Good point. Can’t let the events of Blindsight come to pass.
Maybe some other options for Butch and Suni:
Don’t laugh too hard. The MOOSE was a serious proposal for emergency reentry. Just get in a bag with some cans of foam insulation and ride it all the way down:
If they can’t take Starliner since it’s a mess, and they can’t take Crew Dragon since the spacesuits aren’t compatible, and (as I predict) they really do end up on Crew Dragon, then NASA is saying the totality of Starliner hull + suit is less safe than the Crew Dragon with no suit. A suit which does exactly zero to protect against most of what can go seriously wrong during a return from orbit.
Hell of an endorsement for the process which built Starliner and approved it for launch.
Not quite true. They have spare Dragon-compatible suits that fit Butch and Suni. They’ll send up a Dragon with two astronauts and the two spare suits, and then come back with all four astronauts in six months.
You can tell who’s been following the play-by-play (i.e. you) and who has not (i.e. me). 
I’d read early on that they couldn’t return via Dragon due to no compatible suits, but I suppose the unstated rest of that sentence was “… on the next down-bound Dragon”
What are the details of the contract Boeing has: if NASA requires another test flight would it be cheaper for Boeing to simply cancel the fixed-price contract (and pay back money) than to continue?
True.
Though one can’t help but imagine Gene and Jim and any surviving Apollo 13 team members having a quiet smile and thinking “ah, the luxury of LEO and being able to just shoot up supplies that fit…”
NASA has officially decide that SpaceX will bring the ISS astronauts home, displaying no faith in Boeing’s Starliner to safely return them to Earth.
Has any company’s reputation fallen further than Boeing?
Well, “faith” isn’t really the right word: Starliner had a problem with its thrusters (when if everything had been done right there shouldn’t be), malfunctioning thrusters could be fatal on reentry, and after analysis it was decided that there was no way to quantify the risk, other than “it might be okay, if nothing else goes wrong”.
Space gives you one chance to get it right.
So what’s going to happen with Starliner?
Right. And the part that I implied but didn’t quite state is that the spare suits are on the ground right now. So they need to go up on a new Dragon launch, and Butch and Suni really are “stuck” up there for the time being.
There’s also the logistical issue that Starliner has to undock before the second Dragon docks since they only have two ports. Which really is a safety problem since if the Starliner thrusters fail catastrophically, they have an uncontrolled capsule drifting around the ISS and almost nothing they can do about it.
Well, I suppose another option is that the other Dragon undocks first. I can’t tell what the plan is here at the moment. The Crew-9 launch is planned for Sept 24. The Crew-8 return is sometime in Sept. Launching Crew-9 first means Starliner has to get out of the way. But returning Crew-8 first closes off some options, such as using it as a liferaft, with all six returning (two without suits). Maybe this was stated in the press conference but I haven’t seen the detail yet.
You mean to the program in general? NASA is not yet writing them off:
“Boeing has worked very hard with NASA to get the necessary data to make this decision,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a press conference with top NASA officials at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday. “We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS.”
Nonetheless, NASA officials repeatedly expressed support for Boeing, and Nelson said he was “100% certain” that Starliner would be able to launch with a crew again someday.
I think the question may have also been about the Starliner craft which is currently docked at the ISS. If there’s been any public word about what NASA plans to do with that one, I’ve not yet seen it – and it wouldn’t surprise me if they are still working on figuring out a plan. I just hope it doesn’t involve sending 96-year-old Jim Lovell up there with a jury-rigged air filter.
It’s not clear yet. The plan is to undock it early September (tentative date is the 6th). But that depends on it, you know, working. So plans may change.
It has or had a problem that it couldn’t undock at all autonomously. That requires a software update, which I haven’t heard anything about. I think they were planning on having that done by late August… which we’re in. So I dunno.
There’s an upcoming book by Eric Berger, Reentry, that will detail the whole Boeing vs. SpaceX backstory in detail. I have it on preorder.
Boeing tried their best to exclude SpaceX from the Commercial Crew competition and nearly succeeded. A few choice quotes from the book in the post here:
“Boeing had a solution, telling NASA it needed the entire Commercial Crew budget to succeed. Because a lot of decision makers believed that only Boeing could safely fly astronauts, the company’s gambit very nearly worked.” (p.270)
After “a cascade of pro-Boeing opinions swept around the table, a building and unbreakable wave of consensus” (272), NASA’s human exploration lead Gerstenmeier took a month to decide, eventually asking for more budget to support two competing efforts. Ultimately, Boeing would receive twice as much funding as SpaceX, but SpaceX was in the game, as the new kid on the block.
“It had been a very near thing. NASA officials had already written a justification for selecting Boeing, solely for the Commercial Crew contract. It was ready to go and had to be hastily rewritten to include SpaceX. This delayed the announcement to September 16.” (274)
And one bit that I had not previously known–Doug Hurley actively refused to fly on Starliner due to how poorly they ran their program:
“There was an arrogance with them that you certainly didn’t see at SpaceX.” (astronaut Hurley, p.294)
“Boeing also underperformed. Not only were its engineers overconfident, but the company’s management also was not putting skin in the game. Hurley did not see any urgency from Boeing’s teams. Rather, they appeared to be working part-time on Starliner. ‘It was all about managing dollars and cents from Boeing’s perspective,’ Hurley said.” (295)
“That summer NASA was closing in on making crew assignments for the first flights. Hurley told the chief of the astronaut office he would not fly on Starliner.” (296)
Wow, I had no idea!
Seems to reinforce the recent perception… the mid-20th-century Boeing aerospace engineering firm that made the B29 through 747 could have been a good call for a Very Big Project.
This century’s McDonnel-Boeing, “too big to fail” protectionist Defense rent-seeker, was not.
UK’s first vertical rocket launch “delayed after a dramatic explosion” …
(Well, that sounds sensible, imho.)
In other news, SpaceX is launching an all-civilian private mission that will attempt to reach 1000 + km of altitude (the highest since the Apollo missions) and have the first private spacewalk.
Launch is scheduled for August 27th
SpaceX Polaris mission aims for first spacewalk by private citizens - The Washington Post
Interesting – I didn’t know about the Shetlands spaceport. When other launchpads tend to be as far south as possible (Canaveral, French Guyana…), to get a boost from the Earth’s rotation, this one is as far north as possible. I guess the UK just doesn’t have a lot of safe land area down around the southeast coast – and the difference in latitude is small enough that other factors are more important?