What Exactly Happened During Boeing's Starliner Mission to the ISS? (spacenews.com) 80
Space News reports on Boeing's Saturday update about the "Starliner" spacecraft which cut short a test flight last week:
Boeing emphasized the good condition of the spacecraft, which showed "little scorching" from reentry and used only a fraction of its onboard propellant reserved for reentry, which the company said confirmed aerodynamic models of the spacecraft. The interior of the Starliner cabin appeared the same after landing as it did before its Dec. 20 launch from Cape Canaveral, the company noted, evidence that "the Starliner's fully operational life support system functioned as intended and the layout of the interior is well-suited to support crew members in the future."
The statement, though, provided no updates on the timer problem that turned what was originally an eight-day mission into a two-day one without a planned docking at the International Space Station. The spacecraft's mission elapsed timer, which is set by communicating with its Atlas 5 rocket prior to liftoff, was off by 11 hours. That caused the spacecraft to think it was on the wrong phase of its mission after separation from the rocket's upper stage, triggering thruster firings that used excessive amounts of fuel until ground controllers could take over and turn off the thrusters. Why the timer was off, particularly by such a large amount, any why it wasn't detected prior to launch is not known. "If I knew, it wouldn't have happened," said Jim Chilton, senior vice president for Boeing's space and launch division, at a Dec. 21 briefing. "We are surprised. A very large body of integrated tests, approved by NASA, didn't surface this."
"Further complicating matters, at the time when the engines should have fired, the spacecraft was out of coverage from communications satellite," notes the Motley Fool: This prevented override commands from NASA from reaching the spacecraft, correcting the error, and salvaging the mission. By the time NASA was able to reestablish communication, Starliner lacked sufficient fuel to correct course and dock...
NASA and Boeing tried to put a brave face on things, but there's no denying this was a disappointment.
Although Space News also notes that after the landing, "NASA leadership stated that the problem, once understood and corrected, would not necessarily prevent Boeing from proceeding with a crewed test flight."
The statement, though, provided no updates on the timer problem that turned what was originally an eight-day mission into a two-day one without a planned docking at the International Space Station. The spacecraft's mission elapsed timer, which is set by communicating with its Atlas 5 rocket prior to liftoff, was off by 11 hours. That caused the spacecraft to think it was on the wrong phase of its mission after separation from the rocket's upper stage, triggering thruster firings that used excessive amounts of fuel until ground controllers could take over and turn off the thrusters. Why the timer was off, particularly by such a large amount, any why it wasn't detected prior to launch is not known. "If I knew, it wouldn't have happened," said Jim Chilton, senior vice president for Boeing's space and launch division, at a Dec. 21 briefing. "We are surprised. A very large body of integrated tests, approved by NASA, didn't surface this."
"Further complicating matters, at the time when the engines should have fired, the spacecraft was out of coverage from communications satellite," notes the Motley Fool: This prevented override commands from NASA from reaching the spacecraft, correcting the error, and salvaging the mission. By the time NASA was able to reestablish communication, Starliner lacked sufficient fuel to correct course and dock...
NASA and Boeing tried to put a brave face on things, but there's no denying this was a disappointment.
Although Space News also notes that after the landing, "NASA leadership stated that the problem, once understood and corrected, would not necessarily prevent Boeing from proceeding with a crewed test flight."
Who built it . . . ? (Score:2)
. . . engineers? Or MBAs . . ?
That could explain everything.
Re:Who built it . . . ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Defense contractors. Since they've become too big, not just to fail, but to *punish*, they get paid to fix their own screw-ups. That explains every big ticket defense tech program since the great merger of defense companies in the 90s.
Re: Who built it . . . ? (Score:3)
For proving functional safety and ISO26262 compliance, you DO NOT want modern complex processors. You want simple, predictable logic. The most advanced safety certified chip youâ(TM)ll find in a car is an Infineon TriCore, and those are 20 year old designs.
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How the hell am I supposed to play games on it then?
