Boeing Starliner crew get their ISS sleepover extended The crew of the Boeing Starliner will spend the summer aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as NASA and Boeing refused to set a return date for the craft. During a briefing on July 25, Mark Nappi, Vice President and Program Manager of Boeing's Commercial Crew Program, commented on the emphasis placed on the eight-day …
Holly: Oh, then you won't want to know about the two super light-speed fighters that are tracking us.
Lister: What??!!
Holly: I'll leave you to your bubble blowing mate.
Lister: No, Hol, come on, come on.
Holly: They're from Earth.
Lister: Three million years away?
Holly: They're from the NorWEB Federation.
Lister: What's that?
Holly: The North Western Electricity Board. They want you Dave.
Lister: Me? Why? What for?
Holly: For your crimes against humanity.
Lister: You what?!!
Holly: It seems when you left Earth three million years ago, you left two half-eaten German sausages on a plate in your kitchen.
Lister: Did I?
Holly: You know what happens to sausages left unattended for three million years?
Lister: Yeah, they go mouldy.
Holly: Your sausages Dave, now cover seven-eigths of the Earth's surface. Also you left seventeen pounds, fifty pence in a bank account. Thanks to compound interest you now own ninety-eight percent of all the world's wealth, but since you've hoarded it for three million years, nobody's got any money except you and NorWEB.
Lister: Why NorWEB?
Holly: You left a light on in the bathroom. I've got a final demand here for one hundred and eighty billion pounds.
So what are the astronauts doing?
Is this like an unexpected space vacation for them? Just chilling out and looking out the window at the Earth?
Or are there jobs around the ISS that they are helping out with, despite not being trained for a long stay?
Or was this contingency planned for, and they were trained before launch to perform lots of useful tasks on the ISS just in case this happened?
I can't imagine that they are that involved in debugging the capsule, I would imagine that's mostly done by ground control?
There are absolutely loads of jobs to do on the ISS. There's a whole bunch of experiments up there that need regular checking and note taking. Plus now the station is quite old, there's unexpected maintenance jobs that maybe nobody is trained for. So I imagine everyone's workload is reduced a bit. So maybe everyone gets extra time to look out the windows?
Plus they must be running some tests on the Starliner itself.
Being mildly serious, they are dealing with most of the routine cleaning and maintenance issues leaving more time for the regular crew to run the various experiments on the station. Crews on the usual 6 month stint get training on the experiments that are expected to be running during their stay while crews supposedly on short visits only get the standard station training, so it makes sense to release the specialists from fans and filters duties. Apparently it takes about 2.5 full time crew equivalent to keep the place running.
Reported elsewhere, it looks like the thruster problems only occur when they're in a cluster. Test a single thruster in isolation and it's fine, put them in a group like they are on Starliner and heat leakage from a firing thruster affetcs the others in the group. Boeing simulated the clusters rather than test fire an actual physical set...
Boeing need to be made to do yet another test flight. At their own expense. And unmanned.
I don't believe this spacecraft is safe.
Or at least not within acceptable risk margins. It's not the 50s/60s anymore. Obviously NASA have no choice but to say they approve the spacecraft for an emergency return. The alternative is to sit up there and die if an accident strikes the ISS.
It's pretty clear they don't even know what the margins are with all the helium leaks. They've doubled the acceptable life of the battery. Although that might be a lesser risk, as its designed for a longer life - and they have now got more data on its performance in space. But it's clearly also because they have no choice. At one point, 7 of their 8 thrusters failed - and they were dead if they couldn't be fixed.
At this point I'd argue that Boeing could be asked to pay for a Crew Dragon to go up and rescue the crew, and they can bring their pisspoorly built capsule down on automatic. Then they can pay for another unmanned test, and another, and another - until they can manage one that's close the flawless. Because they clearly can't be trusted to build something safe for a crew.
Of course now we have the problem that Falcon needs to do 3 flights without an upper stage engine going boom.
But I've got a bad feeling that they're going to take too big a risk on Starliner, because the alternatives are too expensive, and too bad for the policy of having 2 indpendent suppliers.
