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.
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.
Yeah, but they can’t leave the airport. The precise definition of an emergency is when you can’t say “You know what? This is too dangerous, let’s not fuck with it.” They’re still up there precisely because if that was the scenario, with them on the ground at the airport, they would clearly choose not to fuck with it, because a key component is busted.
Better analogy if you wanted to be precise about it would be: There’s some serious problem with the plane which prevents safe landing. Broken landing gear or similar. They’ve got plenty of time, plenty of fuel, they can fly around and figure things out for as long as they need. But, they need to land, and the safety of the landing is not assured once they commit to whatever best plan they can come up with.
In that scenario, it is never the engineers on the ground or the controllers who dictate the solution and the plan. There’s a book of procedures to follow, there’s input from the engineers which carries a ton of weight, but at the end of the day the crew is responsible for making decisions, because they’re the ones who will be dead if it doesn’t work out right.
The company doesn’t have a meeting of top directors and then radio the pilots what to do. Because, even if the directors of this theoretical company didn’t have a history of blowing up airplanes through their negligence, they’re just not the ones who are supposed to make those decisions, honestly. NASA management getting “input” from the engineers and then escorting them out of the room so they can meet and make decisions has killed quite a few astronauts at this point.
