The people in every one of these Starliner threads seemingly hoping for the worst case scenario to occur just so they can dunk on Boeing for it are disturbing
It’s a weird moral grey zone. Everyone has forgotten the hundreds of people Boeing murdered as a result of their desire to skirt modern safety regulations. I just flew my family across the country yesterday on one of these end-stage-capitalism products for lack of any other option.
Were I to be ash this morning, I would be forgotten too.
But if astronauts were killed, maybe the outrage would finally be enough for all the greased palms to be sheepishly shoved in pockets just long enough to get justice, ground all those affronts to safety, and jail enough executives to maybe make Boeing stop being a global safety risk and a national security concern.
Lol. People want Boeing to fail, because they’re corrupt, lying, poorly engineered pieces of shit riding on bribed politicians. They’ve already deliberately caused the deaths of hundreds of people due to willful and deliberate negligence to save a buck.
Nobody’s wanting the astronauts to die. And they won’t, they’re safe on the space station, and there are multiple options to get them home safe even if they have to abandon the POS Starliner to do it.
Seriously, some of the comments and their phrasing actively gave me flashbacks to my days on stan twitter.
That is clearly a meaning of “not stranded” I was previously unfamiliar with.
They’re not. The ship has 1 bad thruster, but need like a dozen to fail to make re-entry impossible. They could leave right now and everything would be just fine.
The thing is the module that’s malfunctioning doesn’t survive re-entry, so the only time to investigate the problem is before they head back.
If I were thw astronauts I’d refuse to take the starliner back down.
Boeing:
Guys!! Good news! You’re not stranded! We just can’t get you back for a couple of mo…er…weeks! Yeah! That’s the ticket!
Astronauts:
…
“Apollo returns, a Boeing story”
"Huston, we have a problem… "
…ok we figured it out, now guys you’ll have to build a few things. First thing, you’ll have to go into the garbage disposal and using plastic bags please collect small bundles of poop. Mix the poop with hydrochloric acid and make them into hexagonal shapes 6" tall by 2" thick. Now we’ll need one of you to get the flu… Go find a vial left by the ruzzians. Don’t worry, we got the antidote down here. Okay next collect all the snot and mix it up with 10% gelatin. Finally, you’ll have to go outside and patch the heat shield using the gelatine as glue…
Totally not stranded, according to Boeing.
They aren’t stranded because there is the emergency capsule to get them back.
Classic corporate doublespeak and half truths.
They’re not stranded because the part of the capsule that isn’t working has multiple redundancy and is intended to burn up on reentry anyway.
Starliner is perfectly capable of leaving the ISS whenever they want, but they would be unable to continue collecting data on the thruster shutoff (again, because it would burn up in the atmosphere).
Completely untrue. There are currently only 3 human-rated spacecraft docked to the ISS and none of them are set aside as some sort of emergency capsule. There’s no trickery here. The number of astronauts on board is equal to the number of seats available for them to ride back home in. The only reason they aren’t stranded is because Starliner is still fully capable of undocking and taking them home whenever necessary. If it wasn’t, then they would actually be stranded with no alternative way back beyond straping them to the floor of Dragon.
Getting strapped to the floor of a Dragon sounds like a great plot for a space thriller
Except the “emergency capsule” is all of them, including Starliner. Because Starliner is perfectly capable of returning to earth safely.
Because every thruster that has shut down has hot fired okay, and the known helium leaks still leave enough margin to cover several multiples of the 5 hours or so of RCS operation that you need to get to landing.
I thought one thruster has been permanently disabled now? Not that that’s a major problem, but it does eat into their redundancy somewhat.
