One informed source said it was greater than a 50-50 chance that the crew would come back on Dragon. Another source said it was significantly more likely than not they would. To be clear, NASA has not made a final decision. This probably will not happen until at least next week. It is likely that Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, will make the call.
Asked if it was now more likely than not that Starliner’s crew would return on Dragon, NASA spokesperson Josh Finch told Ars on Thursday evening, " NASA is evaluating all options for the return of agency astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from the International Space Station as safely as possible. No decisions have been made and the agency will continue to provide updates on its planning."
If it’s Boeing, I’m not going.
Given all their other issues, safety issues on any Boeing vehicle hardly seems surprising.Huh… Who could have seen that as a likely scenario?
Where’s all the commenters who kept telling me that Starliner was “perfectly fine” and the extra time on station was ONLY because the trunk doesn’t come back so they wanted further testing? That there was never an issue with them using it for return. That the thruster issue was already fixed before they docked to the station and wouldn’t happen again. That even suggesting that a Dragon capsule being sent for their return instead was ridiculous.
I suggested that even if NASA had not asked for it, that it would be prudent for SpaceX to have a Dragon prepared and ready for a recovery flight. Seems that’s probably why NASA paid SpaceX unexpectedly for something related to emergency response, even if they deny it being directly related. Having SpaceX put together a generic response option, means they can say it’s not directly related, even if they fully intend it for that use.
prolly the dragon thing is just to assure safety in the very unlikely case of an emergency, and they just tried to hide it because the general media really likes latching onto the boeing gate train without the knowledge of the entire situation that qualified journalists like eric has.
honestly i feel like they should’ve just designed one of the capsules to have the passive international docking adapter as well as the active they already have, so they can rescue people from the other capsule.
If NASA defers to its fallback plan, flying on Dragon, it may spell the end of the Starliner program. During the development and testing of Starliner, the company has already lost $1.6 billion. Reflying a crew test flight mission, which likely would be necessary should Starliner return autonomously, would cost much more.
Through this lens, I get why they’re taking their time with the decision.
Even if they return the crew on Starliner I feel like this has gone badly enough to warrant another test flight.
another test flight
On which rocket though? All of the remaining Atlas Vs have already been sold:
- Six for the operational Starliner missions
- Eight for Amazon Kuiper
- One for ViaSat
Boeing would either need to reduce the total number of operational Starliner missions, or ask one of the other customers to pretty please sell them an Atlas V launch. They could also pay to crew-rate Vulcan, but I doubt they would want to do that.
Most likely buy one of Amazon’s slots; that seems like it would be easiest to move to Vulcan, especially considering Blue Origin’s involvement in Vulcan. I had thought the plan always was to crew rate Vulcan, though.
Yeah, buying one of Amazon’s slots seems most likely.
I’m under the impression that Vulcan will be crew-rated at some point, but I’m not sure that Boeing would want to foot the bill just for Starliner-6. Are there any crewed vehicles currently in development which are scheduled to fly on Vulcan? None come to mind. Crewed Dream Chaser still seems a long way off, but then again, so is Starliner-6.
I thought I’d seen something about it, I guess for Dream Chaser, but a quick look at Wikipedia the only reference I see for a human-rated Vulcan is a tweet from ULA CEO Tory Bruno in 2016 saying they intend to human-rate it. Of course, back then I think we all expected Starliner to be wildly successful beyond the base NASA mission requirements.
A couple weeks ago, it seemed like they had tested the thruster system both on orbit and on the ground, and things were going well. Have they discovered a more serious issue?
I was firmly in the “nothing is actually wrong and the media coverage is silly” camp, so this report is pretty shocking.
If there are real engineering reasons (as opposed to anxious bureaucrat ones) that Dragon needs to rescue them, this seems like one of the bigger crises in the modern era?
Will wait for more details, but clearly I was wrong about media coverage!
Dragon needs to rescue them, this seems like one of the bigger crises in the modern era?
Just to remind everyone, it wasn’t that long ago after NASA managers tried everything to minimize investigation findings and didn’t bother telling the crew that there was an issue:
The astronauts also likely suffered from significant thermal trauma. Hot gas entered the disintegrating crew module, burning the crew members, whose bodies were still somewhat protected by their ACES suits. Once the crew module fell apart, the astronauts were violently exposed to windblast and a possible shock wave, which stripped their suits from their bodies. The crews’ remains were exposed to hot gas and molten metal as they fell away from the orbiter.
After separation from the crew module, the bodies of the crew members entered an environment with almost no oxygen, very low atmospheric pressure, and both high temperatures caused by deceleration, and extremely low ambient temperatures. Their bodies hit the ground with lethal force.
After repeated firings of the thruster it started behaving similar to the ones in orbit. Disassembling the thruster they found a teflon seal in the poppet valve that feeds the nitrogen tetroxide into the thruster had deformed and actually bulged out, disrupting the flow of oxidizer.
I wonder how predictable the thrust reduction is. I would have thought they could account for this in software, but maybe there’s too much uncertainty. Or perhaps ground tests showed the seal can fail in dangerous ways.
they didn’t even test the thrusters on the ground wtf
Why would you need to test things when you’re Boeing? You know what you’re doing!
My bet is that the capsule stayed in orbit far longer than it should, and they’ve lost pressure to leaks or they discovered something else that didn’t age well.
Interesting hypothesis. I hope NASA release more info soon.
But there were commenters here on lemmy telling anyone talking about that possibility at the time that the leaks weren’t an issue. That even if it were, it would take 14+ weeks until it even started to possibly be an issue at the leak rate. But that wasn’t even a factor because the valves were closed, so there weren’t any current leaks.
They couldn’t possibly have been wrong could they?
You care far too much about some random person on the internet being wrong. I see multiple comments on just this article.
That being said, I think trusting official word from NASA is far more sensible than speculation.
I don’t think it’s just about random wrong internet person. Anyone saying something other than ‘it’s nothing’ was borderline ridiculed.
The important part is that you found a way to be smug about a dangerous situation
There is absolutely no danger related to this situation unless Boeing/NASA insist on using Starliner without being certain there won’t be more issues.
Starliner won’t be used if they aren’t absolutely certain they can fly it back safely. And there is already a proven vehicle available to rescue the crew if necessary. This is a side effect of having multiple companies create launch vehicles post-Shuttle. If one design has an issue, there’s another available to use instead while they figure that out.
