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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.

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

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.

> 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".

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.