NASA, Boeing opt to fly leaky thruster as-is for first crewed Starliner CST-100 mission NASA and Boeing have set another date – June 1 – for the first crewed launch of the Starliner CST-100, a capsule more noted for its reluctance to leave the ground than for its commercial crew capability. The Starliner has suffered several setbacks over the years, with the latest being a helium leak detected after the May 6 …
My truck has had a sporadic error code on the EVAP system for the last two years, the OBDII reader flags it as "Large Leak - Detected", this error only comes up when the temperature rises above 8C.
I finally got under the truck to replace the EVAP solenoid last weekend & found the only part of the connecting rigid hose to the solenoid was the connector on the charcoal canister.
That they have nightmares about not should serve as a good lesson.
The specifics of which company designed it, are not particularly relevant to the point.
That being known flaws that canceled a launch, were not fixed, hand waved away and now the launch is going to happen regardless of who says what or when because the decision has been made for them.
The danger is in knowing of flaws, minor or otherwise, and willingly, in the face of historical disasters and losses of life, not take this seriously, to the point that reentry may not be possible if the right (wrong) things happen. That's true danger. Knowing there's a problem, and ignoring it until such a time (orbit) that they can do nothing about it.
"... the team was happy to launch to spacecraft as is and manage the leak accordingly"
Well they that might say that but then they are not going to be riding the bloody thing into orbit, are they?
Come on Boeing, put your money where your mouth is and book a seat for the CEO on the next iteration of the "Calamity Capsule".
Seems like the mantra still is: Never mind the quality get it out of the door, soonest!
Oh, and yes, I too haven't forgotten about the O ring decision, NASA.
The helium atom (there is no molecule) is small. It goes places that other gases can't go. The helium atom is so small that helium gas is often used as a leak detector for testing piping systems.
I'm not too surprised that Boeing has a helium leak in their spacecraft.
If that is the only thing they can find that is a little anomalous, out of thousands or hundreds of thousands of things that can go wrong, then good luck and good flying.
I've known several people who have often worked with liquid nitrogen. In a physics lab in college (superconductors), we used some too. It's really not that hazardous; make sure the room has good ventilation and don't let it touch anything you don't want deep-frozen, like fingers.
Oh, and make SURE the tank has a slight leak. Do not, under any circumstances, seal it off!
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/how-not-do-it-liquid-nitrogen-tanks
I remember a college science demo where people briefly dipped their fingers in liquid nitrogen. It was pretty weird to feel it boil around your fingers, for maybe 1 second before you yanked them out to avoid freezing.
I am not suggesting that anyone try this!
Know as the leidenfrost effect. It works by your hand in this example being high enough ebove the boiling point of the liquid, that the liquid boils before even touching you and turns to gas, the gas then pushes the liquid away from you so that it forms an insulating layer of gas.
But the temperature difference is such that you don't have long, your hand will give off the heat quickly and the liquid will stop boiling as aggressively and then yeah... Frostbite, rather quickly.
"The helium atom (there is no molecule) is small. "
It's even smaller than the H2 molecule and a real bastard to get tight seal. I would think that most engineers would consider that leaks are inevitable and just design a larger tank with spare capacity for "nominal" leaking. Perhaps they can put a spare tank in the mass budget that can be used to top up with although that might take ages for the change orders and plan reviews.
But, there should not be a leak. It was not designed to leak. But Boeing have decided it is not an issue; just like the the 737 MCAS system which nobody knew about until it crashed two planes. Rather them than me on this mission. Let's hope all the door bolts are in place too....
"But, there should not be a leak. It was not designed to leak. "
There's no way to design a seal so that Helium won't leak. You do the best you can and put a bracket around it expecting the imperfect. The alternative is to use a compatible heavier gas. When I was working on landers, we pressurized the LOx with Helium and the fuel with N2 to save money. Just the mass difference in the gases was 5kg. When we needed to increase the flight time, the decision was made to use only Helium as the pressurizing gas. This let us save the 5kg in the mass of the gas and remove the separate plumbing loop. The downside was that as hard as we tried, there was no way to fill up the tanks the day before testing without needing to top up the next morning.
Gus Grissom famously hung a lemon inside the capsule that was later christened Apollo 1.
I don't know what fruit the crew assigned to Starliner have used, but would YOU want to fly on it?
It all seems so unnecessary anyway when Dragon is already proven and a lot cheaper... Barring SpaceX putting the price up?
No, this has been quite necessary.
It's shown that Boeing can't get their shit together, which is very valuable.
If you remember, the original sentiment was that SpaceX was the unnecessary one, since Boeing was the proven company and SpaceX was just some startup.
It was considered a waste of money to add SpaceX to the competition.
Well, we see how that has panned out, eh? Who's the "unnecessary one" and the "proven one" now?
Can you imagine if Boeing was the sole source here and we would have been depending on Russian Soyuz all this time with the situation in Ukraine?
