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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.
Just...unbelievable
That is wild if true. I was expecting an undisclosed, embarrassing hardware issue (unrelated to the thruster problem) causing the delay… but it might be the software? Yikes.
Yeah, and the estimate is for the update to take 4 weeks? Didn't Boeing do an inflight update on the landing software on OFT-1?
They literally can't even get rid of the thing right now. Wow.
I wonder if they made changes and updates elsewhere that broke that automated undocking code and have to do a big refactor? What a mess.
I wonder if they’re developing without an automated test suite.
You'd think (hope?) that a program like this is constantly running unit testing and software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop regression testing.
Someone on a different site was speculating that the OFT-2 automated undocking and deorbit flight software can't deal with the failed thrusters and new duty cycle and heating limits. That feels plausible.
Nothing would surprise me at this point. This is the same company that outsourced the 737 Max code.