NASA insists stranded Starliner crew is not "stuck"

[euansmith]

[Phil_FR]

Stranded NASA Astronauts Take Emergency Slide Back To Earth

[Enochrewt]

When I read that article yesterday it was eye popping. Safety is safety, I think they starliner should come back uncrewed. The best safety counterpoint is the two astronauts wouldn’t have spacesuits or a means to escape the space station in said suits for three weeks until the dragon capsule gets up there to take them back. They shouldn’t talk all about boeing’s “optics” at all at this point.

I typed this after not reading or hearing any news of what their plan is on Saturday (Today), but my generation watched the Challenger explode in class, in school, they better not mess this up.

[gps1138]

NASA has announced that they will return with SpaceX Crew 9, and Starliner will return autonomously uncrewed.

[gps1138]

The next flight test will also be uncrewed.

[FGD135]

I hope they’ll

Check.... Check.. Check.

[euansmith]

Hopefully uncrewed and unscrewed.

[simplybrianp]

Good to hear that SpaceX will be able to provide transportation for these astronauts.

[Brainspore]

@Enochrewt

my generation watched the Challenger explode in class, in school, they better not mess this up.

Being old enough to remember the Challenger disaster and the nation’s response to it, I was disconcerted by how the loss of Columbia seemed to elicit a comparatively mild response. It was reported as a tragedy but never elicited the same sense of shock and collective grief as the first time around. Kind of like how our country has been desensitized to school shootings.

I hope crewed spaceflight doesn’t become the next human endeavor to just casually shrug off needless deaths as the normal cost of doing business.

[Mindysan33]

@Brainspore

It was reported as a tragedy but never elicited the same sense of shock and collective grief as the first time around. Kind of like how our country has been desensitized to school shootings.

I think that’s part of it (being desensitized) but also, the Challenger disaster was being watched live in schools across the country. I don’t think Columbia had that much public attention as it was coming back. But we were all traumatized by seeing that live (except for me, who was out that day for a funeral).

[anothernewbbaccount]

Watching BBC News at Ten right now and it was confirmed that the Starliner will return autonomously.
SpaceX will be bringing them home in February.

(And glugs of Coke to a few above me.)

[Tribune]

I keep completing it as Butch and Sundance in my head.

[chenille]

Just float into space, Chase
Find a new ride, Clyde
Burn up in the air, Claire
And get yourself…free?

[Otherbrother]

@jaded

EDIT: Just read the Ars article and saw NASA has set the acceptable risk for crew loss at 1:270; and the primary concern is thruster failure, not helium leaks. Same math applies either way.

What I read about those thrusters is that, even though they were able to replicate the failure on the ground, they say that they still don’t really understand the physics of what’s happening. (They know that teflon is swelling up and blocking the flow of the oxidizer, but they don’t know why.)

So it’s really hard to assign meaningful “odds” to a problem that they don’t yet understand and also don’t have enough flight history with to assign odds empirically.

It’s official: NASA calls on Crew Dragon to rescue the Starliner astronauts

When NASA took this finding to the thruster’s manufacturer, Aerojet Rocketdyne, the propulsion company said it had never seen this phenomenon before. It was at this point that agency engineers started to believe that it might not be possible to identify the root cause of the problem in a timely manner and become comfortable enough with the physics to be sure that the thruster problem would not occur during Starliner’s return to Earth.

@gps1138

Starliner will return autonomously uncrewed.

(If it returns at all, that is. Who knows at this point?)

@gps1138

The next flight test will also be uncrewed.

It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that there won’t be another test flight of the Starliner. Boeing already lost a ton of money on this project and they very well may just decide to write off the whole thing at this point and take whatever additional hit there is for failing to complete it. The ISS is only currently scheduled to keep flying for another 6 years, so pretty soon there won’t be much of a reason to even have the Starliner.

[fuzzyfungus]

I’m not sure NASA lets Boeing have the tape after last time.

[FGD135]

This is so weird… Reaction control systems have been around since the late 1950ies or so and are pretty well understood. Even with the spin-offs and the mergers and whatnot (hard to keep up), the companies involved have decades and decades of experience building thrusters. It’s almost like the ghost of Jack Parsons came back to haunt the project.

[NukeML]

@Otherbrother

Aerojet Rocketdyne

@hecep your old stomping ground?

[hecep]

Yep!

Scanning the ars technica article, I was surprised that the thrusters’ mode of failure did not occur during AR’s hot-fire certs of those thrusters — a requirement for all engines prior to delivery. (I can’t imagine that AR skipped that for the pre-delivery failed thrusters.) Yet NASA’s and Boeing’s own recent tests replicated the problem? I’m so happy not to be in some big room at AR right now.

[nosaj]

@FGD135

the ghost of Jack Parsons

Had to look that up. TIL. Wow.

[smulder]

@Otherbrother

If it returns at all, that is

… it’s in low orbit

It’s coming down sooner or later