NASA freezes Starliner missions

For the fall/winter 2025 rotation they're going to plan with it being a Crew Dragon flight for now, subject to change depending on how Starliner's fixes go.

They also somewhat misleadingly say that NASA will also rely on Soyuz because of Starliner's unavailability, but that's just about the seat swap arrangement which helps to ensure that both the US and Russia can maintain a continuous presence if either side's vehicles have trouble. IIRC the agreement is expiring and NASA's interested in extending it, but Roscosmos hasn't agreed yet. I say misleading because I think they intended to extend that agreement regardless of Starliner's status.

I think this is a soft cancellation of Starliner. System certification is indefinitely paused.

No. The ISS is decommissioned in 2030 and Boeing is losing money on the programme. It makes sense for nobody to continue this charade.

The bigger question will be whether it's better for Boeing to take the relatively low cost option of fixing the propulsion system which to some extent is their third party supplier's issue, in a funding environment where operating actual missions is more favourably funded than R&D, or whether that's sunk cost fallacy when SpaceX is clearly ahead of them.

For the ISS? Based on what? It’s most likely to remain where it is.

Agree. That’s why Starliner should be killed. To open those resources to someone who actually intends to compete with SpaceX.

We see similar situation in automotive. Other companies do allow to keep Tesla in check, so there's less opportunity to force "Cybertrucks" onto the market as the only option.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-...

It’s possible, not probable.

It would take an act of the Congress to keep the ISS funded. There is zero indication that status quo will change nor a strong constituency for changing it.

No, they don’t. Starliner is a paper competitor. The money NASA sends it ensure SpaceX maintains a practical monopoly.

Boeing is the “competitor” everyone wishes for. Sucking up the oxygen in the room a real competitor might need while doing absolutely nothing to contest your market share.

> they've built the vehicle with no drama

Late to launch, billions over budget and strands its astronauts but has a CEO you can’t remember because their planes kept falling apart is a weird way to spell “no drama.”

Despite Musk's… what, breakdown? Radicalisation? Temper tantrums? Whatever that is, SpaceX is still astoundingly fast at both launching stuff to orbit and also making new and better rockets than almost everyone else on the planet combined.

I'd like to see the money that was given to Boeing, instead given to another space startup that might do something interesting.

Spin-launch, perhaps.

In response to your other point, I am very skeptical of microgravity experiments becoming a big industry. I think NASA (as an organization, I'm not talking about individuals in NASA) is mostly interested in continuing human space flight simply because it keeps the public interested in space, which makes NASA's funding more secure.

Starliner does not even attempt to compete on the commercial market, it has a fixed number of Atlas V's stored away for the NASA contract, and then someone will have to cough up money to try to put it on another rocket.

So, they aren't even in the market, let alone doing anything to even appear to compete.

There are no competitors that are even remotely close to competing with SpaceX and Boeing without first spending tens of billions of dollars like SpaceX and Boeing have done.

Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?

Problem is, quite a lot of the weird stuff looks like defections in the IPD sense.

Then it killed 7 astronauts.

Then it worked again they said.

Then 7 more died.

> Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?

Well that's just a straight up lie.

How do you know how serious the issue was?

There has been one, a second stage that failed to relight the engine due to a sensor issue that was quickly fixed. Since then they have had more successful launches than most companies fly in entire years. The other failures were:

- A booster that failed to land after the most flights any booster in the fleet has had, a problem only SpaceX is capable of having right now

- A second stage where the engine shutdown during a deorbit burn was a few milliseconds later than expected.

On the other hand, the "minor issue" on Starliner had Boeing burning hundreds of millions of dollars trying to replicate the issue on the ground, after so many years of waterfall-style development.

We all make mistakes, but some mistakes are being made due to shoddy work. It was thankfully not a capsule destroying mistake, but on something high stake such as a human rated capsule, shoddy works shouldn't be tolerated, especially with corner cutting such as removing entire capability in software.

Due to their nature they're sensitive and easy to compromise. Which is also why NASA knew from day 1 that icing was going to be a huge issue on the shuttle. They were retrofitting the vehicle, the launch platform and even the software to reduce heat shield risks very early on.

Some of their earliest flights included EVA experiments where the astronauts translated themselves to the thermal tiles, did inspections, and even did mock repairs to test the feasibility of the idea and of the quality of the adhesives in near total vacuum.

After the final accident they started doing something they could have and should have been doing since the beginning. That was simply taking up a camera that could be attached to the Canadarm, swung "underneath" the shuttle, and used to take a comprehensive survey of the thermal management system immediately on orbit.

In any case, point is, human rated space flight will always require this level of attention to detail and ongoing effort to derisk every possible aspect of every mission performed. NASA management did an outright terrible job at this. From incentivizing the wrong behavior, falling in love with paper targets, and completely failing to audit their own internal risk estimations for errors.

> Well that's just a straight up lie.

I'm guessing they're confusing the expected, catastrophic explosive "failures" on experimental Starship prototypes with payload-carrying F9/FH flights.

What?

That kid who got 1% on his test? He passed, if you redefine the threshold for passing to mean something that everyone else would consider a failure.

We don't know if it was serious or not. If Starliner managed to land this time, will it be able to do it repeatedly, or it was just luck this time?

If we are trying to deduce seriousness of the issue from data, then one point of data is too low. Boeing needs to launch a few dozens more of test flights to gather the data needed for this kind of reasoning. But if we are relying on causal reasoning, then we have no clear understanding of causes, Boeing engineers are still unable to explain how their thrusters fail exactly, and what they could do to make them robust.

Having one major commercial success story is often the way the market leans, the missing piece here is NASA's own competency lost to its history of politics and bureaucratic bullshit - the missing piece is NASA's own lost greatness;

And people need to stop punishing SpaceX for everyone else being retards.

