using that Dragon capsule within days, was it not? They would have to send two less people on Crew 9 mission, then wait the entire mission duration to return? That's so odd.

I'd imagine they would just change the mission to send an empty Dragon in March to get them, but use the launched September Dragon to return those Starliner astronauts right away.

That is the date they will send up a half full Dragon for Crew 9 Mission, which will return home in February. They aren't changing its return date, just how many people it launches with. Crew 9 can't take off until there is a free docking port so Starliner needs to be gone (crewed or not) before Dragon can launch (with 2 or 4 people depending on how Starliner leaves).

Does that mean SpaceX needs to wait for Starliner to be gone before trying anything? What happens if Starliner somehow messes up more? God I can't fathom...

IIRC the Crew 9 mission was postponed for exactly this reason. At some point, Starliner needs to be kicked out because they need the docking space. They can't keep postponing ISS missions as they please.

What's really scary is what if Starliner fucks ISS up during the undocking process...

Exactly right. If a bunch of thrusters don't fire up again you now have a huge piece of debris at risk of colliding with the ISS. This probably gives NASA the most pause before doing an unmanned Starliner exit. Having people on board Starliner might be able to recover from more thruster problems but then there'd also be people on a death trap. So an unmanned Starliner might be risking as much life as a manned Starliner and NASA has no idea how much.

As for your earlier question: yes. Starliner has to leave before Crew 9 can dock. And their rules are it won't launch Crew 9 until there is a port for it to dock to.

On the ISS there are 4 ports on the Russian side only compatible with the Soyuz / Progress ships and 4 for the US side. 2 are "Common Berthing Mechanism" (CBD) used by Cygnus cargo modules (and the original Dragon 1) and 2 are "International Docking System Standard" (IDSS) used by newer Dragon 2, Starliner, "and future" vehicles.

The result is that before a second Dragon can launch Starliner must leave. If Butch and Suni aren't on it then Crew 9 arrives with 2 empty seats and 2 new space suits. The contingency exit plan in between Starliner leaving and Crew 9 arriving is for Butch and Suni to lay on the floor of Crew 8 Dragon without pressure suits below the 4 Dragon crew members (their Starliner suits can't plug into Dragon's systems).

Man this really doesn't look good. I wonder if they have to eventually use the Russian option.

whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union, and it doesnt happen to China, but its happened twice to the US now.

Why is the US giving Boeing a free pass for this? it frankly makes the US look pathetic. News stations quit covering it once the cat was out of the bag that this isnt a "routine evaluation" and the crew is actually just stranded.

23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand?

Maybe China and Russia are less risk averse? Americans hate dead astronauts.

The US has far more deaths per flight than any other nation. There have been 19 astronauts that have died during spaceflight. [1] 14 of them have been American, with the US and USSR/Russia having a comparable number of total launches. The USSR/Russia's most recent fatality was in 1971.

NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing which has left 14 astronauts dead, and now these astronauts stranded. There just seems to be a extreme disconnect between the actual engineering staff and the managerial layer, probably exasperated by the fact that political appointees head the organization.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

When is the last time that China or Russia tried testing an entirely new launch vehicle? It is my understanding, aside from upgrades, they have not really built anything new.

Edit: also looking at your list of accidents, China has one with 6-100 deaths.

And USSR has 120 deaths in 1960.

I think you need to look at deaths beyond just Astronauts here.

"NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing"

This paradox is easily resolved. As risk aversion goes to maximum, the only acceptable solution is to do what was done before. Anything we deviate from doing before is something that could fail in a new and unknown way, possibly bigger than before.

This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies. It is one of the major drivers of their inertia and inability to change course. When the penalty for slightly more failure than before (in anything except money spend, that's OK as long as it's done by high level people) is expulsion and scapegoating and the reward for doing slightly better is a pat on the back and a denied request for a salary upgrade/slight promotion, you converge on having an organization full of people where this is the only path forward, no matter how much acknowledgement there is that the current situation is broken by every last person involved.

To take a really big diversion, one of the deeper aspects of the "move fast and break things" philosophy isn't just about directly moving fast and breaking things; it is creating a culture where people have permission to fail at least a little before being evicted from it. Your biggest successes will always involve some failures on the way, so if you rigorously eliminate all failure from your organization, all but the smallest, most basic of successes will go with it. It's not that you literally want to break things or that managers should necessarily create a "broken things" metric and try to keep it in some band above zero but below catastrophe, it's about making avoiding breakage not calcifying and paralyzing your company by making it the absolute number one priority above all else.

