NASA chief classifies Starliner flight as “Type A” mishap, says agency made mistakes
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Nice to see NASA take a long look at structural issues that led to such an inexplicable decision.
I always appreciate orgs that shine a light on their failures and resolve to do better, instead of memory holing the escapade and waiting for it to fall off the front page. At NASA.
/s
I always appreciate orgs that shine a light on their failures and resolve to do better, instead of memory holing the escapade and waiting for it to fall off the front page. At NASA.
/s
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This is a remarkable level of candor and transparency from NASA, full stop. Add that it is occuring during this administration and it is nothing short of astonishing. Speaks well of Mr Isaacman's mindset and leadership. It will be interesting to see how the accountability he mentioned plays out in the near future.
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Wow. Isaacman just threw a lot of people under the bus, and from what is available publicly IMO it is completely justified. Starliner should never have flown with crew onboard, and the bad decision making just compounded from there.
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The most astonishing part of Jared's letter is that while Butch and Suni were on station they were advocating for NASA to show leadership, and yet disagreements on the ground had "deteriorated into unprofessional conduct".
Yikes.
Yikes.
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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.
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I would really love to know what are in various other internal reports that have never seen the light of day. This isn't just damning due to what was in the the report, but the fact that apparently the report wasn't planned on being released despite the findings.
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I got a little bit more respect for Isaacman. It is a nearly impossible job but heads need to roll at NASA. This isn't a one off. Look at SLS and Orion. Yeah yeah it was stuck to NASA by the Senate and they get plenty of deserved scorn. However NASA management of that has been keystone cops level of bad.
NASA seems utterly incapable of any sort of oversight or management of anything involving HSF. When something is that rotten simply writing new memos about it isn't enough. You need to change people out. Some people need to be fired, some demoted, some put on administrative review.
HSF projects NASA had oversight on over last 40 years
I think NASA can do great things again but I don't think it can happen without a change of culture and you can't do that with all the same people who rotted the culture down to begin with.
I thought Starliner-1 was going to be cargo only given there hasn't been a single successful flight yet. That crew wouldn't happen until Starliner-2. Three for three failures and they are even considering humans on the next flight? JFC. Take what I said above and double it.
NASA seems utterly incapable of any sort of oversight or management of anything involving HSF. When something is that rotten simply writing new memos about it isn't enough. You need to change people out. Some people need to be fired, some demoted, some put on administrative review.
HSF projects NASA had oversight on over last 40 years
- STS - Two crews killed
- Constellation - Ares I would have killed a crew. It shouldn't even have been considered. Congress being cheap bastards likely saved the lives of a crew for the wrong reasons.
- SLS/Orion - Horribly mismanaged. Normalization of the deviance is already happening.
- Starliner - Came close to killing a crew after rubber stamping two failed flights in a row.
- Crew Dragon - Good but how much of this was NASA oversight and how much was simply SpaceX executing well regardless of if NASA was even there.
I think NASA can do great things again but I don't think it can happen without a change of culture and you can't do that with all the same people who rotted the culture down to begin with.
I thought Starliner-1 was going to be cargo only given there hasn't been a single successful flight yet. That crew wouldn't happen until Starliner-2. Three for three failures and they are even considering humans on the next flight? JFC. Take what I said above and double it.
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Not so much throwing people under the bus but holding the necessary people accountable for putting ego and image above the safety of actual human beings. I can imagine the amount of furor that occurred in those internal meetings about this before Isaacman's official letter came out.
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It's really sad when those of us out here in internet commenting land knew that people should not have been on the next flight and that the demo flight should have been repeated yet again.
And the obviousness of this problem is equal to the obviousness that Orion should not fly crew until the heat shield model has been validated at actual lunar entry conditions.
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So fortunate the equivalent of Ctrl-Alt-Delete re-enabled the needed thrusters. Can you imagine what NASA would be like if we lost Butch and Suni?
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Boeing definition of "outstanding".
