NASA freezes Starliner missions

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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...

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.

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.