> This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies.

Not really, because commercial air travel had problems early on, and the FAA approach was to investigate, determine root causes, and make changes to eliminate or reduce the probability of them happening again. Assigning blame or scapegoating was not part of their process (not that it didn't happen in the media). And now commercial air travel is very safe.

Except commercial and amateur air travel seems to now be stuck in a local maxima deeply similar to what the parent talks about, avoiding risk by doing the same thing. There are good processes to improve the safety of existing operations and good reasons to keep doing proven things, but innovation is deeply choked.

See the decades long process of trying to switch away from leaded aviation fuel. Small aircraft are all running engine designs from the 1960s despite huge advances in internal combustion and fuel composition in other applications. Getting a new engine design or fuel mixture approved has proven effectively impossible, so processes have defaulted to doing things the exact same way to avoid risk.

See also the 737 MCAS debacle. Boeing was highly incentivized to keep the 737 flight characteristics exactly the same to avoid needing to re-certify the airframe or re-train pilots they invented MCAS to mimic the old behaviour and didn't tell pilots about it, leading to deadly results. Rules designed to allow change actually perversely made it a better option to avoid change (or at least avoid the appearance of change), so risk behaviour defaulted to do it the same way as before.

The only reason the US had so many more fatalities is because the Shuttle carried a larger crew in the first place.

China, at least Modern China is extremely risk averse. Basically if anything bad happens (not necessarily a death) the whole team would go through a lengthy close-looping quality management process. It is only after the success of SpaceX that things seem to loosen up a bit.

>23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand?

How sure are you about there being no issues or delays?

> 23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues

To be fair, that we know of. It's entirely possible that their re-entry vehicles also had issues that they decided were an acceptable risk, and were proven correct - without publicizing them.

The U.S. has launched more manned missions in the last three years than China has in the last 20.

China has literally dropped rockets on Chinese villages.

The Soviet Union treated its astronauts as disposable, and covered up many of their failed missions.

What do you consider a free pass for Boeing btw?

Say what you will, Russia still has the most reliable launch vehicle that's ever existed.

Proton? It has about 89 percent success, nowhere close to Falcon 9’s 99 percent success rate.

No, Soyuz. And Soyuz has like 4x-5x number of launches of Falcon 9 so direct comparisons like yours don't work.

Soyuz is the most reliable launch vehicle and spacecraft that's ever existed.

Note that your original comment made no acknowledgement of the number of launches by each country. But now when it suites you, it's all important.

What? I was responding to the person saying falcon 9 is the most reliable vehicle we have.

I was merely pointing out that soyuz has like 1500+ launches over Falcon 9 and that there is no comparison.

> pointing out that soyuz has like 1500+ launches over Falcon 9

Not the current variants. If we’re integrating everything called Soyuz we may we well do the same with Long March and every American rocket that uses similar engines.

Falcon is widely considered the most reliable platform you can launch on today.

Widely considred by whom? Elon Musk? Soyuz has like a 98% average success rate over all the variants.

> Widely considred by whom?

Every statistical audit I’ve seen by someone with a background in aerospace engineering.

> Soyuz has like a 98% average success rate over all the variants

Great. You don’t get to fly on “all the variants,” you fly on the most recent. The RD-107A, 108A and Soyuz-2 are not as reliable as Falcon 9.

As I mention in a sibling post, Soyuz might have more launches, but it also has way more launch failures.

Not just more launches, over a THOUSAND more launches. Soyuz has a 98% success rate. Falcon 9 needs to do A LOT more launches before it can be comparable.

> And Soyuz has like 4x-5x number of launches of Falcon 9 so direct comparisons like yours don't work.

You made the comparison first. Are you taking it back then?

Jesus please go back to reddit. I was simply pointing out that Soyuz has had a LOT MORE launches than Falcon 9, literally over a thousand more, so no one can in good faith that Falcon 9 is more reliable given the numbers and statistics.

But they can claim, in good faith, that Soyuz is? Im afraid thats not how logic works. Either the error bars are too large to take a position, or they aren't. You can't have it both ways.

Fact remains that Soyuz has over a thousand more launches than Falcon 9 with an average success rate of 98% over all its variants. It's the single most reliable launch vehicle mankind has ever made.

