Starliner Returning to Factory to Resolve Valve Issue
CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION, Fla. (Boeing PR) — Today, Boeing informed NASA that the company will destack its CST-100 Starliner from the Atlas V rocket and return the spacecraft to the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility (C3PF) for deeper-level troubleshooting of four propulsion system valves that remain closed after last Tuesday’s scrubbed launch.
Starliner has sat atop the Atlas V rocket in ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility since August 4, where Boeing teams have worked to restore functionality to the affected valves.
The relocation of the spacecraft to the C3PF will require Boeing, NASA and United Launch Alliance to agree on a new launch date once the valve issue is resolved.
“Mission success in human spaceflight depends on thousands of factors coming together at the right time,” said John Vollmer, vice president and program manager, Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program. “We’ll continue to work the issue from the Starliner factory and have decided to stand down for this launch window to make way for other national priority missions.”
Boeing will continue to provide information and updates at www.StarlinerUpdates.com as it becomes available.
124 responses to “Starliner Returning to Factory to Resolve Valve Issue”
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Might be the beginning of the end for Starliner… Not looking good. Happy Friday the 13th!
that might not be an overstatement.
its pretty clear that this is a major issue that in my view likely means no flight this year
and its all on the company nickle. its hard to see how this gets picked back up…SNC is waiting.
its a dark day for the company
Boeing should reexamine the whole program while it’s on this forced hiatus. But Starliner is a national prestige program, and a full quit here would cripple their whole space division. SLS already has it on the ropes. They will be back in 2022, unless a review shows they need to completely redesign their plumbing.
they are going to have to scrub the entire program…this is the second time something major has snagged them
They need to do what NASA did after the Apollo 1 fire and review the entire vehicle for hidden flaws, not just the values, but every bolt, wire, etc. A no expense spared, all hands, call in the retired engineers and spare no feelings top to bottom review.
yes its time for a total scrub of the vehicle…there are to many problems
Third time. In 2018 a Starliner service module was on the stand for a test fire. After shutdown it started leaking propellant. It was a valve issue.
https://spaceflightnow.com/…
Good catch. Sounds similar.
and its odd there are similar valves on X37…
There are probably similar valves on every vehicle that has ever used hypergolic thrusters. Something about either the design of Starliner or its operational procedures allowed atmospheric moisture to get into a place it had no business being. That’s what needs to be hunted down and fixed. The X-37 wasn’t designed and built by the same people, or even the same Boeing division, that designed and built the Starliner. Perhaps the latter could start their investigation by consulting the former?
exactly…thats troublesome…in itself
Pathological stovepiping is characteristic of large troubled enterprises. It tends to be encouraged by a sort of balkanization of allegiance where particular divisions of a company become the focus of “corporate patriotism” instead of the company as a whole. This can quickly degenerate into something quite like tribalism.
I saw this sort of thing several times during my working life. It never ends well, but it always – eventually – ends. Usually in bankruptcy and liquidation.
The only way I’ve ever seen this end state avoided is for the worst-offending divisions/projects to have their entire managements replaced, en bloc – as, say, Elon did with the original management cadre at Starlink – or for said divisions/projects to be shut down entirely. The analogy would be to an animal caught in a trap that chews off the trapped limb in order to escape.
Notice in the telecon the Boeing program manager invokes procedural changes that might mitigate the problem. We operate CCD systems kept at -140 C 0.350″ in front of that is a quartz window, and chamber of dry nitrogen then a field corrector. The dry nitrogen prevents condensation forming on the cold quartz window and forming an ice film. A slight over pressure of dry nitrogen filling the environs of the service module before launch would prevent moisture from presenting itself to the valve exterior for osmosis to do its thing. I’ll bet X-37’s payload fairing is filled with dry N2 gas to protect the spacecraft while on the pad.
could be…but this is going to take some time
Ferchrissake, they pack cereal in nitrogen in Battle Creek MI but Boeing doesn’t get it for working in Florida?
the sad thing is that I would imagine that really no one thought of it…that the entire concept was simply not “gamed”…I will bet you money that no where in the program hasa someone in charge gone to some “Dick Drummond” types and said “heh come in on a contract thing for a couple of weeks and see what we missed”
Yes. Somewhere along the line, Boeing lost the knack for doing anything quickly.
That would be unfortunate, and would put the ISS program in a more precarious position. One Falcon 9 mishap would put NASA on the beach for an indeterminate period of time, yet the stated SpaceX intent is to determine how many times a booster can be reflown empirically. Is it really a mishap when it’s planned? “Yes,” says the FAA.
SpaceX will eventually lose a booster on its Nth flight, declare that the working number is N-1, and turn the page. Meanwhile, NASA will have a meltdown, standing down the commercial crew program until a root cause has been determined.
oh I think that they need to continue the program but they are going to have to “clean’ the entire program to find out what doesnt work.
there has to be a second commercial crew vehicle. BUT the key here is that if the CST fails its uncrewed test…then we have real problems
Boeing would have a real problem. NASA, rather less so as Crew Dragon can continue to pull the whole load as it has done for more than a year now.
