11 ms·

Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico

80 points by clessg 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dghlsakjg 2y ago
I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?
- hindsightbias 2y ago
  It’s not like the HW folks had been building capsules for four decades. Look at the last 5 decades of SW. Why aren’t we in an iterative utopia already?
  - pmontra 2y ago
    It's an analogy that's only partially good. Software from 50 or 30 years ago couldn't solve some of the problems current software is solving because the hardware wasn't powerful enough. Example: we had neural networks theory and a little practice but without the current hardware we could not work on them and advance the theory. Could we be confident that LLM could be as good as they are? We could not. However let's go back 20 years or maybe 30 and more mundane tasks like word processing and spreadsheet were already a solved. We needed only to port them to newer versions of the OS. A Word from around 2000 would be OK for most tasks today.
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  I'm no expert but "private equity" seems to be a common refrain. First a company builds good products to build a band, then sells the brand.
- carabiner 2y ago
  ? The Starliner landed successfully, so we have shown that we can iterate.
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    The capsule landed successfully, but it was missing about 400 pounds of the most important cargo.
    - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
      Those are a pair of fat astronauts! Although I guess their spacesuits were missing too so maybe it adds up to that.
  - csomar 2y ago
    The Starliner only landed. It didn't successfully achieve its mission. In fact, it 100% failed.
    - m4rtink 2y ago
      Again - it is not it first fucked up test flight. :P
- sixothree 2y ago
  My only take listening to Apollo recordings is how much time they spent debugging issues. It seemed constant.
- skissane 2y ago
  > I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? I think SpaceX has been doing a great job of that, with Crew Dragon. > Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Yes, but also fewer options. This is the first time NASA has ever had a choice between two completely different American spacecraft to return crew on. It is like if you own two cars, and one is having mechanical problems, so you decide to take the more reliable one for a long trip; but if you only own one car, you would just have risked it with your only car, since you don't have much choice > Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Boeing has really struggled in making the cultural transition from old style cost-plus government contracting – in which cost overruns are charged to the taxpayer – to the new world of fixed price contracts. Not just with NASA, also with Pentagon projects such as the KC-46 aerial refuelling tanker. By contrast, SpaceX is a much younger company, so it never had that cost-plus culture. Plus, it has the advantage of being privately held – so no stock market to satisfy – and investors who are confident in its long-term prospects, so it isn't afraid to lose money on contracts in the short-term, expecting to make it back in the longer-run. By contrast, Boeing is tempted to cut corners in the development process to limit their losses on the contract. According to the rumour mill, part of how this whole fiasco happened: Boeing gave Aerojet Rocketdyne incorrect requirements specs for the thrusters. Boeing then sent Aerojet updated specs, but Aerojet refused to redesign the thrusters according to the new specs unless it was paid more by Boeing, which Boeing didn't want to do. So instead Boeing just decided to risk it with the incorrectly designed thrusters. They cooked up some analysis to justify that doing so was safe, but obviously that analysis was wrong.
  - aredox 2y ago
    Not too wrong as it made it back to Earth. > Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? NASA lost enough people during their "higher risk tolerance" epoch that they don't want to go through it again. Challenger and Columbia were such huge traumas each time...
    - ReptileMan 2y ago
      I think it was the other way around. In the higher risk tolerance era they only had the Apollo 1 fire. The shuttle clusterfucks happened when they no longer knew how to evaluate risks because of organizational culture.
- aredox 2y ago
  Because all of the welds were done by people who had their own know-how, and they retired without passing it on. And this is stuff you have to train on several decades, not just "follow the instructions". We can still redo it, but it is fairly complicated to restore the whole industrial base to match the past 1:1. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
  Generations and corporate cultures change. We've gone hard over into thinking that modeling and simulation alone can lead to greater profits due to (presumably) less infrastructure and fewer people on the job. Time and again it fails and we refuse to learn from it. The current trend in aerospace is Digital Transformation which is all the modeling and sim taken to 11. Making hardware work requires a certain mindset and a lot of practice. There's no money for either.
- vegetablepotpie 2y ago
  Although that happened over 50 years ago, and we can’t make the same exact designs, the physics is the same and well understood. Technology has evolved, and has given us more tools. Similar cultures can be made again that support that kind of work. What’s missing is we need better cultures. I’ve been in engineering cultures that are dominated by management desires to cut costs and deliver on schedule. Engineering excellence is never considered valuable, but it will be the only thing that makes you successful. Boeing lost its culture of engineering excellence > “Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. [1] https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2024/03/29/what-boeing-did-to-all-the-guys-who-remember-how-to-build-a-plane/ https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2024/03/29/what-boeing-did-...
  - sounds 2y ago
