I also wonder if companies or people are ever passively working on something.
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
The problem of deciding whether the capsule is fit for the return trip is solved when it exceeds its expendables endurance. Then you just have to decide how to get your astronauts home after you eject and re-enter that worthless hunk of junk.
Boeing seems to be having a go at it.
It is a bit redundant sounding, but when I hear that phrase I tend to think bending metal vs. stuck in committee.
There have been suggestions that SpaceX is working on bringing back the original Dragon configuration with seven seats (there was a conference call with SpaceX where they emphasized that Dragon still supports this configuration, but they didn’t go into more detail). NASA wanted more margin for rough sea landings, and removing some of the seats gave them more shock absorption distance. But I think NASA might be willing to bend on that target.
SpaceX doesn’t waste their time screwing around, so if there’s a legit chance at this happening, they’re undoubtedly already installing the extra seats in one of their capsules.
The right answer is fill the Starliner with garbage (or other legit downmass) and reenter it. If it survives, a good lesson is learned. If it doesn’t, a different, but equally valuable lesson is learned. And at a tolerable price to all.
It seems utterly clear to me that NASA can’t stand to kill two astronauts, while Boeing can’t stand to take the reputational hit from being relegated to a garbage scow. Where the records for Starliner, even if it becomes a long-term success, will forever have the asterisk that astronauts up != astronauts down.
And so the war is inside NASA between the politics-first faction of their suits and the engineering-first faction of their suits.
Another possibility (that I just thought of based on exactly zero actual evidence) is that the ride up was a lot worse than anyone is saying in public. More issues, more nil margins to disaster that happened to go the lucky way, more scared shitless astronauts who’re not interested in trying round 2 going back down and are making their views very forcefully known on the encrypted comm channels.
Something weird, though. NASA said this last week:
“Our prime option is to complete the mission," Stich said one week ago. “There are a lot of good reasons to complete this mission and bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner. Starliner was designed, as a spacecraft, to have the crew in the cockpit.”
Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. But it’s such an odd statement that I wonder why Stich said it. It’s undoubtedly possible to operate Starliner remotely. But… maybe the margins are in some way less? Like, one layer of the redundancy chain actually depends on having humans in the loop. For example, if their ground comms aren’t as redundant as they should be, it depends on the passengers to initiate the deorbit.
Or something like that. Pure speculation. I just find the statement bizarre.
I had the same reaction when I first read that. It’s a fundamentally un-parseable short sentence that speaks volumes about something utterly hidden from public view. An ultimate “inside baseball” comment.
Unless it was sort of internal NASA “humor” like pushing back on the “spam can” comments of the Original Mercury 7 who felt themselves to be largely useless ballast, at least in the early capsule designs. IOW: “NASA won’t be boldly going by de-orbiting trash. The mission of Starliner is to ferry people, and by gosh we’re gonna Do The Mission. Spaceflight is really Human Spaceflight and there’s no backing away from that.”
Or it was a really clumsy way of saying “Weight and balance requires human crew on the seats, and we don’t have any sort of ad hoc harness system to hold suitably weighted ballast in the same spatial distribution even if we wanted to. Which we don’t.”
And there we go:
Three separate, well-placed sources have confirmed to Ars that the current flight software on board Starliner cannot perform an automated undocking from the space station and entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
At first blush, this seems absurd. After all, Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test 2 mission in May 2022 was a fully automated test of the Starliner vehicle. During this mission, the spacecraft flew up to the space station without crew on board and then returned to Earth six days later. Although the 2022 flight test was completed by a different Starliner vehicle, it clearly demonstrated the ability of the program’s flight software to autonomously dock and return to Earth. Boeing did not respond to a media query about why this capability was removed for the crew flight test.
All I can do is shake my head at this point. My speculation about passengers initiating the deorbit was right. Except… I was thinking that was only for the case where other systems had already failed. Not that it was literally impossible to do it without passengers!
Maybe Boeing made automated docking and undocking be a special option not included in the “standard equipment” version, figuring that most flights will be crewed.
That’ll be an extra $100 million:
did they spring for the
"Starting at: $14,990,000,000,000.00" version *) ???
*) restrictions apply
So if they don’t want to sacrifice an astronaut on a defective capsule, what are the options? Shouldn’t there be a way to do a forced undocking without cooperation from the capsule?
I don’t know if that’s possible. Starliner and Crew Dragon were designed for docking, not berthing. With docking, the spacecraft is responsible for navigating all the way to contact. For berthing, the robot arm is used to bring the craft in.
Even if the docking adapter could be separated from just one side (I don’t know about this), you still have to move the spacecraft away. But there’s no attachment point for the arm as far as I know, and besides it isn’t in the right place.
And then… what do you do with the craft? You can’t just chuck it away; it’ll collide with the station on the next orbit (you can get away with that for cubesats due to their tiny size and high drag, but not a whole capsule). Maybe you could move the ISS itself to a safe distance. Regardless, it’s the worst sort of space junk you can imagine.
Just unbelievable that it isn’t capable of fully automated operation. They say a software update is possible, but it never should have flown without that capability.
Fly up the guy who made that decision, have him do the undocking.
Garner and Southerland are gone, but I think Eastwood and Jones could probably be available if needed.
:: Golf clap ::
And here I thought I was one of the few people alive who still remembered that awful (and yet weirdly funny) movie. Thanks for getting it!
Haven’t seen it since it came out in 2000, but it was fun. 
Having real skin in the game would certainly alter a LOT of management priorities at Boeing and other aerospace government contractors, both Primes and 2nd or 3rd tier.
I misunderstand the contingency plan: the plan is for Butch and Suni to stay another six months–and only two new astronauts to come up.
NASA Says Boeing Starliner Astronauts May Fly Home On SpaceX In 2025 - Slashdot?
It’s a complicated situation.
They still have to decide if Starliner is safe or not. There is still no consensus on this:
If it’s deemed safe, then Starliner separates as planned and returns to Earth. But if not, there are a few issues that have to be resolved.
There are only two docking ports that can handle Starliner or Dragon, and both are occupied (by Starliner and the Crew-8 Dragon). So a Dragon mission of any kind cannot happen until one of them leaves.
But one has to be a lifeboat as well, and that obviously can’t be Starliner. And Starliner can’t leave on its own without a software update. That update will take several weeks.
So nothing at all can happen for those weeks, after which, presumably, Starliner will successfully leave the station (with no passengers), opening up the docking port and allowing another Dragon mission.
While NASA presumably could line up a special Dragon mission, the current contingency plan is to send up Crew-9 with just two astronauts and suits that’ll fit Butch and Suni. And then they stay for a normal duration crew mission–i.e., another 6 months from the launch. They’ll get back sometime next year.