Bypass paywall: https://archive.ph/Kz2Sp
Lmao.
I’m sorry to laugh, but it’s just the absurdity of it all.
The downward spiral of Boeing is insane.
I got hired 2 days before all this shit! Had a pretty alright gig as a regional analyst before accepting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At this point I’m expecting the big Boeing building down the street by NASA to collapse in on itself and the doors to be found 3 towns over.
It would be quite something if the Everett assembly building collapsed like a circus tent.
Largest building by volume in the world.
Why is NASA, a publicly funded science organization, fixing the mistakes of a for profit corporation?
Because for goddamn reason we socialize the losses and privatize the profits
But don’t worry though, NASA says the astronauts are “not stranded”.
Totally not stranded! The capsule that will bring them back just goes to another school.
Yeah, I am seriously upset. NASA press office seems to be telling lies left and right, and they think they’re just pulling the old Washington spin cycle, but it’s obvious lies. And they’re easy out of line.
They issued a 248k “emergency” engineering study contract to SpaceX to support extra pax on the dragon. NASA press office claimed this award had absolutely nothing to do with Crew Test, but this was immediately contradicted by anonymous internal sources.
Heads need to roll at NASA PAO.
Yes, these headlines are continuing to say the astronauts are stranded, which really isn’t the case. This vehicle is working well enough to return them at any time.
The thing is, there is something weird going on with some of the thrusters (of which there are many for redundancy) and this is their only chance to investigate the issue. If they were to return with the astronauts now, it would mean leaving the thrust module to burn up in the atmosphere, and then we wouldn’t be able to test the problematic parts. We could still do that (leave now), but we’d miss out on this opportunity to test hardware and understand better why some thrusters failed.
On the other hand, this is still a huge waste of money and it’s one more example of Boeing bungling things. So I’m not saying this is a great situation, just that the astronauts are not actually “stranded”.
Perhaps if they released some clue what they are learning, and what weeks 9, 10, 11, and 12 will reveal about the problem. Around week 4 this was a PR disaster and the silence is speaking even if they aren’t.
Well, the aerospace industry is not really known for moving quickly… But then Boeing collects a paycheck either way, so they don’t seem to be in any particular hurry.
But I don’t know, I’m not sure it’s a pr disaster, I mean it’s no worse than it usually is up there. We’ve had a Soyuz that sprang a leak and started venting atmosphere. We’ve had random helium leaks into crew compartments. We’ve run out of working eva suits. We’ve had resupply missions that never actually made it all the way to orbit, we’ve had a lot of non-critical internal equipment failures.
It’s a real challenge keeping everything working, this is just one example of how things can go wrong. (Though admittedly, not a lot has really ever gone right with Starliner.)
Pretty sure the ISS always has a Soyuz on hand to bring astronauts back, but if they use that, then all the astronauts have to go back because the “bail out” options will be gone. So troubleshooting and getting the boeing capsule working is the primary goal.
Well yes, that would suck to have to abandon the ISS for any period. Definitely not optimal. But as I said, they could leave in the Starliner right now, if they wanted, they have more than enough thrusters functional to control the craft. It just makes more sense to stay until they’ve done all the troubleshooting and know how to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
They’re not. Whether they return on Starliner is the question. SpaceX can send a Dragon up to bring them back easily.
As far as the Starliner mission is considered, they are stranded. Dragon is the rescue mission.
I mean, Soyuz is the emergency rescue plan. Usually 2 of them sit docked to the ISS at all times for just this purpose. But regardless, the Starliner is functional enough they could leave right now if they had to. They just aren’t stranded, NASA isn’t just like… lying.
The Starliner has redundant systems and even with several thrusters offline it’s still within safe operating parameters. They’re keeping it docked because they want to figure out the problem, not because they need to figure out the problem.
There isn’t a dragon capsule ready to go at the moment, but it doesn’t really matter, it shouldn’t be needed. Because as I said, nobody is stranded, at least not yet.
Two “not stranded” astronauts becoming increasingly stranded. More at 6
Holy shit. I got banned from reddit for saying the Boeing starliner astronauts should fear for their lives cuz Boeing. It was a joke, did not want it to become true! Hopefully they come home safe!
Wow that’s actually crazy that they banned you for that lmao they couldn’t make it any more obvious they got bought off by private companies, yikes. I’m glad Lemmy isn’t prone to that, inherently by design.
I got banned by a bot that found my comment and some human approved it. I deleted everything after that. 15 years, almost all of those with direct financial support.
A total ban like mine?
I got banned for going to sniffies and bringing people from there to r/Seattlegay, which I started during the pandemic.
They banned me site wise on all my accounts and all my devices.
They banned me site wise for saying that riot police should quit their jobs following RvW. But all the right wing trolls spewing vitriol were perfectly acceptable.
I made a bunch of comments critical of the site and then banned myself (deleted account) before they could ban me. “You can’t fire me, I quit!”