A thousand more isn't very much when you consider "Soyuz" (the way you're using it) has been around since the 60s.

Falcon 9 had its first flight in... 2010.

Id personally rather ride Falcon, but to each his own I guess.

Looking at the three most recent Soyuz variants:

Soyuz-U had 765 successes in 786 flights. (97.3%) Soyuz-FG had 69 successes in 70 flights (98.5%) Soyuz-2 has 160 successes in 166 flights (96.3%)

Falcon 9 has 362 successes in 365 flights. (99.1%). That includes the partial failure of the CRS-1 mission, which successfully delivered CRS-1 to the space station but released secondary payloads into a lower than expected orbit. It does't include the AMOS-6 fire, which would bring Falcon 9 down 98.9%.

Falcon 9 is more reliable than Soyuz.

Interestingly none of those numbers is enough to give a significant difference between failure rates in a chi-squared test with p < 0.05 - not even if you pool all the Soyuz variants. Though they do all hit p < 0.10.

Thanks for running the numbers, which I think prove that it's impossible to say that Soyuz is more reliable than Falcon, even if you count AMOS-1 (which feels like it should be counted) and CRS-1 (which I don't).

Russia != Soviet Union. That being said, they've been using roughly the same vehicle for a very long time (20+ years if you only consider the latest gen Soyuz, much longer otherwise). I would hope it is reliable by now.

More than half of Russia's space history is Soviet space history. Russia just happens to be the country that inherited most of the stuff after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

The Soviet Union is included in the Russian Federation's history, but not the other way around. Had they said Russia, then sure.

> Russia just happens to be the country that inherited most of the stuff after the Soviet Union ceased to exist

Stuff, not capability. Russia’s recent spacefaring attempts have cemented its deterioration.

Capabilities degrade over time for a number of reasons. In this case I assume not only lack of continued investment but also fear management.

SpaceX has…

I'd argue that a private company, ran by an immigrant, that started with private capital, carrying out the launches makes it more American than if NASA had done it.

Good point!

I found Xi Jinping’s HN account!

He’s got a lot of them here.

> whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union

Tell that to Vladimir Komarov who launched on Soyuz 1 despite knowing it was a death sentence because if he refused then his close friend (Yuri Gagarin) would have to fly in his stead.

The rocket had several hundred structural problems and they knew it would fail but they launched anyways.

So he died screaming while he burned to death on reentry and he broadcasted it in the clear so that everyone could listen. And they insisted that his remains be shown in an open casket so that leadership would have to look at what they did.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/c...

Or the three backup crew members who flew Soyuz 11 and died of asphyxiation despite the fact that it was a known issue that the cabin pressure valves that led to their deaths did not reliably close automatically. Manually closing them was not part of their reentry flight plan and the only thing they got was a warning from an original crew member to do so because it wasn't safe and they wouldn't add it to the flight plan.

Two space shuttles burned up...

Challenger is 100% on NASA but the Columbia disaster was a perfect storm of small mistakes that could be individually safely mitigated (but not all together) more than a blatant failure on any one person or group in the org's part. Additionally space shuttles had experienced conditions extremely similar to Columbia's time and again without any major damage or risk to crew. It still was a failure but it was a much more complex and subtle form of failure than the Challenger disaster.

But neither of those remotely compares to Soyuz 1 or Soyuz 11. The failure in Soyuz 11 had been seen time and again during trainings and testing but was waived away and the only reason it didn't occur earlier was because of pilots unofficially taking steps to mitigate the issue outside of the flight plan that then weren't performed on Soyuz 11. And the failure in Soyuz 1 was expected from before launch. It wasn't a statistical probability that the team made a risky gamble on (like Challenger) but was a definite death sentence. Soyuz 1 is equivalent to if you had the Challenger failure but on several hundred different parts of the rocket instead of on just one.

Either way the point of my original comment was to dissuade the notion that the USSR didn't have embarrassing crewed failures in space flight, not to try and pick sides on who was worse.

Read The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker. In manufacturing, it’s always a perfect storm because of the variation of Murphy’s Law that’s usually in effect: Everything that can go wrong, usually goes right.

Oh 100%. Columbia was an organizational failure but it wasn't any one person/org's negligence like Challenger was nor was it a gross disregard/disrespect of the lives of the astronauts/cosmonauts like Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 were.

My comment was mainly to address the suggestion that those disasters were equivalent to the gross disregard for life that the USSR put their cosmonauts through.