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An interesting article [arstechnica.com] about space hardened electronics, which states that space applications need better CPUs, so the old method of producing old designs on space rated semiconductors is not sufficient and creating space rated production lines for the latest CPUs is too expensive, thus both ESA and NASA designed high tolerance, high reliability CPUs intended to be manufactured with traditional consumer production, where reliability is achieved not by using special materials, but by multiplying control circ
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Twenty year old chips for 50 year old capsules.
It's like NASA just forgot everything between 1975 and 2011.
Re:Who built it . . . ? (Score:5, Informative)
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At Boeing, there really isn't a difference. Boeing used to be an "engineering" company. They've since become a "profit minded" company.
Well, to be fair, if a company isn't profit-minded, it soon ceases being a company. Except, historically, for defense contractors operating on cost-plus contracts.
Some of those "profit" changes include single project contract engineers. Meaning all the historical knowledge gained from past projects is now lost
Well, that's not profit-minded thinking, that's short-term thinking. Which is often a problem, true. Being profit-minded is the opposite of a problem.
Re:Who built it . . . ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps it'll make more sense if you understand that "profit minded" typically means short-term profit minded. Save a dime today, lose $10 tomorrow.
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I think the problem comes when companies need very long term thinking in evaluating profit. The 737 MAX is an example where the money savings of not doing a new design was very large - but the loss of reputation even larger. A reputation is a not tangible, but is extremely important to a company like Boeing.
We don't know yet if this Starliner problem was the result of poor management, or simply an unlikely event that would not have been caught in a reasonable review. Its possible though that facing competi
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Totally crazy from an engineering point of view, but such things are decided by non-engineers.
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And that is hoe you become 2nd rated and eventually a complete failure.
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Some of those "profit" changes include single project contract engineers. Meaning all the historical knowledge gained from past projects is now lost.
That explains a lot. The problem is that in any advanced engineering discipline, a lot of the knowledge and skills needed are not available from the literature, but only from experience. Hence doing what Boeing does, they cannot go beyond mediocre now and even that may be difficult. Makes me wonder whether they even _can_ fix the 737 max 8.
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Makes me wonder whether they even _can_ fix the 737 max 8.
So far they've done a fine job of avoiding anything solution-like.
Re:Who built it . . . ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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IST is 10.5 hours off EST.
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Re: I can't do anything online anymore. (Score:1)
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Can we have APK back? Please?
Why the error? Repeat from the past... (Score:1)
Why the timer was off, particularly by such a large amount, any why it wasn't detected prior to launch is not known. "If I knew, it wouldn't have happened," said Jim Chilton, senior vice president for Boeing's space and launch division, at a Dec. 21 briefing. "We are surprised. A very large body of integrated tests, approved by NASA, didn't surface this."
We've seen this before... Difference between Imperial and English units.
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I think you will find the second is a metric SI unit. The second came into being after the French Revolution.
Re: Why the error? Repeat from the past... (Score:2)
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We've seen this before... Difference between Imperial and English units.
Kind of... It turns out that Boeing outsourced their embedded software development to a low-cost contracting firm from a small principality that still uses the Julian calendar.
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Guess it's a good thing they didn't contract this out to Ethiopia. Last I checked, they were on a calendar that was s.t. like 7 years different from the one everyone else uses. Which means they hit Y2K in 2007. It's currently the year 2012 on their calendar. Think what a difference that would have made!
Under the Islamic calendar, it's now the year 1441. I'm not sure how widely that is used, however.
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We've seen this before... Difference between Imperial and English units.
Maybe this time it is the time difference between Mumbai, India and Miami?
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That would make sense, although I believe Mumbai is on GMT+5:30, so the diff would have been ten and a half hours. Unless someone rounded that up to 11...
Re: Why the error? Repeat from the past... (Score:1)
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Wouldn't the Empire have used English units? Or are you calling US units "English"?
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The British Empire used British Imperial units (defined in 1824 by an Act of Parliament) because the UK British government (Great Britain and Ireland) was the governing country of the Empire.