I agree that scrubbing the program thoroughly is a good idea, but the Boeing of today is not the North American of 50+ years ago. I’m not sure it has the institutional ability to really do that. Still, I would commend to it some advice from an old joke that a judge gave a 65-year-old defendant after sentencing him to a 50-year prison term. “Judge, I can’t do 50 years!” said the man. “Then just do the best you can,” replied the judge.
So long as said failure occurs on a Starlink mission with a booster having far higher mileage than the ones NASA countenances launching Crew Dragons on, I don’t see the problem. NASA’s deal with SpaceX gives it “visibility” into any F9 failure anyway. And SpaceX has an established track record of fixing serious problems in less time than a standard ISS tour.
Sure, that makes perfect sense, but let’s see how it plays out.
As long as someone with both guts and sense is running HEOMD – like, say, Kathy Lueders – that is how it will play out – if it ever becomes an issue at all.
Or NASA simply requires that SpaceX uses new F9R boosters until the problem is identified.
That has been demonstrated to be no panacea either. Remember the masking-lacquer-in-the-engine-parts issue on new booster stages not so long ago?
More likely SpaceX will decide there is too much refurb work for N+1 flights and just retire the booster in question. Different launch profiles stress the booster differently, you can’t just count launches.
I agree with you…in that I think that the reflight of the booster is probably “the weak link” …but there needs to be two vehicles
we are disconnecting with the russians that process is coming to a head soon
Perhaps that will adequately incentivize Boeing to avoid a third such round of high-profile public embarrassment. Even if there is such a 3rd round, fixing and finishing Starliner might have a tonic effect on the whole company if it can pull this off in the end.
That’s a bit of optimism I’d not have expected from you. But you raise an excellent point. When will Old Space look to the lessons of SpaceX and start changing their ways? I should also include NASA in that question as well.
“look to the lessons of SpaceX” specifically what do you think that the top three lessons are?
Start with Elon Musk’s 5 Rules of R&D, as related to Tim Dodd last week and posted here (and many other sites)
https://lucept.com/2021/08/…
but I am not sure any of those are the starliners problem
Specific problems tend to be manifestations of a defective engineering culture. Without fixes to said culture, more specific problems will just continue to crop up in future – perhaps even with Starliner, but certainly with new projects.
maybe probably but I suspect there is something specific missing here
I don’t think even just fixing Starliner is going to be possible with a few minor tweaks – to either the vehicle or the Boeing corporate culture as it currently stands.
Yep, it was like Baldwin deciding they needed to start building diesel locomotives but building them with the same philosophy they use to built steam engines for a 120 years. They just didn’t get it. And they wondered why, although their diesel locomotives looked like EMDs the railroads didn’t keep buying them. The reason was because their operating costs of the Baldwins were just too high compared to EMD locomotives. They also stayed with air throttles making it difficult to use with none Baldwin engines. You had to have extra crews just like on steam engines.
IBM’s pre-PC tries at something resembling a personal computer had a lot of that same “hangover” quality about them.
I suspect that Starliner is fixable…but it will have to be the pivot point of changing the corporate culture at the company. I worry about things like SLS
Agreed. I would worry about SLS a lot more if I thought it was going to be around long enough to be a significant future problem. If the Artemis 1 test flight turns up any bugs of significance, SpaceX will certainly have a serviceable substitute (Dear Moon) long before Boeing can correct said bugs. That will be finis for SLS. Boeing mainly needs to get its airliner mojo back.
Get the right folks on board, questioning how things have always been done and having a extreme sense of urgency.
In the third video of the Interview Elon Musk, near the end, he made a great statement, we are working as if an asteroid is going to destroy the Earth and Starship is our only hope of stopping it.
I don’t consider that the likely outcome for Boeing, just a possible outcome.
A great deal depends on senior management. Boeing already jettisoned one CEO over 737 MAX. Perhaps it really needs to do so again and bring in an outsider. But if the board just sees Starliner as a minor problem compared to 737 MAX and not as the canary in a coal mine that it actually is, we are unlikely to see such action taken.
That leaves only a revolt by major shareholders or a hostile takeover by a vulture capital outfit or consortium as possible alternatives to board-initiated reforms.
Given the degree to which Boeing has been considered a blue chip stock for so long, a shareholder revolt on the part of big institutional holders of Boeing stock – the folks who manage “widder ‘n orphan” money – is the most likely of these two latter alternatives, but hardly a cinch bet even so.
The probability of any of the three legacy aerospace prime contractors having a “Road to Damascus” moment anent SpaceX/NewSpace is not very high. NorGrum and LockMart are, if anything, even more divorced from the real world of commerce than is Boeing as neither company does anything of consequence not targeted at a government purchaser.
My remaining hopes for private sector revitalization in legacy aerospace, frankly, reside mostly with companies that are 2nd-tier or below in the industy’s pecking order, some of which have shown some inclination to move in a more NewSpace-ish direction.
Sierra Space and Dynetics are two of these. Their efforts along such lines have been clumsy and partial, but there have been such efforts. I still have hopes we may see more.