Reading analysis[0] of the damage caused by a foam strike on STS-119 makes the loss of Columbia feel more "on NASA" to me than not. NASA knew a foam strike could be catastrophic and that the odds of a bad strike weren't astronomically remote. It had already happened on STS-119 and only luck prevented loss of the vehicle.

I didn't have that take initially, but the Causality podcast did an episode[1] on it a few years ago that got me into reading more about it.

[0] https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts119/090327sts27/

[1] https://engineered.network/causality/episode-24-columbia/

As did an early Apollo capsule.

This stuff is still risky even today. It's not like hopping on a flight to Chicago.

I saw an old documentary (cannot recall where) about the Soviet space program. They could not afford a lot of testing or simulations on the ground but there was immense pressure to make progress, so they would just launch stuff and try to learn from the results, good or bad.

this is, frankly, some pretty generous editorializing.

Komarov was selected to command the Soyuz 1, in 1967, with Yuri Gagarin as his backup cosmonaut. refusing to fly has the same consequence for every space program: the backup flies.

as for the "died screaming" claim, thats some malarkey.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/03/135919389/a...

What we've learned: American historian Asif Siddiqi has a transcript of Komarov's final moments in the Soyuz. He got it from the Russian State Archive. It goes like this:

Komarov: Activated, activated, don't worry, everything is in order.

Ground: Understood, we're also not worried. How do you feel, how's everything? Zarya, over.

Komarov: I feel excellent, everything's in order.

Ground: Understood, our comrades here recommend that you take a deep breath. We're waiting for the landing. This is Zarya, over.

Komarov: Thank you for transmitting all of that. [Separation] occurred. [garbled]

Ground: Rubin, this is Zarya. Understood, separation occurred. Let's work during the break [pause]. Rubin, this is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over. Rubin, this is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over. This is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over ...

From that article... '"I asked Siddiqi if he thought his transcript had been doctored. He said, "I'm 100 percent confident the transcripts are genuine," though there may be other recordings from other tracking locations.When I showed it to Bizony, he said, "An official Soviet transcript of anything, from the death of a cosmonaut to the birth of a healthy baby boy, isn't worth the paper it's written on. ... Given that we at least broadly trust Russayev's recollection of events, we are entitled to believe that Komarov, for all his discipline as a cosmonaut, would have been entitled to some spitting madness and frustration."'

Certainly that was my first thought when I read "Russian State Archive"

Oh, that's what the OFFICIAL Soviet state archives say! Well, I am certain that they were trustworthy narrators, and I'm sure they would have been careful to make an accurate record of anything embarrassing to the Party.

Didn't happen in the Soviet Union, nope sure didn't. they just let the cosmonauts die.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/01/chin...

I agree it makes the US look pathetic.

It was bad behind the iron curtain, so bad, that in ukraine half a million man are willing to fight and die to not go back behind one. The propaganda posters hanging on the wall, had nothing to do with the reality behind it.

You're right, China and the Soviet Union would never allow a public discussion of technical problems in their governmental programs.

At this point, now that the SpaceX alternative has been officially acknowledged, I really don't see how anyone at NASA would be comfortable risking the return on Starliner. If they do and it fails and the astronauts die, everyone will be (rightly) outraged that a viable rescue plan was available and not used. It could become an existential crisis for NASA.

My belief is that the fact that they're publicly "considering" the SpaceX plan means that they've probably already decided to do that and what we're seeing in the media right now is NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.

I hope you're right, but at the same time it would be quite sad if this is all theatrics to preserve the feelings of Boeing fanboys (how do those still exist?)

> Boeing fanboys (how do those still exist?)

There are still fans of Boeing's ability to make money, no matter how bad they are at making aerospace products.

They exist because Boeing gives their voters jobs.

I doubt Boeing fanboys are part of the equation.

NASA is an executive agency, the President doesn’t like the head of SpaceX, and it’s an election year.

> NASA is an executive agency, the President doesn’t like the head of SpaceX

NASA is a huge fan of SpaceX. Look at the Artemis programme and the amount of technology risk concentrated with them. They’d similarly defer to SpaceX if Crew Dragon had an issue.

NASA certainly is deeply entwined with SpaceX, but that relationship predates the Biden/Elon animosity.

Biden has the authority to say that he’s not going to give Elon this gloating opportunity ahead of the election.

