NASA Further Delays First Operational Starliner Flight (spacenews.com) 33
NASA will rely on SpaceX's Crew Dragon for two crewed missions to the ISS in 2025 while evaluating whether Boeing's Starliner requires another test flight for certification. SpaceNews reports: In an Oct. 15 statement, NASA said it will use Crew Dragon for both the Crew-10 mission to the ISS, scheduled for no earlier than February 2025, and the Crew-11 mission scheduled for no earlier than July. Crew-10 will fly NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers along with astronaut Takuya Onishi from the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. NASA has not yet announced the crew for the Crew-11 mission.
Earlier this year, NASA had hoped that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner would be certified in time to fly the early 2025 mission. Problems with the Crew Flight Test mission, which launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, led NASA to conclude in July that the spacecraft would not be certified in time. It delayed that Starliner-1 mission from February to August 2025, moving up Crew-10 to February. NASA also announced then that it would prepare Crew-11 in parallel with Starliner-1 for launch in that August 2025 slot. "The timing and configuration of Starliner's next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing's path to system certification is established," NASA said in its statement about the 2025 missions. "NASA is keeping options on the table for how best to achieve system certification, including windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025."
Earlier this year, NASA had hoped that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner would be certified in time to fly the early 2025 mission. Problems with the Crew Flight Test mission, which launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, led NASA to conclude in July that the spacecraft would not be certified in time. It delayed that Starliner-1 mission from February to August 2025, moving up Crew-10 to February. NASA also announced then that it would prepare Crew-11 in parallel with Starliner-1 for launch in that August 2025 slot. "The timing and configuration of Starliner's next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing's path to system certification is established," NASA said in its statement about the 2025 missions. "NASA is keeping options on the table for how best to achieve system certification, including windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025."
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Or are you referring to military in leadership? Because ULA has you covered there too: https://www.ulalaunch.com/care... [ulalaunch.com]
Re:We need the army to take control (Score:5, Insightful)
Stay in Russia, asshole.
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Grab the situation by the balls, so to speak.
Ditch Boeing ASAP (Score:5, Interesting)
And please get rid of SLS. Cancel it now. Call your congresscritter and insist on it. I am serious. That thing is a cancer. The money should go to Stoke Space, Blue Origin, Relativity Space, Rocket Lab, Astra, Firefly, SpaceX, homeless guy down the street etc. Flush it down any toilet but Boeing's.
Re:Ditch Boeing ASAP (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Ditch Boeing ASAP (Score:4, Insightful)
Once starship is operational, Iâ(TM)m not convinced that asteroid mining would be cheeper than it. It will lower launch costs per kg by about 2-3 orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, going to and from the asteroid belt requires about 7km/s of delta v in each direction, which is actually *more* fuel than reaching LEO once youâ(TM)ve gone both ways. Why do you think europa clipper required an entire expended falcon heavy *plus* a kick stage to get out there (and still required a bunch of gravity assists on the way).
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Once starship is operational, Iâ(TM)m not convinced that asteroid mining would be cheeper than it. It will lower launch costs per kg by about 2-3 orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, going to and from the asteroid belt requires about 7km/s of delta v in each direction, which is actually *more* fuel than reaching LEO once youâ(TM)ve gone both ways. Why do you think europa clipper required an entire expended falcon heavy *plus* a kick stage to get out there (and still required a bunch of gravity assists on the way).
Asteroid mining is, at some point in the future, going to be "profitable." But that point won't come until it ceases to be about tugging shit back and forth to Earth, or we come up with a propulsion method other than, "Load up chemicals, spew them out in fire as mass." Maybe there's mining operations to gather fuel on the other end of the run, but I don't really see that being the way to get past the main issue. It simply costs too much in energy and/or mass to shove ourselves around out there today to make
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come up with a propulsion method other than, "Load up chemicals, spew them out in fire as mass."
We already have that. We only need chemical rockets to get out of Earth's gravity well.
Once in space, we can use ion drives for slow but steady propulsion.
To launch from an asteroid, we can use an electric rail gun.
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going to and from the asteroid belt requires about 7km/s of delta v in each direction
You don't have to go to the asteroid belt to mine asteroids.
There are trillions of tonnes of M-type (metal) asteroids in near-Earth orbits.
Here's one example: (6178)_1986_DA [wikipedia.org].
It is mostly iron (about 100 billion tonnes) but also contains about a billion tonnes of gold, platinum, iridium, and other precious metals and rare earths.