This in fact is a shining vindication of Musk's "Waste metal, not time." philosophy.

Boeing is operating in the old school "Spend lots of time planning, go for a hole in one." philosophy, so if they proceed to fail they need to spend lots of more time planning and going for more hole in ones to demonstrate sufficient statistics.

SpaceX? They wasted metal instead of time and got statistics out with sheer numbers before Boeing even got a number, because the only way you get numbers is by getting numbers.

Boeing should be fired and ideally bankrupted, and everyone else needs to get with the times so they don't become the next Boeing.

People buying into that stuff are morons, but useful to the republican party all the same.

What you describe is still a defection in the iterated prisoners' dilemma sense.

First shuttle launch, Columbia STS-1 12 April 1981.[0]

The Canadarm was first tested in orbit in 1981, on Space Shuttle Columbia's STS-2 mission [1] (12 November 1981)

So, not exactly since the beginning

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_missions

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm

They didn't call it "flying the arm" for nothing:

https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-sts077-307-017-19-29-may-1...

In any case, STS-1 was an insane test flight, and had it's own share of thermal tile problems.

NASA wasn’t saying that they know for certain that the Starliner will have a catastrophe on the way back. What they said is that they cannot be certain that the probability of it having a catastrophe is lower than some decision threshold.

Using the russian roulette as an analogy NASA has a revolver with a barel for a million bullets, and they decided they are fine to pull the trigger against the astronauts heads if there are less than 5 bullets in it. But due to nobody really understanding the mechanism of previous anomalies they don’t know how many bullets there are in the barrel. There might be six or more so they are not willing to pull the trigger. (The number of bullets, and the number of chambers is merelly illustrative. I don’t know what is the real number NASA uses.)

There is an important point here that needs to be emphasized. To fix starliner you need to build up personnel familiar with construction, operations, and build/test enough hardware to iterate kinks. This requires investment that Boeing being a publicly traded company cannot do for free (or they will get sued) and NASA is unlikely to pay them to do it. So this is catch 22, they will fix current issues, but given how long it will take, there is a high chance of causing new issues due to loss of essential personnel who would know how to integrate fixes with existing design constraints... so unfortunately charade characterization fits.

[...]

>no drama

Come again?

Especially when your stock price has returned back to where it was before a lot of divestment started.

We all know why America (and the Chinese) want to go to Mars and it ain't for science.

1. They were not unexpected. They very very clearly communicated months ahead.

2. "Catastrophic" is a bit much too, as they were indeed expected and planned for. In fact, the biggest failure in the Starship development was that the rocket did NOT explode fast enough once.

3. "Failures". Well.. no. These are prototypes intended to learn from. Experiments if you will. A scientist that never has a negative result is a fraud. Same here.

If so, she's a miracle worker given all the rest of what we're seeing.

That said, the way he talks about the rockets? Sure, he's ambitious, but he does seem to act like he recognises the laws of physics don't respond to "screw the rules I have money".

That’s why it’s critical to maintain a regulatory environment and supportive infrastructure so that scrappy innovative new competitors can rise up. To do that, the dead standing wood needs to be felled.

Despite Boeing doing an admirable job of falling down on its own, it would probably still be useful to not keep feeding the decay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY8nbSwjtEY

I doubt Boeing could ever be that competition though.

What would you expect them to do differently under this proposed scenario?

Everyone knows Starliner is as good as dead. It's what Boeing wants even, since Starliner is a huge money pit.

The only ones propping up this continued "delay" fiction are the NASA and Boeing PR departments.

The aviation industry is seeing massive growth in new Asian markets, their only competition has a massive backlog and STILL Boeing is sinking.

God knows if they could survive an actual recession.

Was trying to put this 1/500 number into perspective for myself. It sounds like it is rougly similar to the mortality of having appendicites. [1]

1: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstrac...

What more could you want?

> downward spiral

Oh come on.

You can’t innovate when you have to justify every cost. That’s not how innovation works, and in Boeing, engineering was a profit center… but leadership thought Boeing was a manufacturing company, and engineering was a cost center.

So, You cut corners to make manufacturing cheaper, stop innovating, try to fix aerodynamics problems with software, try to pretend like the big changes you made aren’t, underplay the need for training pilots on what are substantially new aircraft because you don’t want to admit they are actually a lot different than the good selling previous models, etc.

All just bean counter shenanigans instead of focusing on what Boeing was actually great at: delivering value through superior engineering.

So, all the engineers that actually wanted to engineer left to do interesting things, and you’re left with the ones that want to do as little as possible, along with the bean counters that want to minimise ‘spensive stuff like actually innovative projects.

At this point it’s almost like a zombie brand, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing boeing branded Chinese dollar store crap any day now.

Therefore the decision to not use it until the causes for all such malfunctions are understood was completely justified.

Problem: "one of the Starliner’s reaction control system (RCS) thrusters did not function".

Why it was not serious: "there are plenty of backup RCS thrusters".

Even if the redundancy ensured a successful return, the causes must be understood, because otherwise at a future return more than one thruster could malfunction and the redundancy may be insufficient.

Same mentality with their civil aviation business. Their failure to invest in the core of the company (making great planes) has led to spectacular - and deadly - failure.

The main reason they are still an important player in civil aviation is because Airbus can't make planes fast enough.

Consider that just the Apollo programme had twenty one (21) launches in a span of about just 8 years before Apollo 11 landed the first men on the Moon.

Gemini had twelve (12) launches in a span of just 2 years, and Mercury had twenty six (26) launches in a span of just 4 years.

Contrast 4 launches of N1, 6 launches of Voskhod, and 13 launches of Vostok from records we know of.

If anything, Musk should waste more metal.

Poor leadership will corrode anything including great workers who feel like they can’t get anything done.