Heck, I still have hopes Bezos will come to his senses, fire Blue’s current CEO and light a fire under his own space company rather than continuing to indulge these public temper tantrums he has been much given to in recent weeks. Perhaps more over-optimism on my part.
NASA is a different matter. With Bridenstine having done a great deal to change NASA’s SOP during his too-short tenure, and with Nelson apparently intent on keeping that ball rolling, NASA seems to be moving in a favorable direction about as fast as can reasonably be expected. This process has been greatly aided by Boeing’s recent wretched performance on SLS and Starliner and by NorGrum’s on JWST. Change is materially easier when “old reliables” have ceased being so reliable.
Beyond what now seems an inevitable transition to a more NewSpace-y contractor base, NASA will be forced to change by external circumstances. The main one of these will be Starship’s imminent role in transforming human spaceflight/exploration/settlement from a government-led to a private sector-led endeavor. This transition is likely to be considerably eased over the next few years by a mass exodus of NASA-uber-alles greyhairs from the agency’s top-heavy-with-seniors cadre at both the managerial and rank-and-file levels.
So I would summarize your thoughts thusly. NASA is already turning the ship and adapting to New Space’s spirit of flying. Bezos can change, but is unknown if he will. I totally agree on that. The Primes won’t change, but this is giving the startups room to grow for the simple fact that The Primes literally can’t fly anymore for one reason or another. You see little room for them to reform excepting a spiritual change at the corporate board. I think that’s a good assessment I see that too. I don’t think a revolt from the shareholders will happen because they know it would ruin their share values now
I’ll throw this in as a bone to be chewed. Perhaps The Primes can be reformed in the same way Boeing was undone by buying McDonnell Douglas. The Primes could very well repeat that process by buying an upstart and adopting their corporate structure. As a shot at this sort of speculation suppose Space X spun off the Falcon program, sold it to ULA, and suddenly Musk or Shotwell is CEO of ULA?
President Shotwell is as important to the success of SpaceX as Elon Musk is. Why would you what to undermine SpaceX while putting her in an environment to fail?
As for ULA buying up Falcon 9, that is really Old Space thinking. The secret of Falcon 9 is not the hardware, but the workforce. As with the AOL/Time Warner merger, the best will leave and Falcon 9 will at best stagnate.
BTW NG did buy up Scaled Composites, did that change how NG is managed?
No, the future of the old Primes is the same as Baldwin, Lima, and ALCO, when GE and EMD changed the railroad industry. And no one but the historians will care about it.
So would you assert that corporate buyouts can only change management for the worse?
That isn’t what he said. Changes in management have often proved restorative.
But they don’t happen too often because most corporate boards never remove or replace their CEOs – and even fewer recruit outsiders when they do.
Boeing dumped one career man who failed to appreciate the gravity of the 737 MAX disaster as it was happening – and who also, for what it’s worth, had been going around to major industry conferences for some time and giving speeches in which he asserted that Boeing would beat SpaceX to Mars with SLS. But they replaced him with another career insider.
I’m not ordinarily any fan of bringing in a new CEO from an industry outside the one he is now expected to join, but in the case of Boeing, it’s hard to see how that could have made things worse.
A great example of how bringing in a new CEO from outside can be a disaster was about 20 years ago when Meade Instruments hired a guy who used to be at a skateboard company to be CEO. The resulting products were an unmitigated disaster and were not able to be fixed by Meade. We tried for a year, then bit the bullet and replaced the 18 new scopes for our undergrad lab with Celestrons. Even the local Meade rep was beside himself.
I also once worked at an observatory that was run/managed by a guy who had retired from the Resolution Trust. So he was essentially a banker. He knew nothing about instrumentation and was also a disaster, and almost impossible to work with. He was fired after getting into a heated argument with a big donor. Not because of his complete ignorance when it came to astronomy and instrumentation.
Yes, good example, it’s why those old Meade telescopes from before then are sought after.
By contrast Harley-Davidson was saved when a management team that understood what a Harley was, who grew up rebuilding old Harley’s, took over
Ah, yes. The AMF years about which we never speak.
You provide two good examples of why I’m not generally a fan of such placements. That’s especially true when the organization in question is not faced with some existential crisis or in the immediate aftermath of some major catastrophe. Were either Meade or the observatory in desperate shape when these idiotic personnel decisions were made? If not, the respective boards should have been shown the door.
I have grave doubts about the ex-Disney theme park guy now running Virgin Galactic for exactly this reason. He’s not from the Imagineering ranks.
In the case of the observatory, the guy had the job because he was a friend of the owner (private observatory). No real idea about Meade at the time, but they seemed to be doing fine.
So both were unforced errors then. I wish I could say I’m surprised. I’ve seen this sort of thing a few times myself.
Depends on who is doing the buyout. Sierra Nevada did very well buying SpaceDev and their Dream Chaser.
But Boeing has a lot of pride in its past which is why it will be difficult to turn it around. It will fight whoever buys it out tooth and nail if they try to change it. You would need to first make them recognize that the past is gone and they have to change to survive.
