NASA said Thursday it will decide this weekend whether Boeing’s new capsule is safe enough to return two astronauts from the International Space Station, where they’ve been waiting since June.
Administrator Bill Nelson and other top officials will meet Saturday. An announcement is expected from Houston once the meeting ends.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched aboard Boeing’s Starliner on June 5. The test flight quickly encountered thruster failures and helium leaks so serious that NASA kept the capsule parked at the station as engineers debated what to do.
SpaceX could retrieve the astronauts, but that would keep them up there until next February. They were supposed to return after a week or so at the station.
I think the astronauts should decide.
What is gained by taking the responsibility away from them, and handing it to some other person? I could maybe see it if I trusted that other person to be more qualified, but if they are NASA administration, then I don’t.
They should certainly have an input, but their desire to get home quickly might really bias them into taking unnecessary risks. I’m not sure I agree with giving them the final call.
It may sound callous, but the downsides also aren’t completely theirs. The death of two astronauts would impact NASA as a whole, and to an extent even the whole US. For NASA it may very well be worth making two people wait another 6 months if it means showing the public that safety comes first.
And what if the two astronauts don’t agree? Can they allow 1 to descend solo while the other waits?
I mean I won’t say you’re wrong in the abstract or don’t have a point, but NASA management’s consistent history of making dogshit decisions as regards safety is also a highly relevant factor here.
Generally in civilian aviation, if you’re on the one on the plane, you get to make the decisions, because ultimately it’s your ass on the line. In emergency situations nobody gets to override you and say you have to do it this other way instead even if you don’t like it. Even if NASA management makes a perfect decision based on the information available to them at the time, and something goes wrong and the astronauts die, that’s still a bothersome outcome to me. Like, it’s their life. Let them have the responsibility. Hopefully there’s one overall probably-right answer, and management and the astronauts would both evaluate the same information and come to the same conclusion anyway, but even so I still feel like it’d be a better situation if it was the astronauts deciding about their own life and death. Then if something does go wrong, everyone’s hands are clean and there’s no second guessing.
Yeah but they’re not on the plane. They’re at the airport, the plane is grounded, and they’re waiting for authorization to get on the plane from the FAA after it’s cleared to fly.
Your whole analogy is flawed because they’re not in flight.
There are many astronauts in the ground in nasa too, and people who actually design and build spaceships
How many of them were involved in overriding the engineers as regarded launching the Challenger?
(I would recommend “Riding Rockets” as a pretty good book to read for a general overview of the safety culture in NASA management and the reasons I don’t trust them to make this decision. Honestly, for all I know, things have changed radically since then – but given that NASA management were the ones that sent them up on a Boeing spacecraft in the first place when years ago I was already able to see that Boeing was no longer capable of doing safe engineering of even civilian commercial air travel, I kind of doubt it.)
Incorrect
Administrator Bill Nelson and other top officials will meet Saturday. An announcement is expected from Houston once the meeting ends.
Engineers are evaluating a new computer model for the Starliner thrusters and how they might perform as the capsule descends out of orbit for a touchdown in the U.S. Western desert. The results, including updated risk analyses, will factor into the final decision, NASA said.
The article makes a specific point about “top officials” being the ones at the meeting, and makes a distinction between those engineers and “NASA” who is the one making the decision.
