I wonder if these Starliner problems are symptoms of the same short-term, bottom-line, corner-cutting in Boeing's airline assembly lines. Given it seems to have come from the top, has it infected the space operations too?
Plausible...but if Short-Term Bottom Line is your top priority for hiring and promoting managers, for years - then don't expect either your engineers or engineering culture to be much good.
I don’t think those recordings have ever been conclusively proved to be real though, have they? There’s zero actual verification of those being his last words, just a claim in a spuriously research book (“Starman”).
Was that the cosmonaut who burned up upon reentry and his last words were basically to the effect of "this piece of shit garbage spacecraft that I told them is going to kill me is going to kill me, Yuri"?
Indeed. He knew going up that it will most likely happen and literally demanded an open casket "so everyone will see what they did to me".
If you ever come across a bright teenager getting lulled into communism keep this in mind as a very edifying example of the pitfalls of that system. The recordings are chilling.
The ones who watch that recording and sort of pause and after a minute double down that the ends justify the means are a lost cause.
> If you ever come across a bright teenager getting lulled into communism keep this in mind as a very edifying example of the pitfalls of that system.
Ironically, the Soyuz family of spacecrafts still flies to this day.
On the other hand, it's not the communists that knowingly sent a defective, leaking Boeing spacecraft into space because a cancellation would have been disastrous for a project so flawed it should never have been authorised to fly in the first place. And the consequences of that decision to fly are so severe that they are postponing a return to avoid probable death.
Nor is the communists that overruled fixing issues with a criticality 1 labelled item, leading to loss of Challenger and the death of 7 astronauts.
And last, but not least, it is not the communists that forgot the costly lessons of their complacency, leading to the loss of Columbia and the death of an other 7 astronauts.
And here we are again, 21 years later. Non-communists, yet complacently sending astronauts to their deaths because corners were cut. The only thing that changed is the ideology being revered. Personally, I don't believe that shareholder return is an improvement..
> If you ever come across a bright teenager getting lulled into communism keep this in mind as a very edifying example of the pitfalls of that system
This does not work at all in most instances. I'm a descendant of Poles who suffered greatly from Soviet oppression and later due to communist rule in Poland. I'm always open to share their horrific stories because it's important to know the past.
The two most frequent arguments I'm getting from those young people fascinated with communism is:
1. The history books are false, Gulags were education communities where people chilled and exchanged ideas
2. USSR was not real communism and we'll make it work this time.
I could spoon feed more details about this incident but if they are already going out of their way to avoid reality there is nothing to do but avoid them.
> USSR/Russia’s safety record is actually far superior here.
It's not; the US has launched more people into space; most of them using far more complex vehicles (reusable shuttles); some of them into far more dangerous missions - beyond the low earth orbit, to the Moon and back.
The US has had no fatal in-flight accidents involving simple rockets and space capsules comparable to Soyuz despite going much further and flying to the Moon. Their accidents happened with an experimental space plane (X-15 in 1967) and space shuttles (Challenger in 1986, Columbia in 2003). Russians spent over 20 years on their space shuttle, but it only flew a single unmanned test flight. The US space shuttle flew 133 successful manned missions out of 135 launches. Likewise, the US flew 199 missions with X-15 space plane, whereas its Soviet counterpart MiG-105 flew only 8.
In other words, Russians never got to flying at scale the kind of missions that killed US astronauts. You need to take that into account when comparing safety records.
Actually what you’re hoping to avoid is authoritarianism. Modern socialist theorists like Richard Wolff and David Harvey are well aware of the failures of authoritarian communism in the 20th century, and advocate for voluntary systems instead. For example Richard Wolff’s proposal for a more Marxist world (with “worker ownership of the means of production”) is to encourage workers to form worker owned cooperatives. If the Marxist theory of worker ownership of the means of production is valid, then an economy where the preponderance of firms are worker owned is going to have a lot more freedom for the average person than what we have today. But no authoritarianism is necessary. Anti-authoritarian communism as a political theory goes back to the 19th century to thinkers like Peter Kropotkin, who advocated for “anarchist communism”.
Very few people beyond edgy internet teenagers advocate for authoritarian communism today. The real takeaway of Marxism for modern audiences is that an economy where the preponderance of firms are owned by an elite ownership class is going to create a society where all social and legal forces benefit the wealthy to the detriment of the working class. We could have a society where the average person works ten hours a week, has ample time off and plenty of spending money, and owns a home. But instead money is continually funneled to the elites who own and control the means of production.
In this sense, Marx’s analysis of capitalism seems correct. And in fact he never advocated to authoritarianism. It was opportunity Soviet leaders Lenin and Stalin who used the popularity of communism in popular culture to seize the power they desired.
