A smart decision. the astronauts can help with the workload on ISS while things get sorted. Will be interesting to see how the Starliner Spacecraft fares on re-entry. With the world watching it seems a very prudent decision. Maybe common sense isn’t that uncommon after all.
Here we have an opportunity to see the benefit of having multiple providers for crew transport. With even a little doubt about the safety of one, the other can can to the rescue. There are good options on the table to choose from.
Listening to the entire press briefing today my ear was tuned to any mention of safety culture change and lessons learned resulting from Challenger and Columbia shuttle losses. I was not disappointed. Bill Nelson was clear and unambiguous on that subject as though those shuttle disasters were as fresh on his mind as the days on which they happened.
NASA made the tough decision and then Bill Nelson owned the decision while not dumping on Boeing which he could have and which a smaller administrator would have. We could all learn that lesson in integrity and dignity. When pressed to justify what Boeing has been paid at taxpayers’ expense to perform, he reminded the press that Boeing signed up for a fixed price and that arrangement is still in effect.
I still think that NASA should offer to pay SpaceX for an additional Crew Dragon flight before Feb to get Butch and Suni. They had no way of planning an 8 month mission from a 8 day mission. Imagine how you would feel in that situation.
The loss of public (taxpayers) confidence in the Boeing Starliner program is a big deal. It could lead to less government funding, fewer partnerships, and more strict regulations. With SpaceX doing well, the pressure on Boeing is even greater. Boeing’s reputation is on the line, and while the program’s future isn’t solely based on public opinion, rebuilding trust is a major concern. But the real question is: can Boeing handle another failure?
Honestly, as a taxpayer, the question is why are we still funding this at all. We already know that human space flight is insanely expensive as it is insanely dangerous. WHAT are we actually gaining for every multibillion-dollar spacecraft test flight? If this is still a republic then I think it’s time that people (not Boeing) vote to say if re-developing manned space capsules is a priority. On second thought, I think I heard Boeing is throwing in the towel on this too.
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I’ve not heard of Boeing throwing in the towel on their space ship. I read that Boeing/Lockheed were thinking about selling the launch business.
Arthur, I get your concerns about funding Boeing’s Starliner program, especially with SpaceX doing so well. Space exploration is risky and expensive, and Boeing’s recent issues make it hard to justify continued investment. But space programs drive innovation and having more than one company involved is crucial for national security and competition.
Public trust in Boeing is low, and another failure would be tough. However, giving up on the program now could mean missing out on future advancements. Space exploration needs long-term commitment, even when results aren’t immediate.
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“space programs drive innovation”
Nope, not here, and now, and not this mission. Manned space capsules in earth orbit date back to 1961. Space exploration needs long-term sensors, not people, and that means means UNMANED missions are preferable. If the goal is exploration then it’s a waste of people to be in space for months or years or decades or centuries.
There is ZERO “national security” in low earth orbit or sending people beyond. None. Nada. Zip.
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Wow Arthur, with your logic, it could be said that passenger flights aren’t necessary because we have video calling. It’s too wasteful and dangerous for people to fly. We can just use drones to do all freight transportation.
My take, If we do not have people in space experiencing the unpredictable then we can’t predict what space travel will do to a person or persons. Living in a tent or cave in the dessert with a group of people is just not the same as sharing a low or zero gravity confined space ship.
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Logic fail on your part. Passenger flights are not the same as operating in space.
If they were, then we’d have been in space in the late 1920’s. Hello?
With today’s advances sensors then it makes ZERO sense to risk people in the BASIC exploration of planets.
Continuing the discussion from Starliner Return Too Risky For Stuck Astronauts:
Almost everything you touch has an I.C. chip or small computer in it. My teakettle has programmable electronic controls. Your car unless it’s a Nash rambler has electronic controls. They work fine until they don’t. This doesn’t happen every day and the reliability gets better by leaps and bounds. None of this would have occurred without the space (military) race. When we return to the moon and go for takeout food I hope there will be someone there preparing it and not just a solar powered dispenser. We need to experience the next frontier, not just take pictures of it.
You have completely missed KlausM’s point. Not to mention Musk’s thoughts on the subject; To inspire young people the way they were inspired by historical explorers of our own planet who went off in incredibly rickety (by today’s standards) vessels to ‘discover’ lands no European had ever seen before…
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You are about 70 years too late if you want to debate the value of the space program, and not the kind of thing the public gets to vote on on determine priorities. That’s the last thing the public should be involved in. Time to rethink what you “think you heard.”
This might be one of the few times I agree with AJ, but he is right.
Manned space flight is only a small part of our exploration of space, with decades of sending probes and robots to several dozens of missions. We sent a ship to Pluto, a 3 BILLION mile flight, to be in the right place for a 36-hour window to photograph it. We have two ships orbiting the sun. We have others exploring Mercury, Jupiter, Mars and Venus and their moons, besides the ones you see on the surface of our moon and Mars.
We landed on and sampled an asteroid, for Christ’s sake.
We have extremely sophisticated telescope, radiation, radio wave and microwave systems on duty 24/7 and our second space-based telescope recording our universe.
Apollo 8 is often overshadowed by other moon missions, but consider that in 1968 it was the first time we left this planet to go somewhere else. That was only 66 years ago.
Voyager I and II are still transmitting as they continue to fly across the universe. How do you like them apples?
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“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space” -HHGG
If your goal is to explore the vastness of space, then use sensors and send robotic probes. Let robots suffer the mindless tedium required to travel years or decades in order to run a few tests. Let probes suffer the double indignity of wasted time if you want samples returned to earth. .