Think of the U.S. Navy after Pearl Harbor sank the Battleship Admirals allowing the Carrier Captains to take over. Boeing needs a Pearl Harbor moment to survive.
One could argue that the 737 MAX fiasco was Boeing’s Pearl Harbor. But the effect, to-date, does not appear comparable to that on the USN post-12-7-1941.
So a McDonnell-Douglas sort of deal with the arithmetic sign reversed, eh? I suppose anything is possible, but I think the specifics of Musk and/or Shotwell exiting SpaceX in mid-ascent to do what would be, in essence, charity work among the hostile heathen is about as close to impossible as it gets. Musk is trying to save humanity, not OldSpace.
A difficulty with the general idea is that the skills for growing a company from scratch and those needed for turning around a seriously distressed old company are not the same, though there is certainly some overlap. So an OldSpace prime just acquiring, say, Firefly or Rocket Lab and putting Markusic or Beck in charge might not work anyway. It’s kind of the difference between a contractor who’s good at building developments of new tract houses vs. one who’s good at doing one-at-a-time rehabs of extant structures.
And this also assumes the willingness of an OldSpace management to do such a deal and then step entirely aside. I’m not seeing that anywhere in OldSpace. In that respect, OldSpace is typical of other once-mighty corporate titans which fell to disruptive technological change. Matula provides an instructive list in his reply. In the area of office equipment, I’d add Addressograph-Multigraph post-Xerox. Sometimes there simply is no saving a company because it’s entire technology base has been superceded. OldSpace isn’t in quite that bad a pickle, but the difference still doesn’t leave much room for maneuver.
I’m not remotely one of those guys who thinks there always needs to be a Great United Shitworks, Inc. just because there always has been one. I got into computing over a half-century ago. The only large computer company of that era still around is IBM, and it is no longer the industry colossus it once was. So many of the once-storied names in aerospace have already disappeared, I figure what is three more, really?
Also consider that the overwhelming majority of computer hardware is no longer made in the USA either. Not having a Boeing does not assume they’ll be replaced by upstart Americans. The COMAC C919 might very well be a perfectly good replacement for the 737.
If SS/SH work, and work well, then everyone is going to start doing it too. Competition will be fierce from foreign providers backed by their states. It’s not a guaranteed American win.
More than you might suppose still is, just not in Silicon Valley anymore. But a lot of the migration that has taken place has been due to bad tax and trade policies which are now, alas, being pushed once again by the party in power.
Boeing has already hollowed itself out to a previously unprecedented degree with all the ill-advised, and execrably managed, off-shoring it did of major 787 components. If Boeing crashes and burns, it’s not the American civil aviation industry’s body that will be found at the crash site. To an unfortunate degree, that industry has already died of self-inflicted wounds.
The COMAC C919 is probably the best “practice airplane” the Chinese have ever turned out, but it’s not going to replace the 737. Either Boeing will get it’s shit together and do that themselves or Airbus will do it for them. Or, given the size of the aircraft, the Canadians and/or Brazilians might seize an opportunity to step up in class.
The F9 already works well and has for more than a decade. Where are its foreign-made, state-sponsored competitors? By the time any other nation can build what SpaceX will shortly have flying, Elon is likely to be mummifying in his grave on Mars.
There is also the other elephant in the room, the future of air travel in a world with Covid-19 endemic, restrictions on CO2 emissions, remote work replacing business travel and virtual tourism along with “slow” travel replacing traditional tourism.
Yes. Never underestimate the would-be gauleiters of the 1,000-year Covid Reich.
I also fear that we’ll find that the real trigger for COVID 19 was international air travel passing a particular volume. If that volume can be identified, likely international air travel will have a ceiling set. I see your point.
The only way Western Digital, AMD, Texas Instruments, Cirrus Logic, motherboard fabs, were going to stay in the US is if Uncle Sam paid for the the plant, trained the workers, threw in some in some operating money, then paid a bonus to the corporate board and passed on collecting taxes. The US could never offer the tax deals or the direct investment that foreign governments offer. All that business went overseas because they were paid to go overseas. What the US should have done is held them prisoner here in the US just as those industries are now held overseas.
As for thinking only Space X can do a Falcon 9 or Starship. We thought that about the atomic bomb , jetliners, and nuclear submarines. If it’s needed it will be copied and then improved upon. The Chinese are copying Falcon now. I’ll bet they start flying their version within 4 years.
Off-shored U.S. industry wasn’t lured there by slinky female Asian agents proffering large sums of free cash, it was pushed there by Democrat high corporate tax policies based on ideology and by “free traders” of both parties who ignored non-reciprocity.
The Soviet atomic bomb was mainly a product of effective espionage, not nimble parallel development. About jetliners, we were right. The Soviets never built anything comparable to Western models and the Chinese are, if anything, even further behind. The C919 is an inferior copy of an American design with roots in the early 60s. The Chinese are nowhere near being able to make widebodies of the sort we have been turning out for more than a half-century.