    Interesting thought. Could there also be the gradual evaporation of the old culture of fear? The 1940s through the 1960s fear of other countries, races, and ideologies? I wonder if the fear suppressed the natural behavior of Jim McNerney and others, keeping them from sowing division within the company because of the perceived danger from outside? Here are some other examples, where today these might sound like an excuse for aggressive business behavior, instead of a unifying mantra -- Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive" Dick Cheney, "Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose." (Yes, yes, he's outing himself as unprincipled; I'm quoting him intentionally since people were still being people all throughout; does this show the larger populace wide zeitgeist?) John F. Kennedy, "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." I think it's interesting how the same thought can sound different when my mind is set in different contexts.
  - lenkite 2y ago
    That article sheds further light on the whistle blower who was assassinated. Didn't know John Barnett was such a major lightning rod at Boeing, documenting corruption to such an extraordinary extent that he was regularly abused by management and the CEO Jim McNerney. And finally was murdered when he was giving testimony. What a tragedy.
- Saturnial22 2y ago
  [flagged]
- crazygringo 2y ago
  We also had the Challenger disaster, which killed seven. And two astronauts died in a flash fire in 1967. Columbia too, another seven. This is not the first time something has not gone according to plan. Thankfully nobody died. Let's not look at the past through rose-colored glasses, and assume that things have gotten worse. Spaceflight has been full of mistakes from the start.
  - foobarbecue 2y ago
    Yep. And Apollo 11 was extremely close to being a crash.
    - chinathrow 2y ago
      13, not 11. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13
      - skissane 2y ago
        No, Apollo 11: > During the 12.6-minute-long powered descent, there were a total of five unexpected computer alarms. These alarms all indicated that Eagle’s computer system was overloaded, but in each case, Mission Control concluded that it was safe to continue the landing. The last of these alarms occurred less than three minutes before landing, when the crew was less than 500 meters above the surface. Because of the navigation error, the computer was guiding the spacecraft towards an unsafe touchdown point in the rugged, boulder-filled ejecta field surrounding West Crater. Armstrong took manual control and flew to a safe landing spot beyond the crater. At 3:17 PM CDT, he announced their safe landing, “Houston, Tranquility Base. The Eagle has landed.” At the time of landing, Mission Control thought that the spacecraft had just 17 seconds of fuel left in the descent stage. However, post mission analysis showed that sloshing in the fuel tank during Armstrong’s search for a safe landing site caused the fuel gauge to give an inaccurate reading. Eagle actually had about 45 seconds of fuel left when it touched down. https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11 https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11 Apollo 13 had some very serious life-threatening problems, but almost crashing into the Moon was not one of them.
- cbanek 2y ago
  (I worked at SpaceX) Two words: flight heritage. Successful concepts are very often reused. For example, heat shields, parachute landings, sea landings, air bags for landings on hard land, etc. Now, let me try to explain this in something similar: cars. Cars are all pretty much the same. They have a steering wheel, 4 tires, transmission, engine, etc. The parts all do the same thing in different cars, but we don't always use the same engine, or the same tires, or the same frame for every car. After making cars for so long, why do car companies still have recalls? New models of cars usually either start from scratch or start based on a different vehicle already in production (new model year). But if you're starting from scratch, you've lost all the "little fixes" that go into making a car good. Like the difference from a new model EV car to a Toyota Corolla that's been in production for basically 10 years has a very different failure/recall rate. After many years of producing the same car, you fix all the little things and get your supply chains working well. Now back to space ships. It's the same thing. You have made a new capsule and although the concepts are the same, think about all the little things: wiring, plumbing, controls, software. These are all new and basically untested. They lack "flight heritage" (proven working in space). For the question as why can't we make Apollo ships or Saturn V's anymore, a lot of plans and drawings were lost. Key people making decisions, testing, or even building parts on an assembly line weren't there. Companies making specialized parts folded or went under, or just stopped making those parts. Sometimes these can be small issues. Like for the Mars Climate Orbiter there was a problem where two different companies thought they were using the same units when they were not. Or when an accelerometer was installed backward on a different ship, making the chute not deploy. Now compare this to the Soyuz, which is more like a Toyota Corolla of space ships. It's not the fanciest or has the most space or efficiency, but it has a lot of flight heritage and operational history. And from there, you can make small changes relatively safely. This is true for all companies making space ships. Really it comes down to how well you test things and a good helping of luck on getting it to work the first time, or fixing it quickly.
  - m4rtink 2y ago
    You mixed up Marce Recognisance Orbiter (still in Mars orbit) with Mars Climate Orbiter (part of Mars due to unit mixup).
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  Our IQ is literally dropping, I don’t think you need more than that. Going to outer space is hard. It requires intelligent people at every level and they need to be focused on what they are doing. Our era is an era of massive distraction and less intelligent people. >Flynn attributed this increase to better nutrition. Flynn continued his work and other scientists followed suit until they all noticed that children born in 1975 reached 'peak IQ' and average intelligence had been dropping ever since. This is called the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'. https://www.develop.bc.ca/the-reverse-flynn-effect/ https://www.develop.bc.ca/the-reverse-flynn-effect/