The delta-V is small, and solar energy is plentiful for ore processing.
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Google tells me that we mine about 2 billion tonnes of iron a year.
How are you going to make it cheaper to drop iron (the definition of heavy, right?) down the gravity well than it is to dig it up? Honest question.
I mean - unless up there is where you want it. Which might make more sense.
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The point of mining in space is that the resulting material is IN SPACE.
The iron would be used to construct steel megastructures in solar or Earth orbit, such as O'Neill Cylinders.
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Experience has told us in the past that relying on a single supplier, a monopoly, is a bad idea.
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Right now the US is concentrating on getting humans into space semi-reliably. SpaceX is working on getting them into space semi-cheaply as well, but that's not ready yet.
Artemis is at least working on some infrastructure, like a station in lunar orbit. That's a lot better than just recreating the direct lauch, land, plant flag, direct return model of Apollo. It would have been better if they specified orbital shuttles and tugs to make the transit to lunar orbit from stations in Earth orbit, but you have to
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Re:Ditch Boeing ASAP (Score:4, Interesting)
While I don't necessarily entirely disagree, it should be kept in mind that, despite all their successes, SpaceX has not yet demonstrated capability equal to what SLS has already done. SLS has already put a human-passenger-capable-size payload around the moon. SpaceX will not have equivalent demonstrated capability until starship on-orbit refueling is demonstrated. Starship is not capable of direct to lunar launch. I typically think of SLS as the more expensive of two redundant options. I think we are not quite to the point where it can be dispensed of out-of-hand, but getting pretty close. I'm not aware that any of the other companies you mention other than SpaceX have plans for anything capable of putting hardware that can support humans beyond low Earth orbit.
My bet is that there will be maybe one or two more SLS launches, by which point SpaceX will basically have a full-cycle lunar access system, and SLS will then be cancelled. The SpaceX-based system is very different, since it would consist of launching humans on Falcon+Dragon, the "human landing system" as a variant starship (without reentry capability) and then as many as 5 or 10 fuel launches. However, the big difference is that the human-rated part of this type system already has two options (Falcon+Dragon, Atlas+Starliner) almost through certification. This is the reason to cancel SLS really. It is unclear that there is a realistic path to human-carry certification. But, given the investment so far, it is probably worth using SLS to get some hardware into lunar orbit. Assuming SpaceX continues to succeed, that is probably what will happen I think.
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Or, simply, delay and reset SLS expectations to allow Boeing time to figure out what they will be able to do.
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SpaceX will not have equivalent demonstrated capability until starship on-orbit refueling is demonstrated.
Where are you getting that from? It has to be false as far as I can tell. I googled it and found an article claiming on-orbit refueling will be required written by a (non-engineer) person who thinks Starship will have a 50% shortfall and assumes things like hot-staging will decrease rather than increase performance. Also, even if Starship underperforms by 50% as the article claims, in non-reusable form it can deliver more mass to TLI than SLS.
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Starship can't deliver humans anywhere yet, so there's that.
There's not a whole lot of point in comparing expendable Starship missions, with a stripped down "Starship," because that negates most of its advantages. Starship is designed to be reusable and to refuel in orbit, and that's what it's going to do. I don't think this is the huge deal some people here make it out to be. We've been transferring fuel in orbit for quite a while, and Starship did this already, internally. The additional step is just rend
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Starship can't deliver humans anywhere yet, so there's that.
Just to point out the elephant in the room, neither can Starliner right now, hence this story, and without Starliner, neither can SLS.
And SLS can't take anybody to the moon without SpaceX's Starship (HLS version) either way. The reason for the refueling stop is so that there's enough fuel for landing on the moon and taking off again repeatedly, not merely to get to the moon. They launch a stripped-down Starship that's basically a giant fuel tank so that the can refuel Starship after it is in orbit, which
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You imagined that elephant. SLS and Starliner are completely different things. SLS uses the Orion module, which is a combination of a Lockheed capsule and Airbus service module. Orion seems to have run through all its tests just fine, including a flight around the moon. That flight, by the way, flew the SLS hardware.
I'm not sure where you're going with the rest. Sure, you cou
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I'm not prepared, as a taxpayer, to waste billions of dollars on Boeing for shitty expendable rockets .. especially when most of it will be spent on building yachts for the Boeing C-suite rather than rockets. SLS is a major rip off for taxpayers. Even the contractor building the new launch platform for it has been working on it for 6 or 7 years and wants $2.7 billion, when SpaceX has built like 3 towers for a fraction of the price .. in a fraction of the time. They rebuilt the destroyed launch tower in mont
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Yes, another moon pissing contest is even more silly than the last one. Unfortunately many of your fellow taxpayers and a majority of your elected representatives disagree with you. They disagree so much that they're quite vigorously proposing to scrap all the actual good things about Artemis in favour of just putting the damn boots on the moon already.