Biden also has the authority to make SpaceX catch a seal, strap it to a board, and make it listen to rocket noise through headphones to see if it becomes distressed.

Biden can also fire every right-leaning defence contractor. SpaceX is the darling child of American aerospace. If your media diet is saying anything to the contrary that’s the carrier signal.

They exist because “real engineering” is something people think ex-software people can’t do. And because some people have a reflexive dislike of Elon Musk.

This is real engineering, folks. By the experienced real engineers at Boeing. Not the idiots at SpaceX whose stuff keeps blowing up.

In school we learned this is called a “trial balloon”

> My belief is that the fact that they're publicly "considering" the SpaceX plan means that they've probably already decided to do that and what we're seeing in the media right now is NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.

The messaging from NASA has slowly shifted from "They're returning on Starliner" to "They're returning on Starliner, and we're considering contingencies" to "We'll make a decision whether they return on Starliner or Crew Dragon".

It does kind of seem like NASA is giving Boeing as much time as they can to try to pull a rabbit out of a hat, with the understanding that if they don't deliver, that the Astronauts are going back on Crew Dragon.

I gather that they're also worried that the Dragon option turns into another can of worms due to a risk that an automated return of the Starliner could result in bricking the ISS's docking port. Something about how they removed the automated docking/undocking software from Starliner for the crewed mission, for reasons I'm guessing I could not begin to fathom.

It isn't that they removed autonomous undocking. IIRC autonomous docking/undocking were part of the requirements for the commercial crew program. Starliner even did attempt an autonomous docking to the station.

The issue is that of fault handling. If the software detects a malfunction when a crew is onboard, the best option is to switch to manual control. But if a crew is not onboard, the craft should handle the failure on its own in the safest possible way.

So, what happened is that they loaded in software which expects the crew to be available. Now, obviously with thruster malfunctions already happening, they can't assume that a fault won't be detected after undocking, so they have to switch the software over to the configuration where it can no longer rely on the crew as a fallback.

Right, but “switch the configuration” isn’t trivial, they’re estimating something like 4+ weeks of work. IIRC it’s essentially equivalent to reflashing the whole thing and revalidating the install was correct.

I agree, what I'm trying to emphasize is that the current software is able to undock autonomously, it isn't able to handle failures autonomously. Many people seem to be thinking that Starliner had been capable of autonomous docking/undocking and the functionality had been removed for seemingly no legitimate reason. But, if we understand that autonomous undocking is present, but autonomous error handling is not, the engineering reason becomes obvious, that when you have a crew available, they're the better option for error handling than the software.

I'm not trying to make the excuse that's going around about how they don't need to change the software, just the configuration. It's absurd that they need 4 weeks for this change when switching from manual to automatic fault handling should be a basic safety contingency (it'd be necessary if the crew had become incapacitated for any reason).

I'm still not convinced this is sound engineering? Shipping two different versions of the software, instead of having some sort of switch you can flip, seems sub-optimal precisely because it increases your exposure to risks like this where you're less able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances because as soon as you wander off the happy path you're in completely uncharted waters. This feels more to me like yet another example of Boeing cutting corners without the benefit of a full understanding of the implications of the decision because their left, right, top, bottom, front, back, charm and strange hands all have no idea what the others are doing.

> Shipping two different versions of the software, instead of having some sort of switch you can flip, seems sub-optimal precisely

Someone on X was saying that NASA's definition of "flight software" includes config files. So it isn't actually the code that needs to be changed, just the config.

I think the need for 4 weeks for a config change is the requirement to test the new config in a simulator (against a long list of scenarios) and have it reviewed and approved by various engineering teams, both Boeing and NASA. Plus likely some margin added.

I wonder if the astronauts themselves get some say in this. What if they decide, since it is their lives, that they're not getting into the starliner, even if NASA decides the risk is acceptable?

At the end of the day NASA administrators can't actually force the astronauts into Starliner. Clearly they get some say in it if they're willing to push hard enough.

I'm sure if they have opinions they would share them with NASA and probably their families, and of course if it comes out that NASA ignored their concerns and they perished that would be pretty bad.

However, I imagine that part of becoming an astronaut means that you really have to get comfortable with trusting others to make critical, ultimately life-affecting decisions on your behalf all the time. So perhaps their mindset is more of "we trust that all the smart people on the ground are doing their best to make the safest decision for us, and we'll go with what you say".

