Re:Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
by foobarbecue on Tuesday May 07, 2024 @08:32AM
(#40284710)
The point of "redundancy" here is so you can don't have to evacuate the space station while Dragon is grounded during the investigation you describe.
Nobody is saying a failure would result in the end of Dragon or SpaceX.
Re:Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
by Beldin on Tuesday May 07, 2024 @01:57PM
(#40289205)
> Something like 3% of all astronauts have died 'on the job' making it likely the single most dangerous profession in existence.
Wait till you hear about a truly deadly job: president of the USA. 8 of the 46 presidents have died while in office, i.e., over 17%.
The reason NASA's failures were such a huge deal is because they shouldn't have happened. In both cases you had issues with the managerial layer ignoring the engineering layer, and moving ahead in high risk scenarios - that was particularly stupid in Challenger, where they also had a high profile civilian aboard. In SpaceX the managerial layer and the technical layer are largely the same thing, and they also have a system where any flight engineer can independently cancel a flight, for any reason, at his own discretion. So the chances of a flight moving forward with a predictable risk is quite low. So what will most likely happen when they lose a crewed flight is an investigation to ensure it was not caused by systemic errors, some effort to ensure that whatever did happen does not happen again, and then a return to flight.