Nuclear submarines? The Soviets/Russians never really mastered the technology and the Chinese have done only somewhat better – mainly in having avoided the worst sorts of fatal disasters that bit the Soviets/Russians on several occasions. Neither The Russians nor the PLAN has anything comparable even to the Los Angeles-class boats that remain in USN service, never mind their Virginia-class replacements.
Personally, I don’t see anything Chinese that suggests a capability to match the F9 in four years. Ten, maybe. By which time the originals will be in various rocket gardens. Matching Starship is a job the PRC is unlikely to last long enough to get anywhere near accomplishing.
The notion that US electronics fled ‘high’ US taxes is laughable. Most US companies don’t even pay taxes, not even then. Yes, they were lured there by being paid to go there. Pure and simple.Being paid is the central precept of business, and if business is all your care about, you go where you’re paid.
Most of Asian technology developments started as espionage and evolved into nimble development. Just as the Soviets with nuclear weapons. Compare “Mike” with the Soviet layer cake. As for submarines, you’re not paying attention since the Cold War ended. Sorry to say, Russian subs exceed ours in many ways even the important metrics. The lead of the late Cold War is over.
Starship is a step back in many ways. The steel structure and welding the Chinese can do. what they lack now is the 4000 PSi engine technology. That will likely change.
Your absurdly counterfactual beliefs about business and taxes are, I guess, a bit easier to understand given your even more risible beliefs about Soviet and Chinese technology.
There is, to begin with, no such thing as “Asian technology developments.” Asian nations differ vastly in terms of their technological capabilities. The Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans are vastly superior to the Burmese, Cambodians and Laotians, for example. The Chinese are somewhere in between these extremes.
You seem to be the one not paying attention since the Cold War ended anent Russian submarines. Most have been scrapped. The relatively few remaining are still mostly rapidly aging-out Soviet-era hulls. There has been exactly one new type of hunter-killer and one new type of boomer designed since the Soviet collapse. Development was protracted and troubled for both. Neither have been built in significant quantity. No new hulls of either type have been laid down in more than five years. Boats on the ways remain unfinished. This is just part of a general failure on the part of the decayed Russian weapons industry to get much of anything into serial production once developed. That applies to ships, subs, planes, tanks, strategic missiles and tactical missiles. The U.S. lead of the late Cold War was considerable and is now far larger.
But never fear. Like good lefties everywhere you can sleep soundly, secure in the certainty of inevitable Chinese triumph when they surpass the U.S. in every way and especially those annoying cowboys in Texas. Real Soon Now.
Oh come on why are you reverting to doubting my patriotism as if you’re the last standing American in California. Your belief that the Russian submarine fleet is today as it was 20 years ago is right in line with your belief in a Soviet style collapse for China happening real soon now. You’ve been spouting this for over 5 years now. Then when you run out of things to say, you call me a China lover. Why not just call me a NAZI? Or say “Got to Russia” as I’m sure you did back in the day. You’re better than carp like this.
Nope, it’s not, it depends on SpaceX moving forward with Starship 2.0, 3.0, without the FAA AST acting like a drag chute to progress by failing to adapt its regulatory system.
That’s not going to happen and you know it. Why do you even fantasize that a space launcher like that is going to be developed without regulation? SS/SH is already almost 5 kT of explosive. That’s a Fulda Gap sized tactical nuclear weapon. When the radius of the LV goes even higher and the tanks get longer, the latent enthalpy goes even further into nuclear territory. No government is going to let that be developed without oversight. Besides, once elected, even the GOP does not let things like that receive even a reduction in oversight. Besides the lack of oversight is one of the reasons Boeing is in trouble. If the FAA and kept the oversight functionality over the 737 MAX, that program would have been the great commercial success it was before the crashes.
Not without regulation but with intelligent regulation. There is a huge difference.
Also you will recall that I had worries about Starship flying from Boca Chica from the beginning which is why I wondered why he didn’t pick a better site like the old Matagorda Island AFB where you could blow up Saturn V class rockets.
And the B737Max is a good example of “unintelligent” regulation where all the i’s doted and t’s were crossed without realizing that they had no relation to reality.
I am kind of watching t he response to see where they go. there are folks out there who could pull this together…but they will have to be brought in
Yes. Boeing already brought in an outsider to run software development. Additional outsiders in high positions – including the highest position – is probably Boeing’s best long-term hope of rejuvenation.
I wonder if NASA should give the program over to another vendor with strict milestones. It would be nice to have a second gumdrop to put meat into and have it come back alive.
Or lifting body…
I think it’s a bit late in the ISS game to be doing that. A thorough scrubbing of Starliner, as Oler recommends, would produce a 2nd usable vehicle much sooner and still allow it a decent service life as solely an ISS taxi – maybe eight more years if Starliner is suitably debugged and demo-ed by 2022.
I think 2022 is a given at this point. Heck, I think it much more likely Starship is going to make it to orbital velocity before Starliner will.
Unless the FAA AST pulls the rug out from under Starship. Never under estimate the ability of regulators to restrict progress. Look at the decades the ICC required railroads to keep cabooses after technology make them unnecessary.
