Boeing Starliner upcoming launch, first w/crew

[coppercone2]

loose mounting bracket

[Gyro]

It's landed successfully (apart from missing its crew).

Interesting dynamics regarding the press briefing. The two Boeing representatives were missing, having 'deferred to NASA'...

In a news briefing following the landing, Steve Stich said: "From a human perspective, all of us feel happy about the successful landing, but then there's a piece of us - all of us - that wish it would have been the way we had planned it.

"We had planned to have the mission land with Butch and Suni on board."

He added there was "clearly work to do", and that it would take "a little time" to determine what will come next.

The briefing panel consisted only of Nasa officials. Missing, were two Boeing representatives who were supposed to be present.

When quizzed on the absence, Nasa official Joel Montalbano said Boeing decided to "defer to Nasa" to represent the mission.

Instead, Boeing released a statement "to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing".

It said Boeing will "review the data and determine the next steps" forward for the programme.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx29wzk4r19o

[coppice]

Interesting dynamics regarding the press briefing. The two Boeing representatives were missing, having 'deferred to NASA'...

That makes sense. At this point Boeing looks so bad nobody will believe a word they say, so let NASA do the talking.

[JustMeHere]

Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and STS all had thruster issues and humans on board....Oh yeah Dragon has had them too. 

[coppice]

Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and STS all had thruster issues and humans on board....Oh yeah Dragon has had them too.

Well, it is rocket science. The regularity of problems with thrusters is sufficiently well known that designers put a lot of redundancy into these systems. Individual failures are quite common, but usually the combinations of problems don't get people excessively worried about the redundancy coping with the individual problems. The problem with Starliner is the number of concurrent failures has been sufficient to get people worried enough about them overwhelming the redundancy to the point of a flight failure that they have thrown 2 seats to orbit (well over $100M) at the problem. That must be some serious concern.

[Psi]

Boeing must have been so relieved that it landed fine after repeatedly telling NASA that it was safe to return crew on Starliner.
Boeing's reputation has been negatively effected already but if it had crashed, even due to some totally unrelated and random failure, it would be hard to see them ever coming back from that.

You always run a big risk when a problem is discovered and you say, "na, it's fine". Even if you did everything right there's always the chance a 2nd problem will appear and trash your reputation with a... "but you said it was fine" scandal.

[floobydust]

Only 1 of 12 (crew module) thrusters newly failed and of the triple-redundant guidance system (SIGI?) one died and another was acting up.
Boeing's absence from the press conference, I guess they did no wrong. Immediate invoice payment is expected lol

[ejeffrey]

Boeing must have been so relieved that it landed fine after repeatedly telling NASA that it was safe to return crew on Starliner.
Boeing's reputation has been negatively effected already but if it had crashed, even due to some totally unrelated and random failure, it would be hard to see them ever coming back from that.

Yes but also theoretically no.  A failed return to earth would have been catastrophic but if they were worried about it at all they shouldn't have disagreed with NASAs safety assessment.  The whole debate should have been whether the vehicle had a 99% or 99.9% chance of successfully returning. 99% being not good enough.   1 in a thousand events do happen of course, but any major failure that even potentially put the vehicle at risk would have called into question whether they were even in the right ballpark.

[coppercone2]

Only 1 of 12 (crew module) thrusters newly failed and of the triple-redundant guidance system (SIGI?) one died and another was acting up.
Boeing's absence from the press conference, I guess they did no wrong. Immediate invoice payment is expected lol

something is seriously wrong with the guidance system, if its acting up it means basically its not safe to use. That means they screwed up 2/3 redundancies. Their not exactly ancient systems, you would think it would all work fine.

The thruster has alot of mechanical crap which you expect to break. 2/3 electronics modules having problems is shady, their low energy circuits. You would think that the redundancy is "for show" on the guidance system.


I wonder if they had sufficient shift rotation installing the redundancies, or if they had the same guys do all three? If the same person is installing it redundancy does not mean alot because it just makes they made the same mistake 3 times without realizing it. Kind of like if you have bad device programmer, you can wreck as many devices as you have.


