Boeing and NASA Target December For Second Try at Uncrewed Orbital Demonstration Flight (techcrunch.com) 25
NASA and Boeing have provided some updates around their Commercial Crew plans, which aim to get Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft certified for regular human flight. From a report: The CST-100 and Boeing's Commercial Crew aspirations hit a snag last year with a first attempt of an uncrewed orbital flight test, which did not go to plan thanks to a couple of software errors that led to an early mission ending, and a failure to reach the International Space Station as intended. In a blog post on Friday, NASA said that it and partner Boeing were aiming to fly the re-do of that uncrewed test no earlier than December 2020. This will involve flying the fully reusable Starliner CST-100 without anyone on board, in a live, fully automated simulation of how a launch with crew would go, including a rendezvous and docking with the ISS on orbit, and a return trip and controlled landing and capsule recovery. During the original OFT last December, the spacecraft took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V as planned, but encountered an issue with its onboard mission timer shortly after disengaging from the launch vehicle. That caused it to misfire its thrusters and expend fuel, and a communication error meant that NASA was not able to correct the issue until it had used too much fuel to allow it to continue to the Space Station as planned. The capsule did safely return to Earth, however, and provided valuable test data on the way.
Who cares about this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only has SpaceX has already made a crewed flight to the ISS on its Crew Dragon capsule but the cost per seat on the SpaceX capsule is cheaper than even the most optimistic forecasts of the cost per seat on the Boeing product.
Why even bother with the Boeing alternative? Will it do things or go places that SpaceX can't? Or is this just another case of the government funneling money into crap to create jobs and keep big aerospace companies happy? (the same way as they continue to funnel money into the useless waste of space that is the SLS even though the alternatives from SpaceX and others are better)
Re:Who cares about this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
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We can contract out other baskets if needed. We're doing it today with the Russian rides.
Insane to pay for SLS for a "just in case" potential.
Competition Matters [Re:Who cares about this?] (Score:2)
Please elaborate. Having to choose between Muskies and Ruskies is a lousy choice.
We need at least two viable and active domestic choices. Russia plays games. And, oligopolies almost always grow fat and lazy.
Correction [Re:Competition Matters [Re:Who cares (Score:1)
Re: "And, oligopolies almost always grow fat and lazy."
Should be "monopolies". Oligopolies also grow fat and lazy. Ideally we'd have lots of competitors in just about any industry, but due to the expensive nature of space travel, that's a tall order.
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Yes, their moon lander was spectacular, at least until it hit the lunar surface at a high speed
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We can contract out other baskets if needed. We're doing it today with the Russian rides.
Yeah. And that was basically our only choice. Another example was the Space Shuttle. So we go with SpaceX and declare Boeing the loser. The fourth return trip from ISS, though, there's an issue with the heat shield. Now we have to wait until NASA and SpaceX figure out what went wrong and make sure it doesn't happen again. And nobody's going to space until that happens.
This way, while NASA and SpaceX figure out what went wrong, we have Boeing.
I understand where you're coming from. I read somewhere tha
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Or alternatively you as the EU/Airbus allege see the money being paid to Boeing as an illegal state subsidy and it all makes a lot more sense.
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And if history is a guide, Boeing will insist on getting a certain number of flights in order to cover their costs of keeping the product alive. The ULA is gearing up to do that with one of their lifters that is no longer economically competitive with SpaceX: unless they get a guaranteed number of
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"Put all your eggs in one basket. Then watch over that basket." -- Andrew Carnegie.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/... [quoteinvestigator.com]
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If the second basket is expensive and fragile maybe you'd be better off buying more of the same kind of basket you've already got.
Keeping Boing involved is just pork.
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Congressional pork.
There's no other reason.
Why else continue a program that just announced a 30% cost increase?
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This, U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) [wikipedia.org]
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Pork isn't the only factor. There's also beef -- I mean, we want more than one capable launch provider, for a healthier market and national security.
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More than just a couple of software errors (Score:1)
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When SpaceX blows up a Starship in Texas it is considered a learning experience
They've had what, one unexpected explosion? The rest have been testing to failure. When you're trying to blow up a craft and you blow it up, mission accomplished. When you thought you were going to dock and then you don't because of a sophomoric error, the only mission you may have accomplished was proving that you're incompetent. But we already knew that about Boeing...
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Between no end-to-end test of the software, no unified test of the systems, loss of communication because of poorly located and designed antennas, burn out of at least one RCS cluster, reading the wrong clock when initializing the system, burning nearly all of their consumables
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Unfounded rumours... (Score:4, Funny)
...have it that Boeing wanted to call it the CST-100-MAX, but NASA put the kibosh on that idea.
It may be expensive and delay of schedule (Score:2)