If I were one of them stuck up there, though, I'd probably want to get on a video call with the Boeing engineers and look them in the eyes, show them pictures of my family, and ask if they are confident their vehicle will bring me home safely.

NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.

If they are doing comms like that, it's telling, they need to cut it out and focus on their real issues.

NASA's real issue is, and has been for decades, not getting their funding taken away. Not embarrassing themselves is a big part of that.

NASA chose to give 2/3rds of the funding to ULA, and seemed pretty reluctant to include SpaceX - it seemed like they were forced to at the time.

They mismanaged the space shuttle, racking up huge costs on a vehicle that put people's lives at risk, while lying to congress and everyone else about how reliable it was. Feynman's report is a good read. Here's an HN thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989483

Unfortunately, a couple astronauts dying isn't an existential crisis for NASA, especially considering their incompetence in the years after the WW2 German rocket scientists died off.

The people making this decision are not 5 year olds. They're not "letting everyone get used to the idea." That may be a nice side benefit of their decision process but the driver is crew safety and data on thruster performance. If they find a rationale for the failures that makes them confident in Starliner they'll use it. That's what the delay is about, not "letting everyone get used to the idea."

They may not be 5 year olds, but they understand the general public are 5 year olds and may be setting a message to account for that.

They don't answer to the general public.

I want to agree, alas cannot.

I would like to believe you, unfortunately previous events show that decisions are not driven primarily by crew safety and data on thruster performance. Politics plays heavily in most decisions.

(e.g., the Shuttle was sold to Congress as a multipurpose vehicle that could support military, scientific, and commercial missions. However, the need to gain political support led to compromises in its design, particularly the decision to make it a reusable vehicle with an orbiter that could carry large payloads, which led to safety issues. The political drive for cost-effectiveness also led to the program being underfunded, contributing to the Challenger disaster in 1986.

The 'Journey to Mars' program was designed to sustain NASA's long-term goals but lacked a clear timeline, partly due to political hesitance to commit to a specific date or strategy that might not align with subsequent administrations' priorities. The program was influenced by political leaders' desires to show progress in space exploration while avoiding the high costs and risks associated with a definitive Mars mission plan.)

In PR terms they are managing the Overton window. As a strategy it is sometimes called gradualism or incrementalism.

Five-year-olds do not use this technique, they do what they want when they want to with no regard for their public image, which is what you are stating NASA will do.

I don't see why NASA would need to manage any "Overton window." NASA loses very little if they decide to send the astronauts back on SpaceX. At worst, and this is very possible, Boeing uses this as an excuse to just ax Starliner, and NASA would be left without a secondary crew vehicle, but they won't lose funding, and their image would probably only go up since they would have made a choice in the interest of safety.

Boeing, on the other hand, stands to suffer a lot of PR and financial damage should NASA make that decision. They have an interest in managing this window. They've been lobbying NASA and tweeted something about how confident they are in Starliner, but they appear to really be on the backfoot.

The whole point is that NASA isn't "letting people get used to the idea." It's really no skin off NASA's back if they send them home on Starliner.

> NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it

Or NASA caving to outside pressure to look, relook, and look once more for any possible way to make a Starliner return possible. Likely the same pressure that called for Starliner in the first place.

There is no tradeoff. NASA has no horse in the race. Starliner is made by Boeing. Both Boeing and SpaceX are NASA contractors.

I'm guessing Boeing, even if it's just by virtue of having been around so much longer than SpaceX, has greased a lot more pockets than SpaceX. Consequently, while NASA has no horse in the race, I'm guessing plenty of well connected people in and around NASA have a horse in the race.

the horse they have in the race are their 2 stranded astronauts

and to be honest, if spacex had made the shuttle that was assigned to boeing they would probably have made it work. no plan survives contact with the enemy and no engineering design survives its own prototype. the people working at these companies and managing the teams is what made the difference, not nasa's original design

> In a past world this would have been seen as a the shame with the fact in which vessel the crew returned, being a just a minor sidenote.

I find it odd to shame NASA for what is a Boeing failure. They hired Boeing to ferry people to the ISS and back. Boeing built a spacecraft that broke down and is considered too dangerous to carry people on the return leg.

Why are we blaming NASA here?

NASA is to blame for their part as responsible steward of public funds. The agency has bent over backwards, to a fault, to hand a contractor a cherry deal, papered over quality issues, performed dubious acceptance testing, made them look good for PR spinning all the failures, all while paying double vs the other (successful) vendor.

