Why is NASA covering for Boeing? Jettison that shit and let it crash into the ocean as a burnt hunk as their infinite hemming and hawing indicates is apparently overwhelmingly likely to happen.
Can you guarantee that hitting the "undock and re-enter" button right now would result in Starliner safely leaving the ISS and then clearing its orbit?
Even if that had an acceptable level of risk, that still leaves two extra crew on the ISS with no seats home in case of an emergency, and NASA's policy in recent years has been to always have emergency return capacity for every crew member onboard.
I'm not saying there isn't a path forward that involves sending Starliner back empty, there are just a lot of considerations going into that decision right now.
At some level by covering or Boeing they are covering for themselves. They were the ones putting the astronauts on it, after all.
But there is another level: there some kind of a background hate directed toward Musk and Space X. Someone in government agencies is asking themselves, how could we put some sticks in Musk's spokes? Some ask him to kidnap seals and put headphones on their heads [1] or calculate what's the chance his rockets would hit whales in the Pacific Ocean [2]. So it's not that they particularly love Boeing that much, but if Boeing's success makes Musk's company look worse, fine, then they'll support Boeing.
Imagine a scenario, for a moment, that the situation is reversed. Space X is the capsule with the issue and Boeing is the one with the cheaper and working version. There would be no hesitation to pointing fingers and accusing Space X make a large media stink about it instead of covering up.
> Whether the seals would be dismayed by the sonic booms. Now, there’ve been a lot of rockets launched out of Vandenberg and the seal population has steadily increased. So if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac, based on the evidence, if you were to correlate rocket launches with seal population. Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures.
> Now, again, you look the surface, look at the Pacific and say what percentage of the Pacific consists of whale? I could give you a big picture and point out all the whales in this picture. I’m like, I don’t see any whales. It’s basically 0%, and if our rocket does hit a whale, which is extremely unlikely beyond all belief, fate had it, that’s a whale has some seriously bad luck, least lucky whale ever.
Just to make it clear, I don't like Musk, I don't have any stock in his companies, and don't buy his cars or use twitter/X. But it's still interesting to observe this effect of cover up and strange push against Musk.
It is not strange at all the inefficiency of the government has compounded to an extent such that even the military can not produce weapons to standards. SpaceX is one of the few shinning beacons of the Pax Americana if they kill SpaceX and continue to support these dying businesses without stringent reforms or refuse to allow their competitors China will overtake us. You can already see this happening where NASA of today just moves money from the government to private companies(but the ones truly doing innovation and delivering are the private companies) the technical capabilities of NASA now exist in the past while the China National Space Administration has been steadily improving their technical capabilities while also supporting a burgeoning private space industry. The financialization of US economy is making it such that those that produce money with the least actual value are being prioritized, while it different in China. The engineering legacy is already gone substantially, we cannnot even produce naval destroyers to spec even after multiple delays and after being overbudget, while China is cranking out better and better ships and using the engineering legacy of ship building to make naval destroyers. The Naval battlefield has changed whereby the previously overpowered aircraft carriers are now a huge liability with a missile costing less that $200k can destroy it (while there was a lot of spending on counter measure like the phalanx) the future is no longer of large ships.
They removed the autonomous flying part for this mission, so they can't jettison it without a human inside. They are supposedly working on adding that feature back in. It also cannot be attached to the canada arm so they can't even clear it away from the port its using.
The whole thing speaks to complete mismanagement on every level. That they still haven't made any kind of decision 3 months in is absolutely laughable.
Now they are saying the astronauts could be up there until MARCH. They miscalculated by EIGHT MONTHS. These people are complete clowns.
Dump that pile of junk, cancel the program, and fire all the managers involved in this cosmic fiasco.
Even if that had an acceptable level of risk, that still leaves two extra crew on the ISS with no seats home in case of an emergency, and NASA's policy in recent years has been to always have emergency return capacity for every crew member onboard.
I'm not saying there isn't a path forward that involves sending Starliner back empty, there are just a lot of considerations going into that decision right now.