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Comment by eth0up | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm a victim of this reporting to some extent, because I remember this situation going on for months, and I keep thinking every time it's mentioned (often) how terrible it must be for these astronauts and why something isn't done about it. But I know almost nothing regarding details. I know I despise Boeing and that I admire astronauts and that reading this headline, I thought 'its about fucking time!'

But if I realize the entire situation has been misrepresented, I think I will be annoyed with myself. Is this really all nonsense? Is the situation normal, or common?

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> Is the situation normal, or common?

They went up on an experimental spacecraft on its shakedown cruise. They’re coming down on a different spacecraft than planned — a different make of spacecraft, even. That’s never happened before, and is neither normal nor common. The spacecraft type they flew up will almost certainly never fly again because of how badly the shakedown went. That’s never happened before to a manned design to my knowledge — certainly not normal or common.

Because I cannot upvote comments on HN, I'll clutter the thread by thanking both you and the other fellow who gave pretty good explanations.

It appears you're referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30742539

The most likely explanation of the effect you're observing is that the server, having done a database fetch to get you the profile once, is not interested in doing it over and over again.

It's cached. You do not have a uniquely broken upvote button.

No. Definitely no.

I've tested this many times by up-voting predictably stable comments, noting the karma number before and hours later. No effect. No exceptions. Additionally, there was a time where this limitation didn't exist. I am pretty sure I triggered a flag for my tendency to up-vote controversial and underdog content.

I don't think dang is right about everything, but I get the impression that he's honest and expect he'd confirm this limitation on my username. Ask. But I'm not grovelling for equal rights on HN and will make no inquiries to insiders.

Also, if your interpretation was correct, there's this really big parallel contrary reality where the upvote system works and entries are accepted and processed, hence the ever changing karma number of each active user. Perhaps it's the ad blocker, but it's not normal

As an experiment, I upvoted your comment.

But first, I loaded your profile.

Then I refreshed it several times.

At no point did your karma score change on your profile.

It's caching.

I once had this limitation on my own account. It was because I had upvoted certain grayed out comments that were flamewar fodder. I did that because there were equally bad counter-comments in the thread that weren't voted down (grayed), and out of a misguided commitment to balance I wanted to fight for the losing side.

When I emailed dang to ask about my voting limitation he explained why my account had been penalized. I said I wouldn't vote up bad comments in the future and he restored my comment voting. Now when bad arguments attract bad counter-arguments I just downvote instead of trying to boost the somewhat-less-bad side.

You don't have to send email about this if you don't want to, but it doesn't require groveling to fix.

Thanks a bunch for this comment. It clarifies and it helps, especially with the samatman types obsessed with caches... and proving me wrong for reasons I'm quite content never knowing.

I think some folks see the apparent simplicity of HN and assume it's primitive and clean, with nothing too sophisticated running in the background.

Why can't you upvote comments on HN?

>>The spacecraft type they flew up will almost certainly never fly again because of how badly the shakedown went.

I haven't seen this in the reporting. Can you share any context for it?

There’s been a bit of reporting on Boeing “considering” whether to cancel the remains of this program. There’s been no reporting on any decision — likely because Boeing hasn’t made one. But there’s zero financial upside to continuing, and zero PR upside to continuing… and I just don’t see any world in which Boeing, in its current state, continues to spend billions of dollars of its own money to set up more and more elaborate shows of its own (well understood, internally) incompetence. So, complete speculation on my side, but I’m comfortable enough making that speculation without a throwaway account.

There were issues with Boeing's Starliner that made it difficult for NASA to quantify the risk of bringing the test crew back on it. NASA still believed that the risk was likely to be negligible, but since they had the option of taking a fully proven spacecraft back home, they opted to send Starliner home empty.

The astronauts were/are comfortable on the ISS. There are plenty of supplies, and more have gone up as part of regular resupplies. IIRC the only discomfort for them was having to use makeshift sleeping places until the previous crew departed. As astronauts, they pretty much live to go into space, so they were happy, of course with the minor caveat of the disappointment regarding their primary mission not panning out and of having to be away from family for a few months. Especially considering that they are unlikely to get to be in space again as the ISS is due for retirement by the end of the decade and NASA wants to give space travel experience to the astronauts intended for the Moon.

Putting it differently, the biggest issue/inconvenience with this situation was that Starliner was taking up a docking port and causing things to have to be rescheduled. Prior to launch, crew are trained to operate certain experiments, or to do servicing space walks. Since the crew being launched had to be reordered, these plans had to be reworked.

There are a lot of people focusing in on the fact that they will be returning in February, but they're completely ignoring the fact that they're perfectly capable of coming back early, that option is actively not being chosen as having them stay till then would be more optimal for station operational planning.

It's worth noting that the astronauts in question have little to no control over the schedule, so "perfectly capable of coming back early" isn't a fair assessment in this context.

Coming back "early" would also occur at a cost of either tens of millions of dollars for an extra launch, or at a cost of valuable experiments not getting run because the space station was empty of personnel. NASA policy would prohibit the remaining astronauts from... well, remaining, because they have to have a lifeboat, which the two "rescuees" would have just used to go home. Thus, all of them would have to go home.

IOW, painting this as "normal operations" in any sense is disingenuous. The danger levels may not be overly exacerbated, but it was a very costly failure, and it may well be a drastic inconvenience to the astronauts. We likely won't know the truth of the latter until they write their memoirs.

It's easy to manage spin when the opinions being spun are in orbit on a restricted communication system.

> I guess I'm a victim of this reporting to some extent, because I remember this situation going on for months, and I keep thinking every time it's mentioned (often) how terrible it must be for these astronauts and why something isn't done about it.

I'm not Butch or Suni, but I think the astronauts most negatively affected by this would be the two that got bumped from Crew 9. Astronauts define their careers by the amount and quality of the time they are blessed to spend in space. Chris Hadfield, e.g., has taken it for granted that the pair would feel lucky to be "stranded" for a few months, and would have plenty of meaningful work to occupy their time.

“Normal” and “common” would still be the last words on my mind considering the amount of planning and money that goes into sending people to space and back. The only normal situation would be they go there and then back alive on the same mission as originally planned. Any divergence from that is totally abnormal.

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