Since there are no people on board…… I hope it blows up
Why not just fly the crew back in it then? "likely to work fine" is not sufficient level of certainty for NASA (anymore, because of bitter lessons). They need to be able to quantify the risk. And this is not possible, because an uncertain amount of damage was already done inside the thruster dog houses when they overheated and some material in them melted, and they cannot be inspected.
What guaranteed the unmanned return was that when they did new ground tests with the equipment, the damage was not consistent between tests. This means they cannot model what happened, and they cannot inspect the current state of the dog houses, meaning that no sane engineer will sign off on it, even though the damage is probably not very large and they can prevent future damage by using a less aggressive flight plan.
It never was. If you trip into a known failed safe situation the mission rules immediately change. This has been true since manned space flight started.
Saying "welp... guess we'll close up shop and ship those jobs somewhere else. Time to learn French and go work for Airbus (The ArianeGroup is Airbus and Safran)."
Wishing for the demise of Boeing represents an irrecoverable loss of industrial capacity for the US.
The kid gets a failing grade. Pick someone else that is a better candidate at mission success. Select someone that's serious about doing real work.
Maybe capitalism's competitor, whatever that may be, is better at heralding space travel and mass production?
> China's busy just trying to catch up. Everybody else can't seem to figure out how to pass econ-101.
edit: Getting to the frustration of realizing all reasonable options have been exhausted is an obstacle to climb over.
There is no magic sauce that will make economies work for everyone. Specialization is how we built civilization tens of thousands of years ago. It's how we get off the struggle bus today. But if nations can't rely on a global trade order then they all have to build everything.
Besides violating some sacred cow and norms, how does the "no true Scotsman" fallacy proposal relate to the fact that no true scientist would ever consider the Boeing aerospace company or Elon Musk anything close to engineering geniuses? Because, otherwise, you're just avoiding the objective commentary's point and discussion it leads to. Whether this evasion is intentional or not.
If the US takes their ball and goes home from space exploration, who's does it? China?
Just let them keep eating crackers in bed, or what?
aka "too big to fail"
I believe that this is a form of the Anna Karenina principle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle )
> All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
There is no scripted formula to repair a large organization. Each one needs to be addressed in a way that is particular to that organization, its culture, and its ultimate desired end state.
One could look at the Gil Amelio to Steve Jobs Apple - that was a turn around of a not small organization. However, what worked for Apple certainly won't work for Boeing.
That said, I too wish for this outcome (the final destruction of the US military and all of their too-big-to-fail supply chain).
Also if it lands okay then they are more likely to deduce and correct what the issues are for a possible future mission (though at this point I do not know the likelyhood that Starliner will get another chance)
Even if such an explosion happened the debris wouldn't be around for long, stuff in LEO will fall back to earth quite quickly without stationkeeping.