The question facing NASA’s leadership today? Should the two astronauts return to Earth from the International Space Station in Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, with its history of thruster failures and helium leaks, or should they come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule?
Step 1. Fire Boeing.
Step 2. Fucking FUND NASA.
Step 3. NASA builds space stuff that works.
I like my humor like I like my NASA space vehicles - outsourced to the lowest bidder.
NASA contracting stuff to space X has probably be the most amazing and sound financial decision they have made.
People on this website are so biased because Elon runs it but he genuinely built one of the most amazing companies in the world. Government including the US are miles behind them and struggling to play catch up and they are only trying because Space X has become so much better than them they have to.
Don’t care. He built the company, he’s the face of it. People hate the company and live in a dreamland where it’s failing because they want what Elon owns to be shit.
It isn’t and they are wrong because they can’t see past their bias.
It’s not just blind hate for Elon, they’re genuinely terrible stewards of the environment in south Texas. They constantly lie about their intentions and impact to avoid having to take responsibility for anything. Say what you will about how independently they operate from his input, this is definitely a company culture that he cultivates and promotes.
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1823378186836889699
CNBC updated its story yesterday with additional factually inaccurate information.
While there may be a typo in one table of the initial TCEQ’s public version of the permit application, the rest of the application and the lab reports clearly states that levels of Mercury found in non-stormwater discharge associated with the water deluge system are well below state and federal water quality criteria (of no higher than 2.1 micrograms per liter for acute aquatic toxicity), and are, in most instances, non-detectable.
The initial application was updated within 30 days to correct the typo and TCEQ is updating the application to reflect the correction.
Those are valid points. The people that actually know even small amounts about the company do have interesting insights.
But I wasn’t talking about those people. I was talking about people that see the name Elon and immediately “know” the company is in a shambles, failing and can’t keep up with the competition and all other sorts of nonsense based on no facts.
The news story you are linking was incorrect and based on a typo in a report.
People on this website are so biased because Elon runs it but he genuinely built one of the most amazing companies in the world
Elon didn’t build it. They literally have a manager whose entire job is to make sure Elon doesn’t get too close to the technical stuff because he’ll break it with some random order to change it for no reason
If BASA build aircraft they would have to throw it all away at the end of the flight.
Need better funding but they absolutely shouldn’t be building spacecraft, they are too scared of getting yelled at to innovate, and innovation is required.
Their idea of building a new rocket is by reusing as much of the 1970’s shuttle tech as they can.
They tried being more actively involved with the Aries I and Aries V rockets, but they got really bogged down to the point where Obama started commercial crew. Aries V eventually evolved into SLS, but with low capability and a very long schedule. And for better or for worse, SLS is getting lots of funding.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_I https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Program
I’ve worked for several aerospace companies including Boeing. I have nothing but contempt and hatred for Boeing and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Management is garbage, safety comes second to schedule, people are treated like disposable cogs, but I would trust Boeing over NASA. I work with a lot of NASA and ex-NASA people right now on a couple major projects. Dear god NASA upper management makes me want to put my head through a wall! The insufferable sense of superiority trying to tell us “how things are done”. Bro, how is SLS coming? That’s what I thought, shut your mouth and stop pretending like you are the Apple of space systems. Luckily, most of the ground level people at NASA are more down to earth (pardon the puns) and easier to work with.
In this particular situation, if Boeing says it’s safe, I would be inclined to trust them, because if they make the return happen, and it fails, Boeing is done fore. As a crew member though, I would pass for sure and wait for a Dragon
How many people died because boeing made shitty planes and didn’t train their crew properly?
Is boeing done for?
They get one last chance! If they kill these astronauts this time, we’ll be really, really mad like for real!
I think messing up on NASA projects will hurt a company way more. Of course aviation is supposed to be safe, but even the 737 Max has flown thousands of hours. Comparing how many people that have flown on them, versus how many that have been hurt/killed, is still a small number, which is still is supposed to be zero of course.
Traversing space, a pinnacle of engineering, is quite another level of danger, and if you insist on your product being functional and safe, and then kills two astronauts, would cause a whole different level of backlash
I am not sure that businesses like Boeing make risk decisions like that. You would think that they would only take a risk that they know they can win, but many times they take a risk and hope that the dice land their way. This would be lives at risk, with calculations assessed by people with very poor records with such assessments.
They already couldn’t afford this situation, and look where they are.
What’s an improbable “acceptable risk” to them may not be good enough for NASA, especially if they don’t really understand what’s wrong.
They could feel like there’s nothing more to lose if it doesn’t make it back but they might be able to claw their way back if it succeeds. “They” being the individuals making the recommendation, not the individuals more concerned about the company overall. If Boeing decides the spaceflight industry isn’t worth the risks, a downsize or complete closing of that part of the company could cost the jobs of those who are the experts in this situation.
So it might not be a case of “we think it’s safe to return”. It might be “returning safely is the only scenario where we aren’t fucked, so let’s roll the dice”.
The crew should come back on the Dragon and Boeing be required to solve the problems and carry out another test flight. It is unacceptable that Boeing wants to bring the astronauts back without understanding some of the failures on the Starliner.
Another test flight will be a bit of a problem. There are no spare Atlas V rockets. They will either have to convince Amazon to give up one of theirs or they will have to launch one of the missions on Vulcan Centaur, which is not currently crew rated.
This is exactly it for me. A problem is one thing, a problem can be addressed. But a problem whose core cause is not understood can’t be quantified or addressed.
So you have a thruster pack that’s overheating and they don’t even know why, you have helium that’s leaking and they don’t even know why, so I ask why is it even a question what to do?
I am among other things a private pilot, I fly little propeller airplanes around for fun. Lots of private pilots do stupid stuff, and some get killed as a result. I’m talking for example pilots who want to get back to their home airport, so they fly over five airports that all sell fuel without landing but then run out of gas and crash half a mile from their home airport. So there is a saying, before you do anything risky, consider how stupid you will look in the NTSB report if it doesn’t work out. And the pilot who intentionally flew below fuel minimums looks pretty damn stupid, destroyed a $100,000 airplane and lost his life so he could save 20 bucks on cheaper gas.
Point is, the same principle applies to all of the recent space disasters. Challenger was obviously not the right decision to launch. Columbia obviously a serious risk that was ignored. And that brings us to Starliner, we have serious fundamental problems that could definitely lead to a loss of ship and crew situation and we don’t even understand what is causing those problems. Now imagine Starliner fails. How stupid will that decision look? Probably even dumber than Columbia or Challenger, because unlike those two disasters we know ahead of time that something is very wrong.
This is an excellent article. I’m glad they took time to go into the history of these folks.