I am hoping the the FAA AST will practice intelligent regulation, but it’s not guaranteed.
I fully back and understand regulatory unease with Starship and Superheavy. Musk admits they’re rushing things at a greatly accelerated pace. I fully expect, and fully hope the FAA regulates with a heavy hand. Super Heavy and Starship will be all the better prepared for flight if they can make it past regulatory hurdles.
That depends entirely on what those regulatory hurdles are.
Obviously they’ll be if the hot dog vendor is cleaning their vending cart every night.
I agree.
Just for laughs. In case Boeing exits from the space taxi business.
Northrop Grumman can probably make a pseudo Soyuz crew vehicle relatively quickly. Build something similar to the Soyuz reentry section in a gumdrop shape for 4 persons. Stick a shorten Cygnus pressurized cargo module in the front and the Cygnus bus module in the back plus a LES tower. Then figure out which available launch vehicle is compatible. Should be easier to bring into service than Dreamchaser flying exposed on top of a launcher.
Hopefully this remains a fantasy.
hmm that config has been seen somewhere in the US from some company … I think I would try Big G…its possible the Rocketlabs new rocket could launch it
You might be thinking of the Dragon XL. But what I described was a Soyuz like vehicle with substitute components carrying not much cargo. LES tower on top of the shorten PCM on top of the reentry module on top of the Cygnus service bus. The PCM serves the same purpose as the orbital module on the Soyuz. It provides additional pressurized volume for the crew and the docking port to the ISS.
And no don’t think the RocketLab Neutron can launch something with the mass of a Big G to LEO. IIRC Neutron can loft about 8 tonnes to LEO with down range booster recovery.
I have seen this from a US company I think Boeing…
NorGrum, like Boeing and LockMart, doesn’t do anything “relatively quickly.” And there is utterly no reason to try frog-marching it into ginning up some pseudo-Soyuz. Having Boeing fix Starliner – even if doing so takes an additional round of flaw discovery and repair beyond this second one upon which we are now embarked, Starliner would be ready sooner anyway.
As for Dream Chaser flying exposed, I think attaching lightweight detachable panels that render it lift-neutral on ascent and a mechanism to safely discard them at altitude would be a much easier job of engineering than a counterfeit Soyuz.
As for Boeing exiting the Commercial Crew program, I’m not sure it can. Pulling another XS-1 with Starliner would certainly call into question Boeing’s trustworthiness anent any other work it is doing for NASA and immediately have that agency looking for ways to reduce or eliminate dependence on SLS. I suspect you’ll agree NASA would not have far to look.
Was thinking an unlikely scenario of a repeat of what happen to Rockerplane Kistler. Which got it’s COTS contract cancel and replaced by Orbital Science.
I see what you’re getting at. But that COTS kerfuffle happened when ISS was only a few years old and still had at least a couple of decades of service life remaining. Also, that was about freight, not crew. Neither is true in the current circumstances. If Boeing bows out of CC – I don’t see NASA throwing them out – I think what happens is we just soldier on with Crew Dragon. Starship can provide dissimilar redundancy in a pinch starting perhaps as soon as two or three years hence.
This makes me wonder what issues they are going to find with the Orion on its first real test flight. Yes, it’s Lockheed, but you have to start wondering about how Old Space does it’s development.
Blowing things up, and having to clean up the mess and figure out what happened like SpaceX does, seems to have its advantages. If really helps you to respect the power of the forces involved that is missing when you are just running simulations.
Orion is LockMart—and they also made the Atlas V and that wasn’t the problem this time or the last.
Speaking of which…that Altas/Centaur is still sitting there, right?
Boeing might stop the hemorrhaging if they were to pay for it to go to any languishing payloads that aren’t that particular as to launch windows.
A free ride on us, Tony could say….good publicity for ULA for a change right? Maybe an on-line contest for who could build a quick science payload before something rusts 😉
That would be a nice gesture to buy Boeing some time and put out some spot fires as it were…
Having listened to the telecon this afternoon I ask these questions. Established aerospace has operated UDMH/NTO systems at The Cape for something like 70 years now, how is it that Boeing was caught off guard by the onset of bad weather and high humidity? How is it that valves that allow NTO to leak forward into the plumbing were not qualified by Boeing after receiving them from the contractor? Did we get off lucky here? The double failure of moisture from the environment penetrating into the plumbing and NTO leaking forward of the stop valve allowed the forward valves to corrode such that they could not actuate. If the weather had been different and the formation of nitric acid not corroded the forward valves, what would have happened in flight, or sitting at the station?
Another disturbing aspect of the telecon was the invocation of innovation in the test series to diagnose and prepare the spacecraft for a second attempt later this month. Innovation on a man rated system at the tail end of development is not what you expect to hear. Also this is UDMH/NTO, if the current operations and integration teams have to innovate with such an established technology am I going to far in thinking that the current operators have not had a full transfer of knowledge and experience from their operations ancestors? Are we seeing the US begin to suffer the same mismatch between generations of the Soviet space program and the Russian space program?
