[mihaaly]

I am still a bit puzzled how cheerful some people seem about a product that was unable to fulfill its purpose: Starliner getting to its intended destination. Seems like they cheer that it stayed in one piece at least. Not too promising.

[hoorayimhelping]

>I am still a bit puzzled how cheerful some people seem about a product that was unable to fulfill its purpose: Starliner getting to its intended destination.

Calling a space capsule a product and treating it like some kind of tech product launch and framing it's success that way is weird. It's a spacecraft and the mission was meant to test its capabilities and get data about it during an actual orbital flight, then go from there.

The reason everyone is trying to be so cheerful and optimistic is because it was a partial success - the capsule stayed together and landed, which were part of its mission parameters. But (clearly) the public perception of this mission is that it failed because it didn't get to the ISS, so I imagine people are trying to be cheerful to remind people that they're not upset cause they didn't fail, they just didn't fully succeed.

I'm no fan of Boeing or how they've handled 787 MAX or ULA or Starliner or their relationship with NASA, but calling this not too promising is a bit unfair.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It failed for essentially trivial reasons. Which suggests there are issues with the procedures that should eliminate those failures, and that similar failure modes are possible.

That's why it's not encouraging - and why it's not at all unfair to be scathing.

[CamperBob2]

We launched the ISS over 20 years ago. If you look 20 years down the road from Kitty Hawk, we had already built tens of thousands of manned aircraft and fought a world war with them at that point in time.

Apparently, 20 years of progress and "promise" ain't what it used to be.

[ericd]

I think it's because it's a lot easier to go fast when there are huge potential rewards (winning a World War) and you're willing to accept fatalities (war). The rewards here are much more nebulous, and we're not willing to accept fatalities. So we go slow and careful.

[sidlls]

I’m not at all puzzled that a bunch of people commenting in a hacker forum don’t understand very much about engineering like this. Astronautical and aeronautical engineering are difficult. The fact that we’ve been in space 50-odd years doesn’t mean we’ve perfected anything to the point where we should expect a flawless mission on the first go even for something like this.

[bkor]

The suggested failure/problem was in the software side.

[mlyle]

Maybe not even in software, but procedures. Still, this is common. A big share of space failures are, on some level, failures of software and procedures.

[mlyle]

Because it's a test that showed a large number of things went right, and otherwise didn't meet overall objectives for a small, trivial reason.

That is, the amount of project surface that it increased confidence in is as great or greater than the amount it called into question.

[rossdavidh]

Well it did turn out better than the 737 MAX in that no one died...