And this thread is talking about an expendable Starship versus an expendable Artemis. I fail to see how the former is any better than the latter, particularl
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You imagined that elephant. SLS and Starliner are completely different things. SLS uses the Orion module, which is a combination of a Lockheed capsule and Airbus service module. Orion seems to have run through all its tests just fine, including a flight around the moon. That flight, by the way, flew the SLS hardware.
Gah. i mixed up the two NASA capsules again. The fact that there are two NASA capsules simultaneously is, in and of itself, bizarre.
Either way, it remains true that SLS can't get to the moon without Starship (HLS), making it kind of an uninteresting project without that key part. So Orion and HLS are basically just a hedge against Starship not being able to land safely without going off like a hand grenade upon water impact. *sigh*
I'm not sure where you're going with the rest. Sure, you could probably modify the Starship booster to launch Orion. You'd have to finish developing it, mate it to the capsule, human rate it.
Or you could just use the Starship capsule. It's at least theoretically
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Orion is a product of the Orion program, which is Artemis except ordered by George Bush Jr. instead of Donald Trump. There was a project to strip it down into a Dragon/Starliner type vehicle for trips to the ISS. It was Bigelow Aerospace, and didn't work out. Bigelow dropped the idea, and Lockheed, and started work on a capsule with Boeing instead. That's Starliner. It's not unusual that there are two capsules: Orion is a much more capable spacecraft than Starliner is, designed for long duration and deep sp
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Orion is a product of the Orion program, which is Artemis except ordered by George Bush Jr. instead of Donald Trump. There was a project to strip it down into a Dragon/Starliner type vehicle for trips to the ISS. It was Bigelow Aerospace, and didn't work out. Bigelow dropped the idea, and Lockheed, and started work on a capsule with Boeing instead. That's Starliner. It's not unusual that there are two capsules: Orion is a much more capable spacecraft than Starliner is, designed for long duration and deep space, not to mention reentry from a lunar transfer orbit.
But unless I'm missing something, Orion can do everything Starliner can do, at a slightly higher cost in terms of replacing the larger ablative heat shield. So having two designs simultaneously still seems strange to me. Orion can do everything Dragon can do, too, so Orion by itself would have been an adequate alternative without needing to build Starliner at all.
You're proposing an expendable Starship.
No, I'm just proposing Starship. AFAIK, the Starship capsule is always reusable (though this is still untested from anything approaching a luna
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The current estimate for a Starship launch is $100 million... for a gas tank with some flaps and engines attached. Someone took the price of a Raptor, multiplied by 39 and added a bit for steel tank they're attached to. It costs quite a bit more to build an actual spacecraft capable of carrying people, build, maintain and operate all the ground infrastructure, etc. I highly doubt Starship goes to the moon and comes back in one piece without refuelling. You're ditching both with your plan.
Orion is much more
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The current estimate for a Starship launch is $100 million... for a gas tank with some flaps and engines attached.
For a non-reusable launch, yes. For a reusable launch, it's $3 million.
Someone took the price of a Raptor, multiplied by 39 and added a bit for steel tank they're attached to. It costs quite a bit more to build an actual spacecraft capable of carrying people, build, maintain and operate all the ground infrastructure, etc.
Musk's estimates, not mine.
I highly doubt Starship goes to the moon and comes back in one piece without refuelling. You're ditching both with your plan.
Who said anything about doing it without refueling?
Orion is much more capable than Starliner or Dragon. It's launch mass is 33 tonnes. Starliner is 13 and Dragon Crew is 12.5. You can use a 40' motorhome to commute to work but a Civic is a lot more practical, which is why we build both.
In theory, maybe, but when it is going to cost you almost $7 billion in R&D costs (not including Boeing's one-point-five-billion-dollar loss on that contract), and you're planning maybe low double-digit launches, the money saved per launch over the cost of an Orion capsule is unlikely to pay for the cost of development over the lifetime of the design. Eve
Another Test Flight? (Score:4, Funny)
There is nothing to evaluate (Score:4, Informative)
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Better a pleonasm than a neoplasm.
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The moronic MBAs
Well, at least we know who will be going on their next test flight.