this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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Boeing will try to fly its troubled Starliner capsule back to Earth next week (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 months ago by threelonmusketeers to c/spaceflight
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Flying on autopilot, the Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to depart the station at approximately 6:04 pm EDT (22:04 UTC) on September 6. The capsule will fire its engines to drop out of orbit and target a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico at 12:03 am EDT (04:03 UTC) on September 7, NASA said in a statement Thursday.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Starliner isn't going anywhere, the flaws so far have been identified and mostly addressed. The only outstanding one is the doghouse arrangement of control thrusters, which has apparently led to overheating. This likely isn't anything anyone could have predicted.

The failures so far:

  1. Flammable tape being used around wiring. This annoys me, and Boeing as an airline manufacturer should really have known better. However, it is notable that this was discovered by Boeing engineers - it's not like they tried to cover it up.
  2. Parachute lines not being rated for the worst case scenario. They were rated for 3 chutes, but NASA required capability to land safely with 2 out of 3 chutes. Boeing found this also before crewed flight certification.
  3. Helium leaks. That's what it does, helium is a sneaky bastard and leaks are common.
  4. Aft control thrusters receiving heating beyond what was expected causing teflon poppet valves to expand and the thrusters to shut down.

Boeing as a brand is heavily tarnished, primarily from the MCAS and door plug issues, however it's also not going anywhere. The company is too heavily entwined with the US military.

Meanwhile the old guard have mostly left the company and dropped the bag, leaving the remaining investors to feel the brunt of everything while they run off with the short term profits. They've won, and all the bitterness people are displaying isn't affecting them.

I'm all for hating on the bullshit from Boeing - and have a particular bug in my bonnet against the former McDonnell Douglas C-suite levels who have dragged the company through the mud, performing the same antics they did at MDD - but the fact is the issues with Starliner have been massively overblown by people looking to jump on a hype bandwagon.

That isn't to say the craft is without issues, nor that some of the issues (1 & 2) shouldn't have happened, but just that people aren't being rational, and the anti-PR noise is annoying and counterproductive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

leaving the remaining investors to feel the brunt of everything

There are 5779 people I'm more sympathetic toward than investors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Most of those weren't anything to with Boeing.

The Max was a stupid, stupid set of mistakes, really the line needs to be cancelled, and they need to tear the manufacturing management down to the studs.

But Boeings used to be the safest plane, until they bought MD, which made some of the least safe planes this side of Tupolev (A plane so fast it can take you all the way to your grave in 5 minutes).

Let's fire all the shit managers from the merger and start again. Better yet hire one of the senior managers from Lockheed and have them go to town with a blowtorch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Sure, I share your displeasure with Boeing's airline division. However a significant portion of those were just accidents, ones that couldn't have reasonably been predicted and were readily learned from and corrected. And many of those were not the fault of Boeing's design.

The crimes started after MDD and Boeing merged, when the MDD directors came onto the Boeing board and then performed the same antics they'd done at MDD that run that business into the ground. Things like ignoring issues at design stage, refusing to acknowledge the issue until after 2 major fatal accidents had occured, and "gentleman's agreements" with the FAA to get around safety rules. These happened with the DC-10, and then they happened with the MAX.

But Boeing was at one point one of if not the most respected engineering aviation companies. Don't revise history based on current events. In any case, we're talking about the space division here, where they do maintain some of the original professionalism and standards Boeing used to have running in its blood. This is evidenced by the fact it was Boeing engineers who raised the issues, rather than trying to cover them up and leave them for NASA to find.

Also, I was merely pointing out that your malice should be pointed at these directors - the people who let people die and then ran off with all the money before the business started to fail.

The directors belong in prison. Slagging off the Boeing brand and jerking off over it is not in pursuit of that goal.