Boeing Starliner's 1st crewed trip to the ISS delayed again over battery overheating risk Boeing's first mission carrying astronauts to the International Space Station aboard its Starliner capsule, scheduled for April, is now delayed until summer due to the risk of overheating batteries. NASA is concerned that the Starliner's lithium-ion batteries could overheat while docked to the ISS. Although executives from the …
Boeing have got paydays for passing milestones and hope to get more when the actually transport (and return) astronauts. Presumably the expected cost of continuing is less than the payments they have yet to receive ($?M for this test flight + $90M * 4 astronauts * 6 flights). To make the economics less simple, Starliner is intended to carry 5: 4 NASA + 1 tourist and Boeing get to sell the tourist seat for whatever rich tourists will pay.
There is also a theoretical possibility of more flights. The commercial crew program promised SpaceX and Boeing 6 flights each. The plan was to divide up flights beyond those 12 between SpaceX and Boeing. NASA have so far allocated flights up to 2030: 14 to SpaceX and 0 to Boeing. Boeing could theoretically get some pure tourist flights to the ISS and to Blue Origin's Orbital Reef (because Jeff would rather not buy launches from Elon).
In real life, there is a limited supply of Atlas V rockets to launch Starliner and no more will be built. There are enough reserved for this test flight and the six operational flights. After that, Boeing has to find a new man rated rocket. The obvious choice would be Vulcan. Someone would have to come up with the money to man-rate Vulcan. Boeing could do that by putting up their prices - just like SpaceX did for launches after their first 6 (to include the cost of delays provided by congress reducing the funding for the commercial crew program). The silly choice would be SLS: put another $200M onto the per seat cost and add a year of delay to Artemis for each launch to the ISS and that is before factoring in the cost of another mobile launch platform equipped to supply Starliner.
In the background to such decisions: NASA have clearly decided they can man rate Starship HLS for a trip from Lunar orbit to the Moon and back. What happens _when_ they decide to man rate it for launches from and landings on Earth? Their choices are either to go with the flow or watch Jared Isaacman's Polaris III orbital party on youtube.
I think humanity is better off having a few designs for access to space. I also think the US specifically is better off having multiple designs itself. Yes, it's a metric-fuck-tonne of money, but the aerospace pork-barrel is never going to get forged into health or welfare plowshares, that just isn't the way things work in our present order of priorities.
This is the same company that was toasting airliners with poor battery designs that would cook-off and start fires.
So yeah, they should have 5 extra safety checks as the last couple of things they said 'this is easy to engineer', they nearly killed people... I wouldn't fly anywhere on anything they designed in the last 10 years.
And that's before we get to the software problems and management issues plaguing them.
> Software bugs in the flight code also had to be checked
The bugs had to be checked? Shouldn't they have been FIXED?
(Yes, I understand that bugs can be acceptable in this sort of thing if they have been rigorously analysed, the scope for problems is known, and if necessary appropriate mitigations are put in place. I wouldn't describe this as "checking" the bug, though.)
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