Well, it DOES still serve a purpose because the brief to NASA is to have multiple home grown manned options to get to/from the ISS and/or it's successor. On the other hand, there's Dreamchaser. Admittedly that's not flown yet, so we'll have to wait and see. With Boeings losses on Starliner, they may not want to succeed and be happy to leave the "second launch system" to them. 'Cos there's no way a second Starliner is going to be cost-plus, that ship has sailed (unlike Starliner, at time of posting!) and any future Starliners are going to have to be well under budget to recoup the losses.
That doesn't sound correct.
If NASA paid for it already, for a fixed price, any additional cost would have to be absorbed by Boeing for going over the fixed price contract terms. Or a new contract would have to be signed to include extra cost to NASA.
If NASA cancel now, there should be no repercussions as they stated their price, it was paid, work was done and at the end extra is on Boeing not NASA, as extra was not in the "fixed" price contract.
According to Forbes, Boeing issued thir very first "Diversity Report" in April of 2021.
Since that time, there have been a *cough* FEW issues with quality at Boeing. There were earlier problems with 737 Max (2 crashes, software) around 2018, and the plane had to be re-certified in 2020. But 2 other versions of 737 Max have had waivers issued and were never certified due to quality issues. Then there was the door falling off in mid flight earlier this year, and even more problems with starliner.
Many of these problems initially pre-date their DEI implementation but some of them since then reflect serious manufacturing and assembly issues, and not necessarily design flaws.
Boeing has management problems and they have tried "cleaning house" to fix it. I fear they hired new management that are just "diverse" versions of the same *KINDS* of bad management that led to the 737 Max and Starliner issues, and the fact remains that DEI hiring picks identity over qualifications....
I have firsthand evidence of senior staff retained for DEI reasons despite committing offences that I've seen others sacked for.
Calling it out would itself be considered a DEI violation such is the nonsense that has crept in.
So how do we take it back out again, fairly?
>Boeing issued thir very first "Diversity Report" in April of 2021.
Diversity has definitely been at the root of Boeing's recent issues.
Specifically, hiring managers from a minority aircraft maker and moving manufacturing to states where snake handling and moonshine brewing are the main achievements
Exactly! Stop trying to turn issues into a political problem that suits your agenda! This ISN'T a DEI / politically-based problem with Boeing, this is strictly ECONOMIC.
They allowed management from a company with a questionable ethical and quality control background take over. They moved said management away from their manufacturing headquarters. Then they moved manufacturing away from said historic area, with skilled but well-paid workers, to a new location with no experienced aerospace workers based solely on the expectation of cost savings.
Failure after management failure. Don't go trying to blame anything else but greed and avarice..
HIRING? Nobody *HIRED* the MDD managers... They came with the package when they MERGED.
During the merger they bribed MDD with the C-Suite... see how *that* turned out.
DEI has absolutely nothing to do with the failures to heed safety issues raised by engineering and the boys on the lines...
Worshipping leaders never ends well, and this is exactly what happened at B.
The company nearly destroyed itself so it could pretend their leadership ae wonderful and paying them crazy amounts of money instead of actually using that money and time to do proper responsible engineering.
Russia is also destroying itself for the same reason worshipping Putin. Its strange the war was about having a port on the blacksea at Crimea, and today they basically dont have a functional fleet of any kind in those waters. Not too mention the destruction of Russia that will take at least 40 years to restore.
AIUI, NASA did have the good sense to award this on a fixed price contract basis, so, again so I’m told, Boeing have now run up a billion dollar loss at least on this, which will ultimately come out of the pockets of their shareholders (cue the playing of the world’s smallest violin) - who may, or may not be considering ‘lawyering up’ to ask the obvious questions.
Also, didn’t NASA (AKA the US taxpayer), give Boeing some $4.5 billion to provide a transport service to the ISS, but only $2.4 billion to the ‘also-ran’ Space-X, just because they had to be seen to be promoting multiple suppliers?
Hah, madness, how possibly could a startup company possibly compete?
Lastly, "a de-orbit burn might not be possible in the event of multiple thruster failures”!!!!! So not only are they having ‘difficulties’ getting it up (no sniggering at the back), even if they do, there’s a non-zero chance that they might not be able to get it back down again on cue!
Would be rather embarassing for boing if the starliner made it to the ISS, but for technical reasons could not safely get down again...
Would how much SpaceX would charge boing per dragon seat in order to get their crew home?
ee <<< the missing e's
PS SpaceX just completed their 58th flight of the year 20 minutes ago.....
Now what I don’t get* is that this was originally scheduled to launch in what 2016/2017. So here we are some, what seven years late!
Now presumably NASA is the customer having engaged Boeing to do xyz, now imagine it was you calling a plumber to completely renew the pipes in your house, and seven years later you are still waiting for them to get it all working? Would you not have long since have told them thanks but no thanks and gone elsewhere?
* And yes I do know the reason, could it be Boeing ‘suggesting’ to members of Congress how bad it would be if they lost their federal founding and had to close facilities in said members constituency?
Cynic? Me? Absolutely not!
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