  - orwin 2y ago
    I really don't believe your source, so I looked into the original material : Flynn 1984, Flynn 1987, Flynn 2012,and I was right: the first study reporting a reverse-Flynn effect is pretty recent, and is from my country France, it's the Dutton&Lynn from 2015. Also, it's way more complicated than this. Basically an IQ test, if you're lucky to never have been subjected to one, is in fact multiple different tests (for me it was either 4 or five, I don't remember, I know I scored under the mean in the temporal-spatial test, barely above in the verbal, and way above in at least 2 others). It's a 'proxy' for intelligence but, but an incomplete one, and different tests exists. According to Flynn (2012), the gains were mostly with performance-based mesures, and the gains in verbal tests (which highlight education, and imho, culture) were low or negative. The reverse-Flynn could very well be caused by a decline in crystallized intelligence (general knowledge subtest, vocabulary/verbal subtests), while performance-based tests (logic, adaptibility, spatial vision) plateau or stopped increasing. In any case, we should avoid making broad claims about IQ: tests aren't _really_ standardized, vary between countries (and psychologists tbh) and are a very complex subject.
    - Mistletoe 2y ago
      More reading for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
  - blisterpeanuts 2y ago
- lofaszvanitt 2y ago
  The new kid on the block is some cult like mentality that dictates: you have to pretend to be stupid, otherwise the bogeyman gonna come for you it really is mind boggling, but here we are, we have arrived into the zone of full retardedness in 2024 youtube is full with "look how idiot I am, although I serviced this nuclear reactor, but still..." kinda videos: I spent 55 days creating this "whatever" I broke my new ferrari next day, that I spent 200 days repairing ... and the list goes on maybe the aliens are riled up that they will lose control over Earth, or smth like that, and they now beam the full retard signal :D
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Today's space flight has many additional constraints compared to 1960's space flight. For one thing, we try to avoid as much as possible hydrazine and other very toxic propellants. For another, there's a great push to reducing cost - reusability is a big part of that. Also, any component we can save weight on, we can send more mass to orbit. So we use modern design methods and materials to reduce weight. All these changes mean, pretty much, that we need a new capsule (or more radical design, e.g. Starship).
- mulmen 2y ago
  We're iterating on a new idea. The commercialization of space travel. The technology exists to go to the moon or live in orbit but the question now is can we reduce cost and scale capacity.
- philistine 2y ago
  50 years ago, the mission profile was much simpler than it is today. For one, Starliner is reusable, which means a completely different set of materials and components for many elements of the system. Each and every Apollo capsule went straight to a museum after each use. And if 50 years ago you mean the Shuttle, then that thing killed 2 crews. Not a shining beacon to emulate.
zdw 2y ago
Saw the reentry fireball in the sky from AZ, which was pretty. Glad it made it down in one piece, hopefully they'll be able to troubleshoot the problems better because of that.
- albertopv 2y ago
  Problematic parts burned down with services module, so no, not going to able to troubleshoot thrusters problems better.
rezmason 2y ago
Is this the first time a spaceship disembarked from a space station and landed back on the ground, all while unpiloted?
- buildsjets 2y ago
  No, that’s also exactly how the previous Starliner mission operated. Its also how the first Starliner mission was supposed to operate, but Boeing mis-set their wristwatch and f’d up the ISS rendezvous.
- skykooler 2y ago
  No. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft has a cargo variant which regularly makes uncrewed missions to the ISS and back (and was doing so for several years before they ever flew with people). There are other uncrewed spacecraft such as Cygnus, but not all of them return to Earth with intent to land; I don't know off the top of my head which was the first one to do so.
gopkarthik 2y ago
Noob question: Hypothetically if the crew were in the Starliner for the trip, they would have planned safely? I get that prior to the trip, the risk of failure was high enough to not make that call.
- imtringued 2y ago
  The problem wasn't landing Starliner. The problem is that the crew might be stuck in orbit, because the thrusters won't fire.
- gopkarthik 2y ago
  > planned safely *landed safely
underseacables 2y ago
I seriously believe there's going to be at least one executive from Boeing who's going to say to the government in some legalese document or something "see, it landed just fine"
grecy 2y ago
After all the recent discussions on the topic, it seems strange this is not on the front page…
- alecco 2y ago
  Probably due to the time. Americans are asleep at the moment.
- shusaku 2y ago
  If it bleeds, it leads. But if things go well nobody is interested.
blisterpeanuts 2y ago
I’ll say it, since no one else is: Congratulations to Boeing! This is a much needed victory at a time when their reputation has taken a beating (most of it deserved). Over on Slashdot, it was reported that the likely cause was: a “Teflon seal in a valve known as a ‘poppet’ expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters, significantly constraining the flow of the oxidizer”. As Musk’s SpaceX team has stated repeatedly, every failure provides data for future success. At least they have a good idea as to why the thrusters failed, and the design can probably be modified and retested in a couple of uncrewed launches in 2025 or 2026. The thrusters can be fixed. The question is whether Boeing can fix its culture.
- timbit42 2y ago
  I'll hold my congratulations to Boeing for when they fix their culture.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41470139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41470139

