NASA chief classifies Starliner flight as “Type A” mishap, says agency made mistakes

"The most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware."

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[Ragashingo]

Finally! Those original uncrewed near failures + the crewed near disaster should have had a full review long ago. I only fear that Isaacman won't be around much longer and Boeing / Old Space will buy a new industry yes man once again.

 

[Ragashingo]

Having now read the report NASA released, it seems almost criminal that the 6DOF loss was not communicated to the public. Here's the key paragraph in the report:

While in a manual hold at 260m, two additional jets triggered fail-off FDIR. Thrusters B2A2 (GMT 15:28), were removed from the the control algorithm resulting in 0FT for 6DOF control, and S1A1 (GMT15:31) resulting in loss of X-axis translation and degraded pitch and yaw capability. The loss of X-axis translation resulted in a loss of movement in the forward direction and the Starliner vehicle was no longer capable of docking to the ISS, until a subset of thrusters could be recovered.

(Bolding is included in the report.)

NASA and Boeing were having webcast press conferences and nothing nearly so dire was ever hinted at. Maybe even more galling was Boeing's stupid starlinerupdate.com website that kept blog posting articles talking up how capable Starliner was and how ready and confident Boeing was to bring the crew back home on Starliner.

We had two astronauts literally stranded in space for a couple of hours unable to return to earth or dock with the ISS and that was never communicated. My perception is we can't trust Boeing or NASA to tell us how bad a problem is until years later and that all their press conferences during the crisis were essentially meaningless.

 

[Ragashingo]

The timeline shows thruster S1A1 being nominally offline for 14 minutes 10 seconds, with a hotfire performed less than 7 minutes after it initially went offline.

I'd count the entire 13:38:12 to 16:41:40 as a serious problem. One where either option of safety was seriously in question. But yes, they were only actually completely unable to move for a shorter time.

 

[Ragashingo]

Not quite - they could still have pitched 90 degrees and use y- or z-axis translation to null out their velocity.

What they couldn't do is dock, because that requires thrust in the x-axis to approach and hold with the docking port in the correct alignment.

Yeah... if the emergency had been that bad, the controllers would have figured something out. Aren't we doing crazy things like pointing Hubble using one reaction wheel and the pressure from solar wind or something at this point?

 

[Ragashingo]

I must have watched a different press conference - because they are STILL going to keep working with Boeing on Starliner. Even as Jared stated that the root cause of the issue - STILL - isn't completely nailed down. Something seems very off about all of this.

The only reason to continue with Starliner is to have a short back-up should Crew Dragon suffer a problem and be grounded. But with the Space Station near end-of-life, it's something of a participation ribbon for Boeing. Giving them a chance to prove Starliner would have eventually worked, and then dropping it because we don't need it anymore.

Finally, I think Jared is dead wrong about needing a manned orbital economy. I seriously doubt that private companies will make manned commercial Space Stations economically viable. There are many companies that want to try, but ALL of them will fail. So, not only does Starliner have no future, but neither does Crew Dragon. There is no manned orbital economy that makes good business sense.

I kinda wonder if this document was something of an unofficial killing off of Starliner. At the very least there were two big problems listed that would require pretty massive redesigns. The thrusters damaging the o-ring seals. And the service module not having enough redundancy in terms of staring a reentry burn. (I'm a bit hazy on the SM part, I think it was because a helium leak could completely jeopardize the SM thruster function?, but it was something they cleared out as an unacceptable risk that nobody noticed for years.)

With those two issues, I don't see how Boeing and its subcompanies have anywhere near enough time to redesign, ground test, space test, and certify Starliner for human spaceflight. Maybe NASA will let them use a couple of them for cargo, but I'm doubtful humans will ever get back in one.

 

[Ragashingo]

Sure, but remember that at the point in question, thrusters are failing for some unknown reason.

Let's say you've lost x-axis control and replace it by rotating so that the y-axis is in-line with where the x-axis was a moment ago. Fine.

What happens if having to use the y-axis thrusters for both x-axis and y-axis manoeuvres burns them out?

Or switching back and forth burns out the rotational thrusters?

Sure, they're willing to play around with novel ways of keeping Hubble's pointing stable. Hubble doesn't have a crew aboard. Had all six gyroscopes failed immediately after the last Shuttle mission to service Hubble, it still would have been four years past its original design life. It'll be sad when it goes, sure, but the past twenty years of Hubble has been bonus time, and I think the people squeezing every last second of life out of those last two functional gyroscopes understand that.

When crew are involved, you can't think in those terms.

Oh, for sure! Which is why I contend they were in dire trouble once they started losing multiple thrusters and not just in the short period where they had actually lost 6DOF. The unknowns were crazy. What if thrusters had continued to fail at random? What if more of them had not come back? And if you look at the timeline chart, they had thruster T1F1 suffer a "strike" after they had completed the bulk of their testing and switched Starliner back to auto pilot. I believe that means the system was unhappy with it and another suboptimal firing would have seen it disabled as well. That was just 30ish minutes before they docked.