No splashdowns for the Starliner capsule.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/22/boeings-starliner-lands-in-desert-company-says.html
The SpaceX manned capsule can land on land or water.
Sounds good to me. One of the drawbacks of the Mercury / Gemini / Apollo systems was that they had to call out half of the Navy’s surface fleet to recover them. Not only did you need a recovery force in the prime splashdown location, but you also had to cover several contingency sites as well.
Whereas the Soviet recovery force consisted of a couple of helicopters and trucks. Then again, they had lots of land to work with.
That was the original plan, but they have eliminated that capability.
Which may have been a very good thing in light of the failure associated with the SuperDraco thruster fuel system.
Apparently, somebody forgot to wind the clock in the Starliner.
It was a little odd that the Starliner screws up around the same time as Boeing finally throws in the towel on the 737Max.
~VOW
Bit of a bump.
This could also go into any of the “WTF is wrong with Boeing nowadays?” discussions.
The Starliner software failures (both the one that prevented boosting into proper mission orbit, and the one that almost destroyed the spacecraft) would probably have been detected if Boeing had done an end-to-end mission simulation, which they did not (to NASA’s surprise).
That caught me off-guard, as well. I’ve worked as a contractor supporting NASA missions, and comprehensive mission rehearsal was always a non-negotiable requirement. I would like to know how Boeing got away with skipping that, and NASA not realizing it.
SpaceX is planning to send 2 astronauts up in May. Of course it could be pushed back due to problems. Also they have planned 2 more astronauts in July
Something very wrong is going on in Boeing’s software division. They released the software for Orion without doing a full integration test. I can’t imagine doing that for a video game, let alone mission critical software that could kill people or cause hundreds of millions of dollars in losses if something goes wrong. This seems absolutely insane to me.
Neither can NASA. Nor can anyone figure out why NASA signed off on the decision. Just like the FAA signed off on the Max 8 decisions.
Not only is Boeing guilty of massive hubris, the Gov’t seems to haven fallen for it as well.
the safe thing would be to redo software from scratch but it won’t happen due to cost and timeline. What can happen is you fix a bug which then creates other bugs. I know this from personal experience. What they could do is hire an outside vendor to run QC on the software. I think NASA and the FAA should require that given Boeings problems .
A better idea: Make the lead QA on the project and the software engineering manager fly on the next test flight.