80 points by clessg 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?

hindsightbias 2y ago
It’s not like the HW folks had been building capsules for four decades. Look at the last 5 decades of SW. Why aren’t we in an iterative utopia already?
- pmontra 2y ago
  It's an analogy that's only partially good. Software from 50 or 30 years ago couldn't solve some of the problems current software is solving because the hardware wasn't powerful enough. Example: we had neural networks theory and a little practice but without the current hardware we could not work on them and advance the theory. Could we be confident that LLM could be as good as they are? We could not. However let's go back 20 years or maybe 30 and more mundane tasks like word processing and spreadsheet were already a solved. We needed only to port them to newer versions of the OS. A Word from around 2000 would be OK for most tasks today.
kylebenzle 2y ago
I'm no expert but "private equity" seems to be a common refrain. First a company builds good products to build a band, then sells the brand.
carabiner 2y ago
? The Starliner landed successfully, so we have shown that we can iterate.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  The capsule landed successfully, but it was missing about 400 pounds of the most important cargo.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
    Those are a pair of fat astronauts! Although I guess their spacesuits were missing too so maybe it adds up to that.
- csomar 2y ago
  The Starliner only landed. It didn't successfully achieve its mission. In fact, it 100% failed.
  - m4rtink 2y ago
    Again - it is not it first fucked up test flight. :P
sixothree 2y ago
My only take listening to Apollo recordings is how much time they spent debugging issues. It seemed constant.
skissane 2y ago
> I'm genuinely curious what has happened in the past 50 years that we can't iterate on already successful concepts? I think SpaceX has been doing a great job of that, with Crew Dragon. > Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Yes, but also fewer options. This is the first time NASA has ever had a choice between two completely different American spacecraft to return crew on. It is like if you own two cars, and one is having mechanical problems, so you decide to take the more reliable one for a long trip; but if you only own one car, you would just have risked it with your only car, since you don't have much choice > Is Boeing genuinely this bad? Boeing has really struggled in making the cultural transition from old style cost-plus government contracting – in which cost overruns are charged to the taxpayer – to the new world of fixed price contracts. Not just with NASA, also with Pentagon projects such as the KC-46 aerial refuelling tanker. By contrast, SpaceX is a much younger company, so it never had that cost-plus culture. Plus, it has the advantage of being privately held – so no stock market to satisfy – and investors who are confident in its long-term prospects, so it isn't afraid to lose money on contracts in the short-term, expecting to make it back in the longer-run. By contrast, Boeing is tempted to cut corners in the development process to limit their losses on the contract. According to the rumour mill, part of how this whole fiasco happened: Boeing gave Aerojet Rocketdyne incorrect requirements specs for the thrusters. Boeing then sent Aerojet updated specs, but Aerojet refused to redesign the thrusters according to the new specs unless it was paid more by Boeing, which Boeing didn't want to do. So instead Boeing just decided to risk it with the incorrectly designed thrusters. They cooked up some analysis to justify that doing so was safe, but obviously that analysis was wrong.
- aredox 2y ago
  Not too wrong as it made it back to Earth. > Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? NASA lost enough people during their "higher risk tolerance" epoch that they don't want to go through it again. Challenger and Columbia were such huge traumas each time...
  - ReptileMan 2y ago
    I think it was the other way around. In the higher risk tolerance era they only had the Apollo 1 fire. The shuttle clusterfucks happened when they no longer knew how to evaluate risks because of organizational culture.
aredox 2y ago
Because all of the welds were done by people who had their own know-how, and they retired without passing it on. And this is stuff you have to train on several decades, not just "follow the instructions". We can still redo it, but it is fairly complicated to restore the whole industrial base to match the past 1:1. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
Generations and corporate cultures change. We've gone hard over into thinking that modeling and simulation alone can lead to greater profits due to (presumably) less infrastructure and fewer people on the job. Time and again it fails and we refuse to learn from it. The current trend in aerospace is Digital Transformation which is all the modeling and sim taken to 11. Making hardware work requires a certain mindset and a lot of practice. There's no money for either.
vegetablepotpie 2y ago
