Two astronauts wait to come home as Boeing races to understand spacecraft issues
Two astronauts wait to come home as Boeing races to understand spacecraft issues. Here’s what’s at stake | CNN
To be clear: to get back to the ground safely, the spacecraft RCS has to operate for no more than about five hours.
As far as I know, this spacecraft is still certified for emergency reentry, and if they needed to, the crew can get in and leave at any time. And they have good confidence that the spacecraft will get them to earth safely.
These delays aimed at getting more data to justify certification as an operational vehicle instead of flight test. If it doesn't work out, the worst case seems to be that a second test flight may be required.
Delays don't really cost NASA anything either. There's plenty of consumables on the station for the crew, and when the capsule is docked the RCS can be shut down so it doesn't leak.
Yeah, reading the article, it sounds like they've decided to park at the space station because the parts that malfunctioned during the journey to the space station were not designed to survive re-entry, meaning that they won't have the opportunity to understand what went wrong with them after they return to Earth. So they're delaying the departure in order to collect as much information as possible about what went wrong in the first part of the mission. They're still confident that a safe return is going to happen.
Thanks, Obama. Really glad you privatized space travel. It's going great. Our space program now consists of Guy who wants space apartheid, and company whose name is synonymous with planes that crash for no reason.
I mean, private companies have been responsible for every launch since the Soviet Union fell (unless China is fully state owned, I don't know)
NASA modifies equipment sometimes but they were always buying launch vehicles from private industry.
...some of you are going to die...
...martyrs, of course, to the freedom that I shall provide.
Tell em, Peter
Big E, is that u?
'Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
"Relax," said the night man
"We are programmed to receive
You can check-out any time you like
But you can never leave!"'
such a lovely place
Mr. Xi,
Our astronauts yearn for freedom!
if they d!e upon reentry, will someone pick up them cursing boeing on amateur radio?
You can say "die" here, it's ok
so to answer your question: my guess is no one will.
it would be so funny if russia or china manage rescue them first
Realistically, there's a SpaceX Dragon docked to the ISS, so that's probably their emergency shelter and ride home.
Definitely the bravest people we have. Fyling Boeing... wow.
Got to be nerve wracking as the astronaut waiting to ride back.
After a half decade of delays and several major issues, including it spinning out of control in space on it's first test flight, and all the issues with literally anything else Boeing touches, I can't see how they talked them into getting in it in the first place.
I'm pretty sure it hasn't had a single fully successfully test flight yet so I'm surprised even NASA allowed it.
They are safe on the space station. They have all the time they need to sort it out. They can even wait for another craft to arrive.
With the space shuttle they observed an issue on launch, looked into it and decided the shuttle was ok to return, then it blew up. Not saying that's what will happen here, but has to have occurred to the astronauts that it's happened before.
Where's the problem? If the door opens blows out en route the astronauts will probably still reentry.
We kinda want him alive
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was set to mark its crowning achievement this month: Ferrying two NASA astronauts on a round trip to the International Space Station, proving the long-delayed and over-budget capsule is up for the task.
But the two veteran astronauts piloting this test flight are now in a tentative position — extending their stay aboard the space station for a second time while engineers on the ground scramble to learn more about issues that plagued the first leg of their journey.
Williams and Wilmore will now return no earlier than June 26, NASA announced Tuesday, stretching their mission to at least 20 days as engineers race to gain a better understanding of the spacecraft’s problems while it’s safely attached to the space station.
Officials have said there is no reason to believe Starliner won’t be able to bring the astronauts back home, though “we really want to work through the remainder of the data,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, at a Tuesday news conference.
Michael Lembeck, an aerospace engineering associate professor of practice at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who was a consultant for Boeing’s spaceflight division from 2009 to 2014, told CNN that it would be difficult to determine whether additional ground tests may have caught the thruster issues at hand.
Boeing executives have repeatedly sought to make clear that the Starliner program operates independently from the company’s other units — including the commercial aircraft division that has been at the center of scandals for years.
The original article contains 1,347 words, the summary contains 250 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Huh. Even Boeing doesn't want to be associated with Boeing:
Are they independent from the cancerous management though?
No, the spacecraft gets lumped in with the military business unit because the contracting structures are similar, and very different from how commercial aircraft development is financed.
The classic rebranding ala facebook -> meta / insta, or food companies with their thousands of differently named subsidiaries.