Andrew I share your well stated concerns
Mine would be added to that
1. the dividing line between traditional aerospace company and “new space” is now the ability to operate off of a cost plus contract and onto a firm $ dollar contract.
2. its completely possible that the old cost plus companies are simply not capable of operating safely in an environment where they have to make decisions within a set framework of dollars
3. there simply might be no institutional memory of how legacy systems operate and no hint of being able to innovate new ones
4. there is in sufficient oversight
In combination, items 1 – 3 constitute an institutional case of what psychologists refer to as “learned helplessness.” In individual human beings, helplessness can be unlearned. But I am unaware of any corporation that has done so. I am aware of many that have failed to do so – most now defunct. Boeing may simply lack the capacity to save itself at this point.
All of this, of course, renders point 4 impossible of achievement. There simply isn’t any level of oversight sufficient to save an enterprise that has completely lost its way.
What happened is pretty clear evidence they didn’t have sealed nozzles and nitrogen throughout the dry side of the lines and in the service module. I’d think that old-school method of moisture proofing would be SOP, it’s even used to pack perishables, but I guess not.
Wow, good post
It is painfully clear that Boeing is a blank slate. All the expertise within the company and its acquisitions disappeared into the ether. The sort of hidden in plain sight truth is SpaceX, being insular outsider, built the expertise over the last 15-20 years. All the while Boeing was advertising such despite the emperor having no clothes.
that is the truly scary thought…not so much scary for SpaceX it is in fact a tribute to them…but to Boeing…SpaceX built the expertise but Boeing let it go away …so here is the 30 billion dollar question
is this going to follow them in the SLS?
I think this is a use it or lose it scenario. If you wait too long, then try to use…it isn’t there.
Will there be Starliner-like problems with SLS? One hopes not, but who knows? Even with nominal results on Artemis 1, though, SLS’s days are numbered. Starship has better specs and is already too cheap and its production rate too high for SLS to ever catch up even if Starship were used strictly in expendable mode.
OldSpace as Russia with a veneer of capitalism. I think you’re quite likely right. But Russia has no NewSpace to save it. The U.S. does. And that will make all the difference.
They are clueless. As empty a husk as Biden’s brain.
A very desperate option could be to use X-37B and develop a plug-in module with minimum life-support to return some ISS crew, with the option to deploy more if needed?
The fact that Boeing have already been paid to looked into this may also help…
https://newatlas.com/x37b-m…
…though an X-34C maybe too much of a stretch, given current circumstances.
What is the point of desperation? Crew Dragon exists, works and can handle the whole ISS crew taxi job for as long as the station lasts. We have the luxury of having only to worry about Starliner, not Starliner’s intended job. That’s covered.
Not desperation, but the risk averse decisions made currently. Glen would have never made orbit under current rules, much less Apollo 11. One problem and it’s freak out time.
Which means it’s likely a good thing such decisions will increasingly be made in boardrooms and not the offices of NASA going forward.
No point in being desperate… currently. My comment was to simply point out that *relatively* easy solutions could be available without reverting to clean-sheet designs and may already be available within another part of Boeing.
Yes, that is the key, as long as the ISS lasts. Interesting article about looking at how to dispose of ISS when its mission is over.
https://www.upi.com/Science…
Aug. 12, 2021 / 3:00 AM
NASA mulls how to dispose of International Space Station
By Paul Brinkmann
It is interesting how they are looking at the option of using a Dragon2 for the deorbit burn, among other options. Of course the one they are missing is just having Starship disassemble it and return everything but the solar panels to Earth. Probably would take under a dozen missions given it has much more volume and payload capability that the Shuttle orbiter had.
ISS will be here in 2040
If the ISS is still in orbit after 2030. It will likely be attached to a hosting Starship. Which solves a lot of the issues with aging ISS hardware by turning the ISS into a museum annex for the occasional tourists.
one thing I came away with from the average astronaut is that really no one knows what the final vehicle looks like
There will be a number of vehicle types. Most will have the same outer mold line as the current stack, though some will lack flaps or TPS tiles. Within, things will differ quite a bit across types. And the number of types will continue to proliferate.
Funny. I’d say that the Russian side is already a museum annex to the ISS.
Heh. Like building a modern home next to a mid-19th century sod house that one then keeps maintained just to show the young-uns how folks had to live on-orbit in “olden times.”
Maybe. But, if so, it will be only the oldest of many U.S.-built LEO stations.
Dragon 2 will be a busy beaver for quite some time,
CRS-23,24,25
Crew 3, Crew 4…
Inspiration4
Axiom 1, 2, 3, 4
Space Adventures
SpaceX says they’re training over 20 commercial crew members.
My comment being marked as spam, not sure whether it’s me or something in the content. My concern is if anything affects Dragon, and Starship is an unknown at this time. While I don’t know of any problems, back up options are definitely nice to have.