All government procurement is fraught with industry and political pressure which looks like it happened here, yet again.

Lest it looks like a one time thing, have a look at the OIG report about the SLS program perforance from Boeing, in a disastrous condition.

The thing about reality is that it always exposes PR spin, cheating, and fraud, eventually. Often disastrously. A lesson that seems difficult to learn, for some reason.

All this is true, but NASA at least deserves some credit for finally moving to fixed-price contracts instead of just shoveling endless dollars at their contractors for nothing to get done. The fact that Boeing is so dysfunctional that they can't deliver anything on fixed-price contracts is their fault, not NASA's, and they will have to either shape up or exit the sector.

The agency has bent over backwards, to a fault, to hand a contractor a cherry deal, papered over quality issues, performed dubious acceptance testing, made them look good for PR spinning all the failures, all while paying double vs the other (successful) vendor.

Yes, we know NASA has been propping up SpaceX, but how does that relate to Boeing?

Oh wait, NASA has been doing the same thing with Boeing that is has been doing with SpaceX? Giving both companies the opportunity to redeem themselves from (sometimes explosive) unexplained errors while paying them hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to do all of it? It's almost as if NASA is trying to create a launch industry instead of a launch monopoly controlled by an erratic individual who has no issues with just randomly blowing stuff up because he feels like it.

> NASA has been doing the same thing with Boeing that is has been doing with SpaceX

No.

SpaceX delivered. And SpaceX hasn’t been called out in a NASA OIG report as having mismanaged a critical programme (SLS Block 1B) [1].

> as if NASA is trying to create a launch industry instead of a launch monopoly

Boeing brings nothing to the table in launch diversification. Crewliner isn’t a launch programme. It is currently the stupidest aerospace programme on the planet, and that would still be true if it actually worked. (Zero redundancy given its dependence on a deprecated launch vehicle.)

[1] https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-015.pd...

SpaceX delivered. Eventually.

Boeing will deliver. Eventually. They always do.

Boeing brings nothing to the table in launch diversification. Crewliner isn’t a launch programme. It is currently the stupidest aerospace programme on the planet, and that would still be true if it actually worked.

Boeing provides a counterbalance to an Elon Musk controlled SpaceX. If Elon were sane, this wouldn't be necessary, but right now he's inflaming race riots in Europe.

> SpaceX delivered. Eventually.

At half the cost, pretty much on time and without stranding a crew.

> Boeing will deliver. Eventually. They always do

With infinite time and resources anyone can.

As the OIG’s report spells out, Boeing’s mismanagement is material and unusual. It’s wild to ignore that to justify a false equivalence.

> Boeing provides a counterbalance to an Elon Musk controlled SpaceX

In the way a rubber duck counterbalances a battleship.

There is nothing Boeing is working on that challenges SpaceX launch monopoly. Starliner doesn’t challenge Dragon’s monopoly because it only has seven launches left in its lifecycle. (Again, I’m ignoring that it does not work.)

I’m not arguing we go all in on SpaceX. I’m saying we need a second space provider, and Boeing isn’t it. Continuing to bet on Boeing cements SpaceX’s lead.

At half the cost, pretty much on time and without stranding a crew.

SpaceX lost a lot of expensive government equipment in its early days, including DoD satellites estimated to be collectively worth in the billions. (We don't know the actual value because the DoD won't say.)

With infinite time and resources anyone can.

It's a good thing the DoD was willing to keep working with SpaceX after those expensive failures. It's great to have the DoD's unlimited resources on your side even when your CEO fails a drug test that should have gotten your company barred from government contracts. (For those not in the know, Musk openly abuses marijuana, which was still illegal at the federal level in SpaceX's early days, and openly uses ketamine and other psychotropic drugs.)

In the way a rubber duck counterbalances a battleship.

Is SpaceX the rubber duck, because of all of the explosions? The Boeing is built like a battleship, and that's part of the problem: it's too complicated to diagnose from far away. Maybe if they resorted to the rubber duck method of just launching stuff and seeing what doesn't explode?

I’m not arguing we go all in on SpaceX. I’m saying we need a second space provider, and Boeing isn’t it.

Boeing is the only realistic American competitor unless Northrup and Lockheed decide to participate, but those two companies only know one way to do R&D: spend 3x your budget, then come back and ask for more. (And all of the other traditional aerospace vendors are already partnering with Boeing on this project.)

