NASA safety panel skeptical of Starliner readiness for crewed flight

https://spacenews.com/nasa-safety-panel-skeptical-of-starliner-readiness-for-crewed-flight/

by belter • 3 years ago

31 27 3 years ago

dmbche• 3 years ago

Oh wow, they are expecting to throw people in the sky in July! That's crazy

logdap2• 3 years ago

Crazy it's taken them this long and they're still having problems. If it weren't for SpaceX, the whole western world would be out of manned spaceflight right now. The Russians and Chinese can fly humans, but NASA is Congressionally forbidden from dealing with China, and since 2022 dealing with Russia is off the table too. That leaves SpaceX, and this notoriously dysfunctional Starliner program.

Get your act together, Boeing.

wongarsu4• 3 years ago

Paying for two competing providers really payed off for NASA. If they had only gone with the safe choice (which in 2011 definitely seemed to be Boeing) the West would be forced to soften their stance to either China or Russia, or be locked out of the ISS.

n8cpdx• 3 years ago

Well, they’re expecting to send people to the heavens, one way or another. Boeing has a great track record here, even recently in the aviation business.

wongarsu4• 3 years ago

It's almost comical at this point. The Commercial Crew Program was started as a replacement for the space shuttle, to have an option to get Astronauts to the ISS without relying on Russia. The initial goal was to begin service in 2017, and for that two providers were chosen: the reliable and experienced aerospace company Boeing, and the new upstart SpaceX. Back in 2011 the SpaceX choice seemed risky.

As expected both had some delays, but SpaceX had their first crewed test flight in March of 2020, with regular flights starting in November of the same year. Meanwhile Boeing's Starliner continues to be always just six months away.

hef198983• 3 years ago

Nobody has a monopoly of promising something in 6 months.

Boeing really isn't what it was once. A pitty, really.

entropicgravity• 3 years ago

Let this be a lesson to those on the boards of tech companies. It's not necessarily horrible to chose a new CEO that has an MBA degree but also be sure that he has an engineering degree. An MBA only CEO in tech is almost always a poor out come, as in the case of Boeing.

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

Note that SpaceX was not paid to begin service in 2017. Commercial Crew funding was cut by Congress. We will never know if SpaceX could have begun flying in 2017 if they had received the full funding. It's unlikely they could have, but we'll never know. What is sure is that the delayed funding delayed Dragon's first crewed flight. SpaceX did not hit a good operational cadence flying Falcon9 until about 2017, so was a severely cash constrained operation.

cameldrv2• 3 years ago

At this point, what's the purpose of continuing with the Starliner program? Does it provide any capability that's not already proven with Dragon?

logdap2• 3 years ago

Two is better than one. If Dragon were grounded for some reason, an operational Starliner would give NASA a lot more flexibility.

wongarsu4• 3 years ago

Having a second provider makes sense: competition keeps the prices down and innovation up, and you have some redundancy if one company or launch system has trouble (like when the Space Shuttle was grounded for 2.5 years after the Columbia disaster).

Whether that second provider should still be Boeing is less clear. But inertia and sunk cost make it easier to stick with them than to give the money to someone else.

cameldrv2• 3 years ago

Obviously in hindsight it was a very good idea to award the contract to two teams to develop commercial crew, but Dragon/Falcon has a good service history now.

Also, the ISS is will probably be retired in 8 years or less, so NASA could simply buy Dragon flights to cover them through that time.

It's not clear what the purpose of either vehicle will be once the ISS is retired, especially considering that Starship will very likely be flying, which completely changes the economics and practical possibilities of spaceflight.

Even in the context of the partially reusable Falcon 9, Vulcan makes very questionable sense, but in the context of the fully reusable Starship, Vulcan seems incredibly wasteful to continue flying.

tjpnz• 3 years ago

Dream Chaser may be able to fill that gap. And unlike Dragon it would be capable of reboosting the ISS.

gcanyon• 3 years ago

It's not inconceivable that Elon Musk could pack up his toys and move his business elsewhere. He has amply demonstrated his mercurial nature and his willingness to throw a pile of money/infrastructure/relationships onto a bonfire just to watch the fire dance.

I love the progress he's made, but it's unsafe to assume he's 100% aligned with U.S. interests.

larkost• 3 years ago

The same reason as the Dragon was initially funded: options. The thinking is that only having one option is more risky than having two, and spending the extra money on the two programs is justified both by the enhancements that competition between teams brings, and by the lowering of risk to the program as a whole (if one does not work out, then we have a second one).

And to counter the idea "the race is won, we don't need a second one", I will argue that we don't want this to end up like the Apollo program where we get there and then don't go back for 60 years.

wmf• 3 years ago

NASA is already buying the minimum number of Starliner flights. I don't know if NASA can legally cancel the Starliner contract and everyone involved would lose even more face by canceling.

proggy• 3 years ago

“First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?”

- S.R. Hadden, Contact

firstlink• 3 years ago

Okay, but what do the politicos say? Their opinion is the one which will drive decisions.

jfengel• 3 years ago

I don't have a full picture of the various crewed systems, so I'll share what I figured out:

Starliner is the capsule. It looks a lot like a bigger version of the Apollo command module.

The rocket part is an Atlas V, which is venerable and reliable. So venerable that they're about to retire it. But they can also put it on a Falcon 9 or something called Vulcan Centaur, which I've never heard of but which is supposed to launch soon. It's apparently a bit more powerful than the Falcon 9.

If I'm understanding this correctly, it means that they're less worried about "rocket go boom" as "rocket go up with living people but comes down with dead people".

wongarsu4• 3 years ago

The Vulcan Centaur is built by ULE, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. It would thus be the logical choice for launching Starliner. The problem is that Vulcan Centaur uses BE-4 engines from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. The BE-4 is arguably the most promising product Blue Origin has produced in the past 22 years, but it is three to four years behind schedule because of technical and managerial problems. The first two engines are now finally mounted to a rocket and are currently undergoing flight readiness testing, so I guess the next weeks or months will show how bright the future of the Vulcan looks like.

sebazzz• 3 years ago

Latest status is that they had a Flight Tanking Test and needed to roll back, and just yesterday aborted a Flight Readyness Firing (or what SpaceX calls "static fire").

Standing down for today. We test the BE4 ignition system during the count. Timing and response doesn’t look right. Need to understand it.

https://twitter.com/torybruno/status/1658084513963192320 https://twitter.com/torybruno/status/1661834466032238592

ericcumbee• 3 years ago

and Vulcan is not human rated. and ULA has said they have no plans to Human Rate Vulcan.

I feel like that is kind of the writing on the wall that Starliner won't fly beyond what they have Atlas boosters earmarked for.

NASA safety panel skeptical of Starliner readiness for crewed flight

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