Context is everything; the topic was MANNED low earth orbit being no longer needed for national security. Heck, the push nowadays is to also get rid of manned aircraft too.
The Question is who is paying.
In this case taxpayers via NASA.
(I presume Boeing and TheMouthX are paying too, old explorers like Columbus probably received both government support (dictated by Kings) and donations (wealthy individuals).
For Columbus motivated by trying to find a shorter transportation route to good things from the Orient, recall spices came from the Orient/SE Asia by land using pass-along trading until reaching the Atlantic Ocean or by the very long route around Africa.
With ignorance - the American continents got in the way of Columbus. Later an explorer found a way around the bottom of South America, IIRC in secret.)
While any form of travel has its risks, space travel tops the chart (riding atop a somewhat-controlled explosion surely raises your life insurance premiums). I’m glad to see that with all the issues Starliner has suffered (and probably some we aren’t aware of) that they have scrubbed the ship for the astronaut’s return.
As for the merits of space travel - many things we have here today are from space exploration technology. Medical breakthroughs and research done in or because of space have helped us ‘planet bound’ people. The new Polaris Dawn mission by SpaceX in a couple of days will do a host of experiments and research. Download the Supercluster app for a detailed explanation of the many events. These experiments require human intervention to be performed and can have far-reaching results. I for one am not a fan of a lunar or Mars colony, but I’m sure few individuals spoke of flying in the 1800’s!
While it’s about a billion years in the future, if we survive and don’t find a way off this rock by then, none of it will make any difference. Manned exploration needs to happen if we hope to continue as a species.
The Apollo program was revamped after the Apollo 1 fire and NASA learned from that. Boeing will learn from this and at some point the troubled Starliner will be a distant memory. We need to “climb the mountain” because it is there.
It’s not a this or that thing but a mix of what is smart/reasonable/popular determining what to spend space dollars on. My money is on space based (orbit and moon) observatories as well as learning to live in appropriately sized communities firstly on Luna or at colonies (RAMA comes to mind) in local orbit. Robotic probes to our neighbour planets is vital if we’re to understand our solar system and needs boosting even though it’s not as sexy as a manned presence. Time to take a rational look at costs and knowledge gains.
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The first human born off Earth will be an Extraterrestial by definition. Probably a “Lunar”, Selenar" or maybe just a “Moonie”. Could also be an “Orbiter”. Home to these humans is not the same as for us. Exciting times indeed!
With today’s advances in sensors, it makes ZERO sense to fly for a business meeting or for a great majority in administrivia to work in an office.
There are thousands of books and hundreds of documentary videos on the topic of Yellowstone National park. There is nothing to glean by going there that you can’t read in a book, watch on video or even experience in virtual reality.
Yet visitors to Yellowstone spent over $800 million in 2023 visiting the park. Why in the world would the populous spend $800 million for something they could have gotten for free with a library card and a few YouTube videos?
When you can answer that question, you might be able to explain the urge to send people to space.
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“When you can answer that question”
Selling the family on a 2 day drive to see Yellowstone is easy.
Selling the family on a 2 year isolated ride to a moon of Jupiter to see a Sulphur pool for $800 million per person is probably a “no”.
What are you selling and why the need to sell it when you can everything you need for free from a book?
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So Robert, You taking your kids on a private submarine trip down to see the Titanic in person this Labor Day vacation or seeing the exhibit in the local museum?
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So AJ, you’ve now changed your mind? Which is it: explore or not to explore?
They were discovering the rudimentary nature of space and evaluating human compatibility with a previously unexplored and unexperienced dimension. They learned enough to allow us to get to the moon, find out if it was made of cheese or something firm that would support a spacecraft and come back. That was the exploration equivalent of 15th and 16th century explorers looking for resources to plunder. But exploration now is also about examining the things we take for granted on terra firma, like which way do the roots of a plant grow in microgravity? How do the characteristics of a superconductor change when in zero-g? Do epoxy resins form stronger bonds without gravity? Does cancer cell metabolism slow in prolonged low gravity?
Sensor technology has already surpassed human sensing capability, but sensing is not the same as perception and human intuition makes for much higher efficiency and productivity when experimenting and learning and redesigning an experiment on the fly.
I think that to propose that an army of robots can establish and execute an asteroidal mining operation without any human presence requires at least a similar operation on benign earth that serves as proof of concept. Is there?
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Robots are perfect for far away basic discovery. Not only do you save money and size and complexity of the vehicle, but you don’t subject people to the mindlessness of sitting in a capsule for perhaps years at a stretch. As said, we’re already automating most systems here on earth and ALL systems that explore extreme environments are now done by robots.
Sending people into deadly environments is not needed and is probably prohibited by all civilized nations.
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Arthur you have a serious need to do some research as to the militarization of Low earth orbit and the commercialization of the same. If you think there is No national security value to maintaining a commanding presence in LEO then you have buried you head in the proverbial sand. Think of the following…Weather sats. Communication sats. Geoscience sats. Surface mapping…you think Google earth and all those sat images came from nowhere? I will not even bother with the REAL imagining stuff.
I’ve seen robots assemble robots. Do you have any examples of robots diagnosing a robot on the “not working right” heap and then performing the repair? (And the repaired robot works, and doesn’t look like Frankenstein) 
“So jet flight at 39,000 ft should be out of the question, eh?”
It proves that to do so you have to be surrounded with technology, supported by a massive earth-based infrastructure, thousands of unseen workers making it possible, and even then you are limited to just several hours.
Try occupying the sea floor near Antarctica to get an idea how much technology you need and how you would not live without all the people and supplies required daily to keep you alive there. That’s peanuts compared to what’s needed for people to go to dead cold planets.