You have my sympathies. I have no idea why a comment by you would be deleted as spam. I mark a lot of actual spam as spam and always wonder why I seem to be the first to do so and why the stuff never seems to disappear anyway. I always figured the stuff was examined, at some point, by actual human beings, but perhaps I’m wrong about that.
in all these things the problem first of all is money
these are just my assumptions and they reflect nothing else…but
1. the money that the company (Boeing) set aside for this reflight is I suspect almost all gone. including the software fixes, the booster acquistion, etc a guess is that the program has had a burn rate of nearly 20 million a month (but thats the high number) …that coupled with the launch campaign…and now the destack/teardown/storage has probably run through the 1/2 billion dollars
2. just “non active” the program is probably going to burn 5=10 million a month for XX months as they try and figure out what was wrong. if it turns out to (as I suspect) be more then just “these thruster valves failed lets find more) but a near requal of the entire thruster system…the burn rate is going to jump up quickly probably to 10 million a month bottom flow
3. then we have a new stack, launch campaign, etc…
so we are probably t alking about 200-300 million more dollars that “someone” is going to have to come up with
Who? thats unclear. that question came up in the press conference…but the answer was “less”…so I am sure Bill Bill Bill Bill always ballast Nelson and the gang are eagerly “discussing” this with the folks at the company
I will be surprised if Boeing is willing to come up with it…its not that much money but its money that they dont see a way of getting back…and I suspect that they have already burned through all the “excess cash” that they got from being NASA’s friendly contractor (all DoD/NASA contracts have this)
along with this the politics of all this might be tricky
NASA badly wants Starliner for two reasons 1) to have a safety valve if Dragon has any issues (and this is in my mind valid) and 2) as a fall back to Orion if well SLS and Orion have issues or are stopped by money issues
plus a “reboot” of another competitor is going to take some time. and money
I suspect that we will all know the answers to this sometime around Nov or December…ie during the holidays where the news might get buried…but its hard to see h ow that works with the budget process.
I suspect Bill Ballast Nelson is having to actually start thinking where he might be going with this. along with some notion of how to explain 1) the Russians 2) Webb or whatever we are calling it, if it fails and 3) what happens if SLS/Orion is less…troubling times 🙂
How is Starliner a backup to Orion, and why can’t crew Dragon be that backup ?
Also – to a limited extent, the reusable Dragon is its own backup : If a new Dragon has an issue, NASA can use pre-flown Dragons, and if a pre-flown Dragon has an issue, NASA can use new ones, until the issue is fixed./?
Starliner is a fallback for Boeing and certain NASA Centers to retain funding if SLS and/or Orion gets the Ax. The Crew Dragon only benefits mostly Southern California and the Florida spacecoast for pork distribution by Congressional critters due to SpaceX being very vertically structured as a company. As in not many major sub-contractors.
yeah
But we have also seen on several occasions – the most recent being the HLS-sole-source-to-SpaceX dust-up, that political influence has decided limits. SpaceX has been heavily vertically integrated in its manufacturing since its founding. And, yet, it has steadily advanced as a government service supplier. Not the least of the reasons for this is that the legacy contractors, with those carefully-crafted sub-contractor supply chains that owe more to politics than practicality, have taken to, more and more, screwing various pooches after which SpaceX has to ride to the rescue. These politically-motivated supply chains look formidable at first glance, but prove to be easily frangible spun-sugar confections when any weight is placed upon them.
NASA is very very reluctant to go single string supplier…ie one company supplying everything (and really we all should be, although it might get down to that if Starship is a success as it is envisioned)
Look, my guess (where I suspect I fall off the Musk fan wagon) is that Starship is going to work, but it wont be as grand. Musk is already hinting at a “stage zero” …and I suspect before long the thing is going to do some morphing as technology and time take its toll
One weakness that Bezos is in my view correct in, is the relying on lots of tanking. this assumes that starship quickly ramps up to 1 hour or 24 hour or three day or something turnaround and I think thats going to be awhile
my prediction is that Starship 1) morphs in its concept (ie how the thing is put together) and 2) it takes achieves some operationality pretty soon after the concept is finalized…but it takes some time to get to Musk land where cost are really low and operation is “daily “
and the US will move to get back on the Moon before then…early 30’s
Stage Zero is the pad, GSE, and booster/ship catcher mechanism (Mechazilla), not the vehicle.
NASA never evinced any such reluctance to go “single-string” during the Apollo or Shuttle eras. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle were all single-sourced vehicles with no dissimilar redundancy at all. If there were problems with a vehicle, the contractor fixed it, a second “back-up” contractor with an entirely different vehicle didn’t step in.
It’s hard to avoid the feeling that all this alleged concern for the necessity of “back-up” and dissimilar redundancy is fundamentally a product of a mindset that still after all this time, does not regard SpaceX as a real aerospace company, just some gang of parvenu cowboys that have come into town to drink, fight, tear up the saloons and generally lay waste the settled order. I think this is also where the baseless, but very firm, convictions that – despite massive evidence to the contrary – SpaceX can’t really do things any better or faster than legacy aerospace come from.
One advantage of having Bill Nelson as NASA administrator is that the Congressional critters seems to be more civil asking the tough questions about issues facing NASA. Of course Nelson knows about the dirt on said critters and probably still have political IOUs.
I am going to be curious as to where this goes…how Nelson handles this