> Boeing is built like a battleship, and that's part of the problem: it's too complicated to diagnose from far away

Do you have a background in aerospace engineering?

Starliner is built by committee. There is no reason to have that many RCS thrusters on a LEO platform where you throw away the thrusters every use, other than to justify buying a lot of Rocketdyne thrusters.

> Boeing is the only realistic American competitor

They are literally trying to get out of the launch business [1]. Their only competitive advantages are government relations synergies with defence and their brand.

Boeing is a show competitor. There is zero actual threat they pose to SpaceX, partly because they can’t, mostly because they aren’t bothering to.

[1] https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/boeing-may-sell-space-la...

He's probably talkin about how Boeing is multiple years late and still has a shoddy product.

I don't understand the venom here. SpaceX bids on contracts, does the job, and goes home, no drama. Most recently, they split a bunch of contract wins with ULA.

> All government procurement is fraught with industry and political pressure which looks like it happened here, yet again.

In an ideal world, NASA would be immune from political pressures the same way the military, which are equally ineffective, seem to be.

> as responsible steward of public funds.

They can’t. They are under political pressure from Congress.

Which, in part, is a good thing because it makes NASA into a technology development government agency that creates jobs in sometimes unlikely places and trains people on skills that are very valuable in other fields.

Surely, the answer to your question is right there in your comment.

They also may have to consider for all of the issues that Starliner might have the only way to have competition in the space is to have more than one company that can create spacecraft. But, I agree that this debacle never made any sense and it started to be obvious to have to use another service .

It's NASA's call, not Boeing's, and what'd make NASA look bad is getting the astronauts killed.

NASA have dual launch providers for a reason, and now is the time to take advantage of it.

I'd be amazed if these guys don't come back on Dragon. What's the benefit to NASA on having them coming back on Starliner if the risk level is seen as higher?!

Although, second order effects: if they use the 2nd launch provider option now, that might bring about an immediate and permanent end to the 2nd launch provider option.

I don't see that. From NASA's POV, they'll want to keep the dual provider setup, and the government doesn't generally seem too happy on having to rely on Musk for more than it "has" to.

I'd like to see the day where Blue Origin replaces Boeing as 2nd provider though.

Government spending is just about jobs right? Don't you get more jobs if you give money to many different companies instead of one company?

It’s not really that costly or inconvenient to extend their stay on ISS compared to Skylab though. With Skylab 4 you had to somehow figure out how to support food and water for half-again as many astronaut-days as planned but ISS has routine supply ships and a big enough permanent crew that adding two extra people isn’t a strain. From the perspective of ISS operations, having an extra two crew members more than you planned also means you can get more work done. And if you’re one of the astronauts, who has worked hard for the dream of going to space, getting a bunch of extra space days is not exactly an unwelcome surprise either. So not only is it not actually a big deal to keep them on the ISS for longer, but I bet a few people are happy to have an excuse to keep them there.

In 1974 we were less used to the paradigm of giant companies receiving twice their proposed budget and accomplishing nothing with it.

You can rarely quantify the risk of complex systems. You should instead attempt to bound the risk. This often helps guide your next steps: how can you improve the bounds?

Quantification of reliability and risk of entire systems like spacecrafts is a real activity in aerospace engineering (probably in other safety critical fields too). They take the reliability figures of every single component based on experience, and use them to progressively calculate the reliability up to subsystem and full system levels. From this, they can assess the probabilistic risk involved.

Granted that these figures are theoretical and probably varies from reality by a good margin. But these figures are still useful. For one, these figures are updated, recalculated and refined as more actual figures are obtained from components, packages, subsystems and system level tests. The final reliability and risk figures progressively approach the actual values as more tests, including flight tests are conducted. In addition, even preliminary figures help you identity potential risks and mitigate them with better engineering margins, redundancy, better test methodologies, etc. In other words, the quantification helps you contain the risks much better than any qualitative analysis.

In this particular instance, NASA's statement is concerning because it would mean that they don't the reliability figures for many components and/or don't have the reliability assessments based on tests.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150002964/downloads/20...

We've seen Elon's companies are more than okay with cutting corners as long as marketing optics look good.

Not saying Boeing is any better, but the culture at his companies seems to be: "Fast dev and fake high quality. Hype it up."

This article is about Starliner. Why are you bringing up Musk?

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