well lets hope its still viable. they sure as fuck cant wait for another boeing ship.
In the event it was deemed too compromised, how long would it take to get an emergency Dragon capsule up there?
After this, the FAA should require Boeing to pay spacex to maintain a crew dragon rescue ready to launch at all times the starliner is on orbit.
Honestly SpaceX probably has one on standby right now.
Maybe. There are only four Crew Dragons. One’s attached to the station right now, and one’s had its docking equipment removed in preparation for the spacewalk on the Polaris Dawn mission. That leaves two. I’m sure one’s already in prep for the next regularly scheduled crew rotation. A rescue mission would mean either leaving two of the astronauts scheduled to fly that flight on the ground to leave open seats for the Starliner crew, or a special mission using the last Dragon.
Depending on how the Starliner leaks progress, I might be fine with lying on the floor of a Cargo Dragon.
Originally they had planned on two more seats in the Crew Dragon behind / below the commander and pilot, but when they switched from a powered land landing to a parachute splashdown, they had to adjust the angles of the seats & the travel in the seat suspension. Those changes required them to drop the second row of seats.
Originally they had planned on two more seats
I think the original design had three seats in the second row, for a total of seven.
boy, those voice transmissions back to base informing of these leaks would be worth listening to.
I mean, to be fair, I’d like to know more about the volume lost here.
For example people often struggle to imagine that the sun is losing 4.7 million tons every second. Or that ships constantly take on water they have to pump out. This is part of normal operation, and while the helium leaks here clearly are not, if built with a degree of redundancy in mind, certain loss rates are entirely acceptable.
Or not.
Depends on the volume involved. 😅
Dosage makes the poison for sure.
I wanted to come in here and say something about helium being so small that a small leak would be very easy to miss but 5?
Not to mention that they make helium leak detectors. I’m not an expert but I built a helium tight 60000psi system a couple weeks ago first try. Granted it didn’t have to survive a trip on a rocket.
Boeing and redundancy are like oil and water
To be fair, regarding redundancy:
The astronauts only need seven hours of “free-flight time” to perform the end-of-mission maneuvers and Starliner currently has enough helium for 70 hours of free-flight time, Boeing said.
Boeing said
Do we really trust them at this point? I mean, if true that’s great, but they’ve lied before.
From a business point of view, I don’t think lying about this is in their best interest. If they lie to the FAA about their passenger planes, maybe they get an investigation and a fine. If they lie to NASA about the safety of Starliner, they lose their only customer for it.
Trust? No.
Hoping their greed results in safe conclusion to the mission.
If they succeed, it’ll be in spite of their greed, not because of it.
Man I love nasa!
lol, I worked on a project at my company that sent a box with various instruments up to space sometime in February… but it’s waiting on something that’s on the Starliner before it can be unboxed and used, so now it’s just been sitting for 4 months and will continue to do so for god-knows-how-long