Although that happened over 50 years ago, and we can’t make the same exact designs, the physics is the same and well understood. Technology has evolved, and has given us more tools. Similar cultures can be made again that support that kind of work. What’s missing is we need better cultures. I’ve been in engineering cultures that are dominated by management desires to cut costs and deliver on schedule. Engineering excellence is never considered valuable, but it will be the only thing that makes you successful. Boeing lost its culture of engineering excellence > “Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. [1] https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2024/03/29/what-boeing-did-to-all-the-guys-who-remember-how-to-build-a-plane/ https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2024/03/29/what-boeing-did-...
- sounds 2y ago
  Interesting thought. Could there also be the gradual evaporation of the old culture of fear? The 1940s through the 1960s fear of other countries, races, and ideologies? I wonder if the fear suppressed the natural behavior of Jim McNerney and others, keeping them from sowing division within the company because of the perceived danger from outside? Here are some other examples, where today these might sound like an excuse for aggressive business behavior, instead of a unifying mantra -- Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive" Dick Cheney, "Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose." (Yes, yes, he's outing himself as unprincipled; I'm quoting him intentionally since people were still being people all throughout; does this show the larger populace wide zeitgeist?) John F. Kennedy, "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." I think it's interesting how the same thought can sound different when my mind is set in different contexts.
- lenkite 2y ago
  That article sheds further light on the whistle blower who was assassinated. Didn't know John Barnett was such a major lightning rod at Boeing, documenting corruption to such an extraordinary extent that he was regularly abused by management and the CEO Jim McNerney. And finally was murdered when he was giving testimony. What a tragedy.
Saturnial22 2y ago
[flagged]
crazygringo 2y ago
We also had the Challenger disaster, which killed seven. And two astronauts died in a flash fire in 1967. Columbia too, another seven. This is not the first time something has not gone according to plan. Thankfully nobody died. Let's not look at the past through rose-colored glasses, and assume that things have gotten worse. Spaceflight has been full of mistakes from the start.
- foobarbecue 2y ago
  Yep. And Apollo 11 was extremely close to being a crash.
  - chinathrow 2y ago
    13, not 11. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13
    - skissane 2y ago
      No, Apollo 11: > During the 12.6-minute-long powered descent, there were a total of five unexpected computer alarms. These alarms all indicated that Eagle’s computer system was overloaded, but in each case, Mission Control concluded that it was safe to continue the landing. The last of these alarms occurred less than three minutes before landing, when the crew was less than 500 meters above the surface. Because of the navigation error, the computer was guiding the spacecraft towards an unsafe touchdown point in the rugged, boulder-filled ejecta field surrounding West Crater. Armstrong took manual control and flew to a safe landing spot beyond the crater. At 3:17 PM CDT, he announced their safe landing, “Houston, Tranquility Base. The Eagle has landed.” At the time of landing, Mission Control thought that the spacecraft had just 17 seconds of fuel left in the descent stage. However, post mission analysis showed that sloshing in the fuel tank during Armstrong’s search for a safe landing site caused the fuel gauge to give an inaccurate reading. Eagle actually had about 45 seconds of fuel left when it touched down. https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11 https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11 Apollo 13 had some very serious life-threatening problems, but almost crashing into the Moon was not one of them.
cbanek 2y ago
(I worked at SpaceX) Two words: flight heritage. Successful concepts are very often reused. For example, heat shields, parachute landings, sea landings, air bags for landings on hard land, etc. Now, let me try to explain this in something similar: cars. Cars are all pretty much the same. They have a steering wheel, 4 tires, transmission, engine, etc. The parts all do the same thing in different cars, but we don't always use the same engine, or the same tires, or the same frame for every car. After making cars for so long, why do car companies still have recalls? New models of cars usually either start from scratch or start based on a different vehicle already in production (new model year). But if you're starting from scratch, you've lost all the "little fixes" that go into making a car good. Like the difference from a new model EV car to a Toyota Corolla that's been in production for basically 10 years has a very different failure/recall rate. After many years of producing the same car, you fix all the little things and get your supply chains working well. Now back to space ships. It's the same thing. You have made a new capsule and although the concepts