jbmcnamee
Better to have tha astronauts on the ISS wishing they had gone on Starliner than being on Starliner wishing they had stayed on the ISS.
Better to have tha astronauts on the ISS wishing they had gone on Starliner than being on Starliner wishing they had stayed on the ISS.
A good decision to send the astros home on a vehicle that doesn’t have outstanding and serious safety questions.
A much bigger though similar decision is coming regarding Artemis II, which intends to send 4 astros around the moon in 2025. The unmanned Atremis I mission demonstrated that the crew-capsule (Orion) heatshield did not perform as expected, taking significant damage.
NASA has kept on kicking the can down the road on that one so far. There is no backup option for that mission, they’ll either cross their fingers and go anyway, or delay the flight for years while the heatshield is redesigned - at which point they either cross their fingers with THAT one or spend billions on another test flight.
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Artemis is not the only project with design issues where they kicked to can down the road. The helium thruster issue is in that same category. They need to learn the early signs so any redesign doesn’t earn so much negative publicity that they don’t do it.
To clarify, Starliner’s midnight return time is in Eastern time. It is scheduled to undock from the ISS about six hours earlier, at 6:04 p.m. ET.
One green-eyeshade-wearing-gimlet-eyed-editor’s quibble, having nothing to do with the prose of the article, but with its blurb in the ‘Subject:’ line of the email:
“Starliner Returns, …” should have been “Starliner to Return” (because it has not, yet) or better, “Starliner to Return Today” (if you’re feeling lucky),
As for the predictable (and not totally unjustified) Boeing-bashing: there is a world of difference between a commercial product with paying customers aboard, and a test vehicle going into a non-commercial environment. Not the least of which is the facility that builds the vehicle.
Undocking looked flawless, let’s see how the rest goes!
Congrats Boeing, what a comeback!
'Tis great to read good news once and a while.
[And I do think that NASA made the right choice none the less.]
I doubt NASA or anyone with full information expected a failure to land safely, it was always the most likely outcome. But they have firm criteria for crew risk (LOC = 1/270), and if the risk had gone above that value, then the chosen alternative was the correct decision.
Boeing’s challenge is to make Starliner reliable and trustworthy, which it presently is not. I’m not picking on Boeing, if any other company had similar, ongoing issues that cast doubt on vehicle safety and reliability, they would be dealing with the same. It’s just that Boeing seems to have these sorts of issues company-wide…