I noticed if you have repeditive work people always find hacks to make it go faster, even with writing, instead of writing the same sentence 3 times, you can write each word in a column and go word by word, if its more comfortable. I finished a foreign language home work before a long time ago mis spelling the same word ~30 times, because I decided instead of writing the sentence and sounding it out, I would just fill in a "spreadsheet" column by column without ever reading the sentences.

[tom66]

Only 1 of 12 (crew module) thrusters newly failed and of the triple-redundant guidance system (SIGI?) one died and another was acting up.
Boeing's absence from the press conference, I guess they did no wrong. Immediate invoice payment is expected lol

Hmm, that's about my level of success in Kerbal.  I can't imagine two out of three guidance computers going bad and being happy with that outcome.

[coppercone2]

but it does make me think twice about the cutting edge "best practices" for electronics everyone is rapidly adopting . I am sure boeing is on top of adopting all that shit.

I sometimes wonder about all the blame going on cables and connectors and simple explanations like "oops I forgot to tighten that" that basically TOTALLY blame everything on QC or "electricians". Its all like "oh our manufacturing process is fine!! please don't look there!" 

Because I know the best way to keep a project going is to blame something that your boss that you can easily fix, even if its expensive, it has to be easy. Meaning that its never a engineering problem.

 I am starting to think boeing might be giving us "easy to understand" explanations that make people feel "related" to the problem, because its just like that light you let the handy man put in.   



What if its analog design problems and mechanical issues, You know, like high density BGA flex boards breaking and stuff like that, thermal management, noise, etc. Given that we hear EMI coming from a pod through the god damn audio system before a 1.5-2/3 failure of a guidance computer, it makes me wonder.  IMO there is a massive push for manufacturers trying to say "yeah that high density stuff in your phone is reliable for rockets and elevators".

Because the "partial" failure to me... it might be basically a hard failure. How much PR speak do they use for rocket stuff? Explosion got replaced with rapid disassembly? What's that mean, the shockwave is less then mach 6? so it gets a new name? They try to make it relatable with non technical people with dodgy analogies like comparing it to the richter scale or something to make joe public feel at ease lol


Just seeing the trends in.. descriptions.. recently makes me basically even question the results of "serious" analysis. It makes me wonder if their analyzing a problem or analyzing how to sugar coat a problem to the public.  It feels so freaking corporate. You never get a strait answer from corporate stuff, it ALWAYS has some other motive. Sometimes, when you see something like a explosion, the fact is, the analysts see the same thing you saw, that something exploded. They don't have another opinion, it exploded. All they know is MAYBE why. But instead its "while you think you saw a explosion.... our experts determined the glass is actually 2/3 full"


I think it also relates to "data rescue" or "data error correction" efforts that are so common in the same ballpark. When you get bad experimental data and it magically becomes reliable data with enough math because of dr. spindoctor's new algorithm, but that is a another discussion... usually made up to ensure 'projections" materialize

[CatalinaWOW]

For a one of, high reliability requirement system like this it speaks to me of a failure to test, or failure to properly evaluate test results.  Yes, I know you can't test in reliability.  But when you are building single unit quantities of something you can certainly do thermal and vibration screening to uncover bad joints, loose connections and other "infant mortality" type failures.  It would be interesting to know what testing was performed, and how carefully they looked at the results.

There may also be a clue here to a failure to actually understand the environment.  There are two kinds of redundancy.  In one multiple copies of a system are implemented, with the hope that failures are random and that there is reduced likelihood of multiple units failing at the same time.  In the other different implementations of the function are implemented in the hope that one or more of the implementations is not susceptible to an unsuspected input or environment.   They may have mixed these approaches with two copies of one system and an independent implementation.  And unfortunately the one with two copies ran into an unpredicted issue.

[fourfathom]

In case you haven't seen this:
Splashdown! NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 Returns Safely to Earth
https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2024/10/25/splashdown-nasas-spacex-crew-8-returns-safely-to-earth/

[Gyro]

Unfortunately not the two who went up in the Starliner. They're still up there until next year.