are the same, think about all the little things: wiring, plumbing, controls, software. These are all new and basically untested. They lack "flight heritage" (proven working in space). For the question as why can't we make Apollo ships or Saturn V's anymore, a lot of plans and drawings were lost. Key people making decisions, testing, or even building parts on an assembly line weren't there. Companies making specialized parts folded or went under, or just stopped making those parts. Sometimes these can be small issues. Like for the Mars Climate Orbiter there was a problem where two different companies thought they were using the same units when they were not. Or when an accelerometer was installed backward on a different ship, making the chute not deploy. Now compare this to the Soyuz, which is more like a Toyota Corolla of space ships. It's not the fanciest or has the most space or efficiency, but it has a lot of flight heritage and operational history. And from there, you can make small changes relatively safely. This is true for all companies making space ships. Really it comes down to how well you test things and a good helping of luck on getting it to work the first time, or fixing it quickly.
- m4rtink 2y ago
  You mixed up Marce Recognisance Orbiter (still in Mars orbit) with Mars Climate Orbiter (part of Mars due to unit mixup).
Mistletoe 2y ago
Our IQ is literally dropping, I don’t think you need more than that. Going to outer space is hard. It requires intelligent people at every level and they need to be focused on what they are doing. Our era is an era of massive distraction and less intelligent people. >Flynn attributed this increase to better nutrition. Flynn continued his work and other scientists followed suit until they all noticed that children born in 1975 reached 'peak IQ' and average intelligence had been dropping ever since. This is called the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'. https://www.develop.bc.ca/the-reverse-flynn-effect/ https://www.develop.bc.ca/the-reverse-flynn-effect/
- orwin 2y ago
  I really don't believe your source, so I looked into the original material : Flynn 1984, Flynn 1987, Flynn 2012,and I was right: the first study reporting a reverse-Flynn effect is pretty recent, and is from my country France, it's the Dutton&Lynn from 2015. Also, it's way more complicated than this. Basically an IQ test, if you're lucky to never have been subjected to one, is in fact multiple different tests (for me it was either 4 or five, I don't remember, I know I scored under the mean in the temporal-spatial test, barely above in the verbal, and way above in at least 2 others). It's a 'proxy' for intelligence but, but an incomplete one, and different tests exists. According to Flynn (2012), the gains were mostly with performance-based mesures, and the gains in verbal tests (which highlight education, and imho, culture) were low or negative. The reverse-Flynn could very well be caused by a decline in crystallized intelligence (general knowledge subtest, vocabulary/verbal subtests), while performance-based tests (logic, adaptibility, spatial vision) plateau or stopped increasing. In any case, we should avoid making broad claims about IQ: tests aren't _really_ standardized, vary between countries (and psychologists tbh) and are a very complex subject.
  - Mistletoe 2y ago
    More reading for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
- blisterpeanuts 2y ago
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
The new kid on the block is some cult like mentality that dictates: you have to pretend to be stupid, otherwise the bogeyman gonna come for you it really is mind boggling, but here we are, we have arrived into the zone of full retardedness in 2024 youtube is full with "look how idiot I am, although I serviced this nuclear reactor, but still..." kinda videos: I spent 55 days creating this "whatever" I broke my new ferrari next day, that I spent 200 days repairing ... and the list goes on maybe the aliens are riled up that they will lose control over Earth, or smth like that, and they now beam the full retard signal :D
dotancohen 2y ago
Today's space flight has many additional constraints compared to 1960's space flight. For one thing, we try to avoid as much as possible hydrazine and other very toxic propellants. For another, there's a great push to reducing cost - reusability is a big part of that. Also, any component we can save weight on, we can send more mass to orbit. So we use modern design methods and materials to reduce weight. All these changes mean, pretty much, that we need a new capsule (or more radical design, e.g. Starship).
mulmen 2y ago
We're iterating on a new idea. The commercialization of space travel. The technology exists to go to the moon or live in orbit but the question now is can we reduce cost and scale capacity.
philistine 2y ago
50 years ago, the mission profile was much simpler than it is today. For one, Starliner is reusable, which means a completely different set of materials and components for many elements of the system. Each and every Apollo capsule went straight to a museum after each use. And if 50 years ago you mean the Shuttle, then that thing killed 2 crews. Not a shining beacon to emulate.