"We didn't kill the astronauts or destroy the ISS in the process."
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Trump wasn't president during that flight. But, the blame doesn't go on the prior white house either - the blame needs to be on NASA personnel - and that's where Isaacman put it.
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NASA needs this because I'm sure similar discussions are being held or will come about on upcoming human rated hardware which needs to work correctly to get folks to the moon and back, timelines be damned.
Leadership which is willing to lay it out in the open and say this was unsat will hopefully be willing to do the same in the future.
Leadership which is willing to lay it out in the open and say this was unsat will hopefully be willing to do the same in the future.
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And maybe an in-flight test of the ECLSS for more than 24h before committing four lives to it on a no-abort 9 additional days of mission.
Still, Issacmann is proving to be a breath of fresh air at NASA. Two thumbs way up.
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The good news is Trump is half senile, has the attention span of a gnat, and routinely naps half the day away. This might escape his radar simply because it is boring space nerd stuff. Trump just wants NASA to land on the moon during his term so he can get credit. He couldn't care less about anything else. There is zero chance of that happening but nobody is telling him yet. He proposed axing Artemis program entirely after Artemis III with no replacement. No alternate crew view, no replacement missions just zero it out. Why would he care? Artemis IV would happen after he is no longer President.
However yeah if the right person convinces Trump this was done to make him look bad then the director is gone.
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This is absolutely true, but I'm afraid it doesn't go far enough. NASA seems to be losing its way on robotic spaceflight as well--just look at the flaming dumpster full of money (and no guarantee of timeliness, or even success) Mars Sample Return has wound up becoming.
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They killed 8 astronauts twice and nobody so much as lost their job or had a demotion. A few resigned but weren't forced out. In fact the only action in the aftermath of Challenger disaster was to sideline the contractor who warned NASA endlessly that launching under those conditions had a serious risk of a fatal accident. See the problem wasn't killing eight crew the problem was this guy who kept warning us and removing any plausible deniability.
So if they killed two more I wouldn't expect much would change without outside action. "Thoughts and prayers. Space is dangerous. We must continue Butch and Suni's legacy."
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The brief time I was at NASA, the candidate most likely to be the next NASA administrator was running JSC and overspent budget by I forget exactly what multiple of his allocated budget. Multiple billions over, anyway. Oops.
On the robotics/science side we had no respect for the human space flight side. I mean sure we’d occasionally mix up units and splat into Mars, but we could try more often and get shit done without human deaths, at far lower cost.
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The GOP already quite vocally (and in a bullshit way) put the blame on Biden a while ago, so this accurate criticism doesn’t conflict with the program of hating on the Democrats.
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Shit he's showing competence, transparency, and admitting errors - how long till he's fired?
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It's terribly easy to dish out blame if the incident in question predates you being installed in the post.
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True - that is at least on par for the administration. I guess we see how that balances against perceived competence on the fickle scales of the Orange menace
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The first uncrewed test wasn't a "near failure". It was a complete failure. Yes, they got the vehicle back intact, but it didn't complete the primary mission objectives, and it didn't give them enough info to fix the problems on the next try.
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Some missions are doomed at an architectural level. They approved it in September 2022 and paused it 14 months later because of the growing cost and complexity, and it is effectively cancelled. For NASA program management that qualifies as decisive action.
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Less easy since most of the people involved still work at NASA and can probably make his life pretty miserable for as long as he's Admin.
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Isaacman's candor reminds me of Feynman on the Rogers Commission investigating Challenger.
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Yeah, but we remember that at the time, after we were still blinking in disbelief at our screens after formal coverage of the test flight finished, and after an hour delay to the presser in order to get their stories straight, that when the feed returned, Jim Bridenstine stared into the camera and confidently announced that "Today, a lot of things went right."
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"or accepted the issue as an unexplained anomaly"
No big deal, somehow we are sure it won't happen again . . .
No big deal, somehow we are sure it won't happen again . . .
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