I'm worried they'll have a major thruster failure halfway through the de-orbit burn - and risk not having time to correct things.
Maybe they have a good idea of the problem, and are just being cautious. Clearly we don't have that information. But if they really knew what was going on, they'd have a much better idea of the timeline for return. This smacks of delaying and hoping for the best.
Falcon 9 due up at 04:21 tomorrow (saturday) morning, second flight due sunday. Should be clear by wednesday. Split line to a redundant sensor leaked a bit of LOX which caused problems with the TEA-TEB ignition fluid (not clear if it froze or just thickened like diesel) so the engine did a 'hard start' when the TEA-TEB finally got into the chamber.
Always the redundant system that fails...
https://www.spacex.com/updates/#falcon-9-returns-to-flight
"During the first burn of Falcon 9’s second stage engine, a liquid oxygen leak developed within the insulation around the upper stage engine. The cause of the leak was identified as a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s oxygen system. This line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line. Despite the leak, the second stage engine continued to operate through the duration of its first burn, and completed its engine shutdown, where it entered the coast phase of the mission in the intended elliptical parking orbit."
New engine (because it's a second stage) so fatigue is a slightly concerning failure mode...
> New engine (because it's a second stage) so fatigue is a slightly concerning failure mode...
There used to be an issue with RL-10 engines going kaboom in flight. Turned out to be it was a flex line vibrating to death.
On the ground during testing, the flex line was coated in a thin layer of ice, so it was fine. In space there was no ice. They replaced it with a solid line.
"I don't believe this spacecraft is safe."
No spacecraft can ever be safe. Their designs are a string of risk mitigations to keeping a livable o2 environment within a small metal bubble. Meanwhile, outside that bubble, there's a total vacuum where the temps can swing from just over absolute zero to your oven on broil.
In space, you can only minimize risk to human space flight, you can never eliminate it.
Nedelin Disaster
Soyuz 1
Apollo 1
Soyuz 11
Apollo 13
Challenger
Columbia
It's a long list... Don't expect it to stop growing any time soon.
Safe is a relative term.
That they knew there were multiple issues before launch and did it and way would firmly put the decision in the UNsafe realm for me.
Yes that may have been the case for others before too but it should not excuse it happening repeatedly. The star liner should never have been launched with people on board.
"No, manned by chairman, a director and the product manager.”
Oh no, not necessary, why waste extra mass which could be better used with scientific experiments or actual professional astronauts, just mandate that the next manned launch will absolutely require the current (at the time of launch) Boeing CEO* to be on board. Otherwise the entire contract is pulled!
Yes in that case Boeing will go legal, and demand ‘damages’ for, basically being useless, but, isn’t Congress the ultimate authority here? Were congress to pass a law ordering Boeing to comply or else?
* and for extra points, maybe mandate that instead, their eldest son/daughter be on board - let’s see how confident they are in their own product!
"Then we'll get a chance to look at the helium leak rates and verify that the system is stable."This seems to me a sign that they aren't really doing the 'safety culture' thing anymore. Otherwise, they'd talk about verifying whether the system is stable, not that it is, which conveys an implicit assumption that it's stable by default. Why did Feynman even bother?
> Considering the delays experienced just getting Starliner off the pad, a longer-than-planned stay at the outpost was not entirely unexpected, particularly since it affords engineers more time to investigate behavior not seen during ground tests.
LA Times: “Ground testing conducted on thrusters that maneuver Boeing’s capsule in space found that Teflon used to control the flow of rocket propellant eroded under high heat conditions, while different seals that control helium gas showed bulging, they said.”
This company is only still running because the American political system has too much to lose both in terms of face and money. It's a cash cow for the government and more important, the corrupt senators who stand to lose billions if the stock tanks. It should have been shut down years ago. Boeing have proved time & time again that they put profit before humanity. It's a fucking joke.
Have you ever seen the shocking state of the cabling in the ISS?
It looks like every astronaut who has ever installed anything has run a "temporary" cable running the entire length of the thing.
Mind you, fixing these sorts of messes usually results in unexpected outtages.
On the plus side, once you have several skips of cable, you can usually exchange them for a decent beer and curry night out with all the wiremen.
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