zdw 2y ago

Saw the reentry fireball in the sky from AZ, which was pretty. Glad it made it down in one piece, hopefully they'll be able to troubleshoot the problems better because of that.

albertopv 2y ago
Problematic parts burned down with services module, so no, not going to able to troubleshoot thrusters problems better.

rezmason 2y ago

Is this the first time a spaceship disembarked from a space station and landed back on the ground, all while unpiloted?

buildsjets 2y ago
No, that’s also exactly how the previous Starliner mission operated. Its also how the first Starliner mission was supposed to operate, but Boeing mis-set their wristwatch and f’d up the ISS rendezvous.
skykooler 2y ago
No. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft has a cargo variant which regularly makes uncrewed missions to the ISS and back (and was doing so for several years before they ever flew with people). There are other uncrewed spacecraft such as Cygnus, but not all of them return to Earth with intent to land; I don't know off the top of my head which was the first one to do so.

gopkarthik 2y ago

Noob question: Hypothetically if the crew were in the Starliner for the trip, they would have planned safely? I get that prior to the trip, the risk of failure was high enough to not make that call.

imtringued 2y ago
The problem wasn't landing Starliner. The problem is that the crew might be stuck in orbit, because the thrusters won't fire.
gopkarthik 2y ago
> planned safely *landed safely

underseacables 2y ago

I seriously believe there's going to be at least one executive from Boeing who's going to say to the government in some legalese document or something "see, it landed just fine"

grecy 2y ago

After all the recent discussions on the topic, it seems strange this is not on the front page…

alecco 2y ago
Probably due to the time. Americans are asleep at the moment.
shusaku 2y ago
If it bleeds, it leads. But if things go well nobody is interested.

blisterpeanuts 2y ago

I’ll say it, since no one else is: Congratulations to Boeing! This is a much needed victory at a time when their reputation has taken a beating (most of it deserved). Over on Slashdot, it was reported that the likely cause was: a “Teflon seal in a valve known as a ‘poppet’ expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters, significantly constraining the flow of the oxidizer”. As Musk’s SpaceX team has stated repeatedly, every failure provides data for future success. At least they have a good idea as to why the thrusters failed, and the design can probably be modified and retested in a couple of uncrewed launches in 2025 or 2026. The thrusters can be fixed. The question is whether Boeing can fix its culture.

timbit42 2y ago
I'll hold my congratulations to Boeing for when they fix their culture.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41470139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41470139