Other communists like Peter Kropotkin renounced the idea of anyone, even themselves, holding that much power. Sadly they were defeated in the political sphere by the authoritarians.
Spend a little time looking at the history of anti-communism efforts by the United States in South America and you will see that we’re authoritarian too.
> We could have a society where the average person works ten hours a week ... and owns a home.
I don't think 10 hours a week on average is enough hours to grow the food to feed everyone, or keep any other part of the economy running. There's probably truth in some of the other parts of what you're saying but this, no way. Maybe 30 hours might be believable.
Not necessarily desirable for every type of produce or animal agriculture. Automated chicken factories are also enormous and remarkably light on labour input, but there are other consequences.
It’s funny this comes up because I’m designing an open source solar powered farming robot as a community oriented engineering project specifically to address the long tail of specialty crops:
Depends how you define work, and how it's divided up.
A remarkable amount of labour goes into generating income to pay for care, for example. Both people saving for their own in later life (or insurance to pay for it), and working to pay for childcare so they can work.
And a sizeable amount also just to facilitate the work itself. Car payments so you can get to work. Student loan repayments on your training, and so on. Paying over the odds for a city apartment because that's where the work is.
None of this can be magicked away of course. But the amount of hours that directly address economic need or generate discretionary income is a lot less than 40.
Oh it’s absolutely enough. It’s hard to fathom just how much wealth we actually have in this world, just not evenly distributed. If we had community ownership of the means of production, wealth would be distributed much more throughout the population instead of concentrated at the very top. Many things would change because of this. For one, significantly less unnecessary stuff would be produced. Huge sectors of our economy are devoted to producing junk that is designed to make someone lots of money and then break quickly. A community oriented economy would produce more durable and useful goods meant to be repaired and upgraded instead of thrown away. It does not necessarily take any extra manufacturing capacity to make things repairable, but they would last much longer. Because of this you can run the same manufacturing capacity less and still provide for everyone. There’s also much more of an incentive to automate when the choice is literally build a robot or you have to do the labor yourself, so we’d see more pressures towards automation. Actually this is something Noam Chomsky talked about in 1976:
It’s difficult to grasp the degree to which the economy would change if we had community oriented production. It’s not a simple incremental change, but a massive improvement in conditions for the average person.
Another angle to think about it is like this: imagine a world where all school children are taught how to properly participate in a cooperate economy from youth. We all learn how to write proposals and vote in regular meetings and work out disputes and by the time we’re adults we’re running big cooperative organizations smoothly. Okay now imagine a place like Amazon starts up as an co-op and all the workers are sharing in the profits. Let’s say they’re just as good as Jeff Bezos at running the company, but there’s no Jeff Bezos to absorb all the profits? How much would each worker earn?
Now in a truly cooperative economy there wouldn’t be poor third world workers to exploit for profit the way Jeff Bezos did so there wouldn’t be such massive windfall profits available, but it’s worth briefly considering how much each Amazon worker would be worth if they actually earned their fair share of the value they’re producing.
By the way the Black Panther Party ran a community learning center for children that focused on cooperation back in 1977. Imagine if all our schools were like this:
I don't really see how benign communism would be sustainable. In order for communal decision making to be practical, some form of representative hierarchy needs to form. That brings the concept of leaders and that brings concentration of power. With power comes privileges and you're then relying on none of those leaders exploiting their position for personal gain so that it doesn't devolve into a classist society of ruling classes Vs serfs.
In my eyes communism is fatally flawed.
Inequality is inherent in human society at scale. Better to accept that fact and design the society with mechanisms that try to keep it in check.
The crews of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia might take issue with your implication that glorious American capitalism could never produce similar outcomes.
You're hoping a similar situation doesn't develop under capitalism though? Also, your point of view only makes sense if you're on the receiving end of capitalism. I don't think lithium miners would object to collectively owning the means of production.
Disclaimer: I'm a random replyguy dumbass and both of these systems have huge problems. I have no better alternative.
Jeez this is the third delay already, June 14 -> 18 -> 26 -> ???. I know NASA projects have a tendency of serial delays but didn’t expect that for a live mission. Makes you wonder if there’s an Allan McDonald-like story here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40748371
could somebody ELI5 what is happening to this program? delays after delays, and now they might need to send another spacecraft to bring people back. It will be hilarious if that turns out to be a SpaceX Dragon.
Everybody involved with the NASA manned space program seems to only care about their slice of The Budget nowadays, with actual mission requirements being a distant second priority. This results in a patchwork of bad design decisions and a weird mix of obsolete and yet-to-be developed technologies. This further results in endless delays and extremely low launch volume, which means you basically learn operations anew for every launch, and achieving anything resembling reliability becomes essentially impossible. Which brings us to this situation, where the Starliner was given the go-ahead out of budgetary desperation, despite having many known reliability problems. For a longer and more colorful version of this argument with sources, see [1].