However, for Americans it is confusing because the 1776 US War of Independence caused the US not to get the 1824 update to the Weights and Measures Act. Therefore the US got stuck with the old definitions which I think the US calls English units.
The OP is confused because the metric SI system was originally devised by t
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Most people today are unaware that the Nixon/Ford administration implemented a ten year conversion period from Imperial to Metric measurements. Throughout the country road signs showed speed limits and distances in both miles and kilometers, measuring tapes came with both Imperial and metric units on them, factories started using hardware measured in metric units. Then the Reagan Badministration came in and canceled the entire process. Thanks to the conservatives we're still stuck with the same system th
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I think you mean British Imperial units versus metric SI units.
Note that US Imperial units and British Imperial units are similar but not equal especially the US gallon versus the British gallon.
Beware that the English government then later the UK government had Acts of Parliament for Weights and Measures. Unfortunately, after the US War of Independence caused the US not to get the updates to the Weights and Measures Act thereby causing the volume of the gallon to diverge between the US and the UK.
The UK is
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Boeing is the epitome of a government contractor. (Score:3)
They are way overbudget on all their government projects, and we taxpayers will be paying whatever they want to finish the porkbarrel projects they're working on.
The SLS should be scrapped at this point, and they should just buy a few Falcon Heavys for their flights.
They have the only aircraft that has been recalled indefinitely; IDK about you, but I'll be checking my flights in the future to make sure I'm not flying on one, if they ever get to return them to service.
They couldn't even set the freaking clock on a billion dollar spacecraft; my wall clock sets itself, as does my phone, watch...
High tech company indeed, lol.
Re:Boeing is the epitome of a government contracto (Score:4, Interesting)
https://qz.com/1572381/the-rel... [qz.com]
Boeing is / or was, an engineering that generates the vast majority of its revenue and profit building planes for private companies.
More accurately, Boeing is an example of late stage capitalism. It has cannibalized all the ideals that made it successful in an attempt to squeeze more profit to increase owner equity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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More accurately, Boeing is an example of late stage capitalism. It has cannibalized all the ideals that made it successful in an attempt to squeeze more profit to increase owner equity.
Pretty much. That also means they will die, but unfortunately that may still take a while.
Bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
"Record revenue of $28.3 billion and record operating profit of $4.2 billion driven by higher volume"
That's from here:
https://investors.boeing.com/i... [boeing.com]
(Dollars in Millions)
Commercial Airplanes
Revenues 238
Defense, Space & Security
Revenues $6,111
Since they are limited in the technology they sell to other countries, a large chunk of the 6 billion comes out of our pocket.
They are a major contractor on the SLS, and it's so far behind schedule, no one even has a recovery plan.
All their parts are late.
The Max fiasco is just more fuel on the fire; the military stopped accepting refueling planes for a while last year because the fuselage and tanks were full of trash.
https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]
Everything I said above is true, with links.
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That's 238 airplanes. Just below the number of planes, on the actual "revenues" line you can see the value of $17,306 (million) for revenues. How did you manage to copy and paste from two different lines like that? Also, did you notice that's just for one quarter? If you tilt your eyes a little bit to the right you can see the yearly figures too. You could then even use a calculator and discover that the Defense, Space & Security revenues for 2018 are 22.9% of the total revenues for 2018.
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What does the SLS have to do with the Starliner? I agree with your assessment of SLS, but the Starliner is a project that should definitely continue and is not dependent on the SLS. I'm really not sure the relationship between the Starliner and the Orion capsule. There's immediate room and need for both SpaceX Dragon and the Starliner. I for one was really excited to see if fly, and glad it safely returned, despite this problem.
As for the clock issue, I'm glad to know it's so simple! They must have just
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When the 737-Max flies again, it will be the world's most scrutinized airplane in history. I'd feel pretty safe flying on it.
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Isn't this a fixed price contact?
That's why they want NASA to sign off without a visit to the ISS - they would have to do the repeat test flight at their own expense.
