If at first you don't succeed, fly, fly again: Boeing to repeat CST-100 test, Russia preps another ISS taxi Boeing is to repeat December's CST-100 test while Russia prepares for what might be the last launch of its space station taxi monopoly in this week's wrangling of rocket news. Boeing to refly Starliner Troubled aviation giant Boeing has opted to have another crack at the Orbital Flight Test mission of its calamity capsule, …
Luck for the russians flying
Good luck to spaceX in their dragon return and the upcoming Dragon crew flight
And next time Boeing, try outsourcing the manglement, who knows.. maybe they could be cheaper and more competent than the ones you have now
Icon... the one thing we dont want to be seeing
Um, in a word : no. Boeing should not get accolades for simply trying to do a second time around what they should have done the first time around.
Cost-cutting, absence of testing, and general not-giving-a-shit made their first test flight an utter failure. In an environment where the slightest mistake can mean death and loss of billions in equipment (try replacing the ISS), you do not get applause for starting to pay attention.
Previous errors can't be undone. What you can do is make the correct next decision.
In this case they have done so, although that doesn't mean we should reduce the vigilance on the next one, or the one after....
Um, in a word : no. Boeing should not get accolades for simply trying to do a second time around what they should have done the first time around.
It’s interesting to note that the end result of both Boeing’s and SpaceX’s approach is that they keep trying until it works. The difference is that SpaceX always said that’s they way they’d do it, and Boeing didn’t.
An interesting question is, is it possible to do it properly first time of asking? Perhaps. Ariane came very close (again Ariane 5 first launch failure was a software balls up). Even the Japanese, noted as they are for doing engineering processes by the book, have got rockets wrong now and then.
So on the face of it we’re not justified in expecting it to have worked first time, but for the failure to be down to essentially rampant cost cutting is the lousiest explanation yet. Ariane had to confess to that too after the failure of the first 5 to be launched.
How do we stop that happening? Well clearly we (as a species) don’t do these things often enough for the lessons learned from one bad experience to be remembered when designing the next one. Especially if it’s being done for a fixed amount of money.
Trouble is there’s very few government money counters willing to fund constant development just to keep a team together that’s really good at it.
I’ve long thought that in many of the endeavours of this sort, the costs of keeping the teams together doing constant development is far cheaper than the costs of the (often explosive) failures that result from starting from scratch every time. The damage done by even a brief spell of cost savings can be very significant.
I can't believe it even happened - you'd expect the engineers to object to this test, they should now how much each tank would weigh full and what the stress levels and limits are.
On the other hand, I have a suspicion the clever guys are working on the Falcon, and he's literally using boiler and water tank welders for this particular scam.
Falcon's pretty much a mature product now, rarely failing to deliver the payload and regularly landing unless they push the envelope (which they like to do).
Starship looks a lot like the early days of Falcon now - build one, blow it up, build a better one - but a 2STO interplanetary vehicle is orders of magnitude more difficult than Falcon 9/Heavy. Conventional wisdom said that was impossible, so who knows how long it will take Starship to go from prototypes to product. I predict a lot of enjoyable RUDs, a lot of naysayers, and Starship will still fly around the Moon before SLS.
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"Shoddy coding, iffy validation and a lack of end-to-end testing " ... I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you! The software should be at least as safe and secure as Microsoft's ... um ... https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/11/microsoft-exploring-rust-safety/ ( " C and C++ are .... very, very unsafe" )
The aerospace community is now suffering from exactly what was predicted by older engineers. The companies are now becoming populated with mediocre calibre engineers who are too young & have zero experience, but huge self belief. The old guys have left & the middle management are just as complacent as the 12 year old engineers they are supposed to supervise.
As a friend said humanity has a 30 collective memory, Apollo 13 was in flight 50 years ago, you do the math.
Space-X crushing their own rocket is beyond belief. Boeing, who after all are well known for their recent programming & risk analysis skills (anyone for a 737max8 ?) being allowed to launch a defective vehicle, just shows how far the rot has set in. When your 12 year old programmer fucks up an app, it’s embarrassing. As Gus Grissom said, when asked how it felt just before launch of his Mercury mission, “How would you feel knowing your sitting on the efforts of a 100 low bidders”. As regards Apollo 13 O2 tank issue showed, assumptions & lack of QA lead to fuck ups.
The Boeing 777, would not fly. The new boys used computers & said all good to go. The old boys who were still around when it first flew insisted on some empirical testing. The engine stalled it’s compressor on first take off due to a bad “computer modelled” inlet lip. Luckily it was attached to the 747 test bed airframe that was able to fly on its other three engines. If the old boys had not prevailed, then the first 777 test flight would have crashed & probably killed the program.
You have been warned, supervise your 12 year olds, QA their work & ensure a robust & comprehensive risk analysis is performed on all designs, whether physical or virtual. Lives may depend on it.
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