[Stray Electron]

   FYI, the US TV news reported last night that Boeing is going to put it's "Space Division" up for sale.

[SiliconWizard]

   FYI, the US TV news reported last night that Boeing is going to put it's "Space Division" up for sale.

Is that a joke?

[Gyro]

   FYI, the US TV news reported last night that Boeing is going to put it's "Space Division" up for sale.

Really? They must be really struggling - in fact they are, their commercial aircraft arm lost $4bn in the last 3 months and even their defense division lost $2.4bn (how do they make a loss in the defense industry? )...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp9zrylmdk0o

I can't think of a worse time to put their Space division up for sale though!

[SiliconWizard]

Nothing that can't be fixed by appointing a new CEO, doubling their salary and laying off half of the workforce, mostly engineers if possible.

[coppice]

FYI, the US TV news reported last night that Boeing is going to put it's "Space Division" up for sale.

With all the business they are losing they just don't need as much space any more.

[jpanhalt]

@Gyro

I have no love for Boeing, but I do have mixed emotions about its potential sale.  Like what is its failed space division worth?  It basically has not achieved commercial flight with humans.  Maybe Musk needs some new space, but I doubt it will be in Seattle.  The last time there was talk of Boeing going belly up, the memes said about Seattle, "Will the last person leaving be sure to turn out the lights."  It is an icon and helped win WWII.

For those who haven't seen pictures of how it was camouflaged after Pearl Harbor, its roof tops were made to look like civilian towns.
  Source: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/boeing-fake-rooftop-town/

I agree in part with Silicon Wizard.  The only way to change a company's culture is to cut at the top and give the new leaders a little time.  That is in contrast to the usual way in America of cutting at the middle and bottom and selling capital, because our BOD's are highly conflicted.

[floobydust]

The Machinist's strike is hurting them a little at the 6 week mark. The union is pissed off.
Imagine removing employee's pensions and underpaying them for many years. What could possibly go wrong? 
Last strike Boeing even threatened to move manufacturing somewhere else. Oh yeah it's easy to beanheads.

Wall Street mentality running a corporation is pure greed and poison with zero regard for employees. Replacing a few managers ain't gonna fix it.

[wraper]

Maybe Musk needs some new space, but I doubt it will be in Seattle.  The last time there was talk of Boeing going belly up, the memes said about Seattle, "Will the last person leaving be sure to turn out the lights."  It is an icon and helped win WWII.

Musk for sure does not need his company hijacked by shit corporate culture like it happened with Boeing in the past. The joke is MacDonnell-Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money. Nor Musk needs any inefficient production facilities that need to be adapted for his business to begin with. I really doubt he wants to overtake/continue any existing Boeing's products.

[iMo]

Boeing is de facto a state owned company (like Intel or others). They contribute to defense and build jets. Musk is not operating in such a mission critical business like building commercial planes, for example. When his gadgets fall down from sky nothing happens. Boeing is in different business in that regard. The space division could be eventually sold, but Boeing will survive, imho..

[floobydust]

Boeing is a critical supplier for the US military. It would be advantageous to many hostile foreign countries to undermine them, ruin them.
I say this because the clown actions of Boeing are absurd for many years now and no sign of that improving. It can't.
The MBA and Wall Street business practices are against good engineering and good manufacturing. That's expensive and time consuming, we want shareholder value now.

I wonder how much tech Boeing has, they outsource as much as possible (like thruster valves) and fired all the old guard engineers eons ago.

[wraper]

Boeing is de facto a state owned company (like Intel or others). They contribute to defense and build jets. Musk is not operating in such a mission critical business like building commercial planes, for example. When his gadgets fall down from sky nothing happens. Boeing is in different business in that regard. The space division could be eventually sold, but Boeing will survive, imho..

LMAO, Musk certainty "not doing mission critical business" such as launching astronauts to ISS, national security satellites, developing Starshield for military, Moon lander for NASA.