Given both recent-ish issues at Roscosmos, and the relatively-famous Columbia rescue plan - https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue... - I wonder if SpaceX has a quiet "we will always be capable of launching an extra Crew Dragon within X days" operating rule. That'd cost money...but have enormous appeal to both the spacefans in the trenches and the Chief Ego Officer.
I'm not an expert in this field but I feel like the key is to make Dragon as a platform cheap, and once that happens more rides can be carried (to ISS) hence making the system battle-tested. Being cheap and reliable are the two major reasons NASA rode with Soyouz in the past few decades and, for better or for worse, still riding with them even after the Ukraine war started.
I think they might fill it with garbage and let Boeing attempt an unmanned landing. All the issues are in the service module - the capsule itself is OK.
this is all overly dramatic. a new vehicle has a few non-critical leaks in the pressure system for its engines and a handful of engines that were being finicky. The leaks cut a tiny fraction of their massive margin on helium pressurant leaving them still with far more than they could possibly use on a return flight and 4 of the 5 misbehaving (of 28) rcs engines are working fine now. everyone wants to get their ducks in a row because this is the first time NASA and Boeing have worked this vehicles with crew at ISS and ISS also has a schedule they can and should work around as well so we're bumping along with a few delays and some poor PR but this isn't anything special and SpaceX's Dragon was not free from issues across its earliest flights either. there's nothing here except a few news outlets chasing clicks. it should have been a three sentence matter of fact update in the sidebar of the paper, not the front page headline, but editorial judgement died in the previous century so what are you gonna do.
SO: Could Rocket Labs quickly launch a "space tug" Photon, capable of replacing the Starliner Service Module's propulsion system well-enough for the undocking and controlled de-orbiting? Hard to imagine NASA allowing that with a manned Starliner. But is there any current capability to handle "dead" spacecraft near the ISS? Docking ports are very limited, and "drifting nearby" can be damned dangerous in orbit.
The "space tug" thing sounds complicated. I imagine if they don't feel the Starliner is safe they could send it to earth without anyone on board and send the SpaceX Dragon to get the astronauts.
I don't understand the planning around "lifeboats" and the ISS. I thought that there was always an extra Soyuz capsule docked in case people are stranded on the ISS. Yet, it's never been used and it's never discussed as an option.
Even with Columbia and after, the discussion was always around sending a second shuttle up if the backflip inspection found a damaged heat shield. Maybe that's more understandable given the number of people involved on the Shuttle.
Still... What's the purpose of having that lifeboat there if it's never considered?
the article says this capsule is only rated for a 45 day stay. it did not say why only 45 days, but that count down started on June 6. they also did not say what would happen if those days elapse. do they just push it away from the shuttle and let it just become space trash? some sort of auto return on a intentional burn up in atmosphere trajectory?
Beyond whatever its rated time remaining, (which usually has to do with weird things like abort system batteries, etc.) there is a _much more pressing issue_ which is that it is _actively leaking a finite supply of helium_ from the myriad thruster leaks, and while it only requires 7 lbs to reenter, they also only have 75 lbs, and are losing more every second.
Perhaps my information is outdated, and happy to be updated, but I don't think they're losing anything while docked because the system is valved off. Once they depart, the leaks will begin again.
If Starliner isn't cleared to return live humans, whatever contingency procedures they come up with can still be tested with a payload of station garbage. The ship can be flown remotely and is fully automated. Even if it doesn't bring its crew back (and they wait for the next Dragon) it can still yield a lot of data.
And, quite frankly, that it can still operate with all those leaks is a testament to good, robust, design.
A bit like imagining how many of the royal family have to die before Princess Eugenie becomes Queen or a Borgen-type affair where a junior minister becomes prime minister, can you imagine the crazy sequence of events that has astronauts rescued by a Shenzhou capsule?
And would it produce some detente or raise tensions?
I read something they would send up Crew Dragon with 2 and bring back 4. At the rate SpaceX launches, they could probably send up a life boat and not even interrupt their schedule. That would be a total flex to pull off. Hell, let the Axios guy go get them!
Someone @musk that question. knowing his ego, he'll have them made. even I would push to have them made just as a big FU to Boeing and take all of the free press about it.
Well, I have solid evidence that the CEO of Boeing molests small woodland creatures, but I'll come up with some way to rescue the stranded kids^H^H^H^Hastronauts. Trust me - Elon Musk
What would anyone have NASA do? Surely in the circumstances what they are doing, is the BATNA pending more information?
In the end, turning the crew into long duration stayers until a dragon capsule and suits to fit can turn up, or negotiate with the Russians may be a better outcome than repeating engineer fear of losing face a la "o" ring decision logic.
