Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought
This article is worth the read. Starliner was in an extremely precarious situation that we didn’t previously know about.
but shouldn’t boeing, of all companies, known of the possible failures? this seems like the bottom line "trump"ed safety…
Aerospace industry engineer here:
We try to identify failure modes and use tools like Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) and fishbone analysis to track down failures and how they cascade to understand system behaviors. However, the more you increase the complexity of the system, the more difficult it is to fully think through all the possible ways things can go wrong and it’s not unheard of for things to slip through review.
Starliner has consistently been plagued by program management issues where they think they’ve caught the failure modes and implemented appropriate mitigations. They do an analysis, run some tests to prove those assumptions are correct, and fly it. In this case there was a design flaw in the thrusters that they saw on a different test flight, thought they fixed it, and flew again not knowing that they didn’t actually fix the problem.
False sense of security is a dangerous place to be when it comes to fault scenarios, but the alternative is extreme paranoia where you trust nothing. In fairness to Boeing, taking some level of risk is necessary in the space industry but I think it’s pretty obvious that they were not paranoid enough and were too trusting that they did their job right
Boeing: “Uhh. Not sure why those thrusters failed, but let’s ship some astronauts.” 🧐 Seems like further mission testing with a planned vehicle recovery mission was necessary before sending up astronauts. I imagine the cost would’ve been great, but that’s aerospace. Every skipped check is likely to be paid for in lives lost.
after reading the article, i must admit, fuck boeing…
Why was this not mentioned before?
Shareholder value. And preserving the scam of privatizing NASA’s source of earth orbit launches.
Yeah, I remember reading multiple times about ppl being stuck on the ISS. Idk how ppl could miss it.
The issue is when they released the information. Not if they did.
Also the issue is about the faulty thrusters. Not them being stuck on the station. Everyone knew that.
That article states it was 56 days after the incident. I meant my question as to why it was not released at the time of the incident. So unless you can show an earlier appearance, my question stands.
Furthermore, the comment immediately preceding mine stated that it was not mentioned at the time. Context matters.
i’m not gonna play defense for NASA or Boeing, just assuming it takes time to investigate properly - probably some PR mentality went into it too but here you go https://www.space.com/starliner-astronaut-mission-landing-delay-july-2024
Thank you for taking the time to find that.
And this is why, all those years ago, the Mercury and Apollo astronauts fought against a fully automatic ride without manual controls (which was NASA’s original design)
Huh? I thought we all knew this? There’s really nothing new in the article.
