Stuck in space: 50 days and still no return date for NASA astronauts Wilmore and Williams

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/26/stuck-in-space-50-days-and-still-no-return-date-for-nasa-astronauts-wilmore-and-williams.html

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I’m sure it’ll all be fine. After all, think of all the lessons NASA learned from Challenger. And Columbia. And the Shuttle/Mir program. Lessons that they’ve surely applied going forward.

…right?

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I suspect this will nail the coffin shut on the Boeing Starliner project. Unless there is some deep reason to keep it alive.

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At least they have a place to stay!

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It’s not Musk?

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Mr. Krikalev spent almost a year stranded at Mir Space Station

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I totally forgot that they were still up there! I guess a few news items in the last couple of weeks seems to have taken our attention away from that whole situation. I’m sure that Boeing didn’t mind everyone forgetting about them for a while.

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Sunk cost fallacy?

But no, it’s not good. :confused:

But also:

“Oh no, Houston. We gotta stay in space longer? Oh darn. Oh no. Well, it is what it is, I guess. We will somehow manage…”

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I mean, not giving Pedo Guy total control over US launch capability seems like a good reason to hang in there.

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Maybe Boeing could make better use of the astronauts’ time by forcing them to watch and comment on cheesy movies.

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“If it’s Boeing I’m not coming back” is a new variation on the old saying. Not a terribly catchy one.

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Has anyone considered that the real reason for the delays is that nobody really wants these astronauts to come back? That Butch dude seems a little off his rocker.

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It’s the very definition of a pork belly project. I’m sure there will be plenty of senators who will continue to back Boeing. I mean Boing has failed upwards for decades. What’s to stop them now? Congress can literally dictate how NASA spends it’s money.

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Isn’t the fact that they’re keeping them up there rather than sending them down after a half-hearted review of the damage that ends in “I’m sure it’ll be fine” a sign that they have learned from those disasters?

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What do you mean “we?” You slept in your own bed last night!

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Excerpt:

Just before liftoff, NASA unloaded luggage that contained some personal items, like their changes of clothing, because the space agency needed the space for a new pump

:grimacing:

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So apparently all they needed to do to replicate the problem was to do some test firing of the same thrusters on the ground:

Left unexplained in the article is how the hell was this issue not discovered much earlier in the test program?? Did they not do earlier test firing on the ground that would simulate the firing sequence during flight? This was a huge miss.

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Not sending them up at all when there were known unresolved issues with unknown potential impacts would have been learning, AFIAC. This smacks of the same kind of go-fever that doomed Columbia. Few thought that the loss of some lightweight foam during liftoff could be a serious problem, either, but we know how that ended up.

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