Where was the timer programmed? (Score:1)
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They wanted to out do SpaceX (Score:2)
Re:11 (Score:2)
The buck finally stopped, but not for long (Score:2)
The Good news is that Boeing's CEO during the project that led to this fiasco, Dennis Muilenberg, has been replaced. He had survived the 737 MAX disaster by blaming the head of Boeing's Commercial Airplane Division Kevin McAllister. But the Starliner incident proves that Boeing's quality sacrificing culture is company wide, and Muilenberg could no longer avoid the consequences.
The bad news: Muilenberg's successor, board chairman David Calhoun is widely characterized as a marketing droid. He does have aero
Boeing Economics 101 (Score:2)
The spacecraft's mission elapsed timer, which is set by communicating with its Atlas 5 rocket prior to liftoff, was off by 11 hours. Why the timer was off, particularly by such a large amount, any why it wasn't detected prior to launch is not known.
Because, like with the Boeing 737MAX, more sensors and code logic are an extra-cost option.
Seriously, there should code *somewhere* in the system that says the capsule won't still be connected to the launch vehicle, or that the boost phase doesn't last, for 11 hours after ignition.
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11 hours off? Isn't that roughly the time difference between USA and India?
And of course, they do not need to check the clock! They are Boeing and obviously Boeing does not make mistakes. Well.
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No, India has that weird 30 minute offset, so midnight in the Eastern US timezone is 10:30 a.m. in Bangalore.
On the other hand it is 11 hours difference between China Standard Time and Eastern US Time.
Summary is inaccurate. (Score:5, Informative)
They converted it wrong (Score:2)
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Do you mean the hours to kiloseconds conversion was done wrongly ?
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Verification vs Validation, MBA vs Engineer (Score:5, Insightful)
Boeing is run by an MBA- mentality management team that focuses on verifying requirements and meeting cost and schedule, instead of validating overall mission success.
This Starliner failure is what happens when engineering leadership is made subordinate to program management. Had anyone from NASA leadership remembered or learned from Apollo 1, they would have mandated Boeing engineering leadership be parallel to program management in order to emphasize technical risk and capability at least as much as cost and schedule. And, they would have emphasized validation at last as much as verification. Boeing's Starliner program lacks comprehensive systems engineering.
Boeing did the same with their X-32 competitor to the F-35: they had such shitty systems engineering that they all but handed the contract to Lockheed.
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This is what happens when you put political appointees and MBAs in charge of engineers.
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Elsewhere someone said that the mission counter started at power up rather than separation, so either the discrete was missed and that didn't throw any red flags, or the programing never included resetting the counter after separation. In either case it points at a remarkably incompetent programming team.
Somebody forgot to include check_ntp? (Score:2)
Just add the ansible role to the playbook, OK?
Had this been actually manned... (Score:2)
Had this been actually manned then, it would have been successful? Maybe so.
Had there been a pilot there riding herd on the automation, they would have likely detected "Hey, this thing is doing something weird and burning up all our fuel at the wrong time, shut it off!"
THIS is why you want a human in the loop....
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How? (Score:2)
I don't understand how it could go wrong --it's not like they used untested software .. i mean they previously used that same software on a plane, the 737-800 Max.
Bunch of clowns (Score:3)
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and they won't give me the time of day
I see what you did there.
Multiple issues (Score:2)
2) This shows exactly why SX's testing is superior to what Boeing is doing. SX is doing edge cases, including 3 flights (with of them done). Boeing is doing only 2 tests.
3) Even with several massive screw-ups, they are now pushing for a crewed go? Hopefully, NASA waits for SX's next test, and assuming that it is good, they then tell Boeing to no pay-out on the test and they have to still undergo another test, s
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there is NO REASON to actually allow Boeing to go forward on this.
Actually there is a reason. If they don't go ahead then the political appointees in charge won't get their cushy Boeing job and stock options after they leave "public service".
Clocks Not Set? (Score:2)
Has nobody at Boeing ever heard of NTP? You know, the protocol that lets computers synchronize what time it is.
Reminder to all and any kind of managers (Score:1)