Too risky? Stranded? Rescued (hopefully)?

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHu99vdz-A

Social media, full of bullshit to drive eyes to constant news feed. Political divide literally caused by the 24 hour cycle.

It needs to end.

Sure, it’s not a “rescue”, it’s just an “unplanned itinerary change to another vessel”.

Also, they’re not “marooned”, they’re “getting an extended work opportunity”.

Calling this a rescue is, to OPs point, just dramatizing the situation for clicks. In pretty much any other circumstance, it wouldn't even make the news.

If you missed a ferry, expecting to be away from your family for a week, only to find you are stuck on a desolate island for 8+ months you would probably feel like you were being rescued.

Significant unexpected planning and spending have to go into getting them a different ride home.

It’s closer to your car breaking down in a remote area. Would a tow truck be a rescue? I would think so.

It's overly dramatic to call it a rescue mission. It just is. It's not great that they're up there longer than planned, but they're not going to explode or fly off into space.

IMO, US citizens/taxpayers would be very justified to be pissed about the failures of a company that their tax dollars heavily fund (from the same article I referenced above, its like 37% of their revenue). The series of very public failures that affect people directly (planes) and affect their tax dollars (recent series of failures of their space program) certainly warrants outrage and coverage. that's my 2 cents

[1]: https://www.airforce-technology.com/features/boeing-pleads-g...

or

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/01/02/ho...

I don't know why people want to quibble about usage that seems clear.

The next ferry doesn’t have room. It has to change its plans to accommodate you.

Like it's not much, but come on.

You are the captain and pilot of the ferry. And it is such a complicated ferry that you are extensively trained on how to navigate it. It is, in fact, so complicated and different that there are other ferries around but you can only sail yours. You can't just hop on another one and do the same trip.

You took this ferry to an island in the middle of nowhere and after you got there you realized the ferry was broken. Nobody knows how bad... it might snap in half in the middle of the return trip.

You have plenty of provisions for the next few months and you are not alone on the island. Other ferries still come and go but you can't just hop on those, you don't know how to operate them.

They sent one of those other ferries just for you with a smaller crew to accommodate you. Without it you are not coming back.

Is it a rescue?

I mean I've certainly been stuck at an airport because I had a ticket for a flight that ended up getting canceled, which necessitated me remaining at the airport for an extended period of time. I had an expectation of getting a new ticket for a new flight, but none of that changed the fact that I was indeed stuck.

If there were no changes needed to the subsequent flight to accommodate two additional riders, sure, not a rescue. But there are, and that's important from multiple perspectives (not least of which is cost)

The postive's overwhelm the negatives by an infinite amount.

But if I realize the entire situation has been misrepresented, I think I will be annoyed with myself. Is this really all nonsense? Is the situation normal, or common?

They went up on an experimental spacecraft on its shakedown cruise. They’re coming down on a different spacecraft than planned — a different make of spacecraft, even. That’s never happened before, and is neither normal nor common. The spacecraft type they flew up will almost certainly never fly again because of how badly the shakedown went. That’s never happened before to a manned design to my knowledge — certainly not normal or common.

The most likely explanation of the effect you're observing is that the server, having done a database fetch to get you the profile once, is not interested in doing it over and over again.

It's cached. You do not have a uniquely broken upvote button.

I've tested this many times by up-voting predictably stable comments, noting the karma number before and hours later. No effect. No exceptions. Additionally, there was a time where this limitation didn't exist. I am pretty sure I triggered a flag for my tendency to up-vote controversial and underdog content.

I don't think dang is right about everything, but I get the impression that he's honest and expect he'd confirm this limitation on my username. Ask. But I'm not grovelling for equal rights on HN and will make no inquiries to insiders.

Also, if your interpretation was correct, there's this really big parallel contrary reality where the upvote system works and entries are accepted and processed, hence the ever changing karma number of each active user. Perhaps it's the ad blocker, but it's not normal

But first, I loaded your profile.

Then I refreshed it several times.

At no point did your karma score change on your profile.

It's caching.

I once had this limitation on my own account. It was because I had upvoted certain grayed out comments that were flamewar fodder. I did that because there were equally bad counter-comments in the thread that weren't voted down (grayed), and out of a misguided commitment to balance I wanted to fight for the losing side.

When I emailed dang to ask about my voting limitation he explained why my account had been penalized. I said I wouldn't vote up bad comments in the future and he restored my comment voting. Now when bad arguments attract bad counter-arguments I just downvote instead of trying to boost the somewhat-less-bad side.

You don't have to send email about this if you don't want to, but it doesn't require groveling to fix.

I think some folks see the apparent simplicity of HN and assume it's primitive and clean, with nothing too sophisticated running in the background.

I haven't seen this in the reporting. Can you share any context for it?

The astronauts were/are comfortable on the ISS. There are plenty of supplies, and more have gone up as part of regular resupplies. IIRC the only discomfort for them was having to use makeshift sleeping places until the previous crew departed. As astronauts, they pretty much live to go into space, so they were happy, of course with the minor caveat of the disappointment regarding their primary mission not panning out and of having to be away from family for a few months. Especially considering that they are unlikely to get to be in space again as the ISS is due for retirement by the end of the decade and NASA wants to give space travel experience to the astronauts intended for the Moon.

Putting it differently, the biggest issue/inconvenience with this situation was that Starliner was taking up a docking port and causing things to have to be rescheduled. Prior to launch, crew are trained to operate certain experiments, or to do servicing space walks. Since the crew being launched had to be reordered, these plans had to be reworked.

There are a lot of people focusing in on the fact that they will be returning in February, but they're completely ignoring the fact that they're perfectly capable of coming back early, that option is actively not being chosen as having them stay till then would be more optimal for station operational planning.

Coming back "early" would also occur at a cost of either tens of millions of dollars for an extra launch, or at a cost of valuable experiments not getting run because the space station was empty of personnel. NASA policy would prohibit the remaining astronauts from... well, remaining, because they have to have a lifeboat, which the two "rescuees" would have just used to go home. Thus, all of them would have to go home.

IOW, painting this as "normal operations" in any sense is disingenuous. The danger levels may not be overly exacerbated, but it was a very costly failure, and it may well be a drastic inconvenience to the astronauts. We likely won't know the truth of the latter until they write their memoirs.

It's easy to manage spin when the opinions being spun are in orbit on a restricted communication system.

I'm not Butch or Suni, but I think the astronauts most negatively affected by this would be the two that got bumped from Crew 9. Astronauts define their careers by the amount and quality of the time they are blessed to spend in space. Chris Hadfield, e.g., has taken it for granted that the pair would feel lucky to be "stranded" for a few months, and would have plenty of meaningful work to occupy their time.

Rescue definition: an act of saving or being saved from danger or distress. The mission to take astronauts off the space station clearly fits this definition - an extended, unplanned and indefinite stay in space has to be distressing at the least.

Has the HN standard become that you can argue the most ridiculous thing if you make that argument against the media?

Edit: "regular crew rotation" implies normal and expected but the point is, even if the crew is in no danger, this wasn't regular or expected.

That’s neither normal nor expected!

Go back to the age of exploration. A crew’s ship strands them on an island. Another ship was due to come anyway in 6 weeks, and the crew have enough food to last them that interval. They use witches to tell the coming crew of their problems, and that ship agrees to lighten its load to make room for the stranded.

This is a rescue! It’s an easy rescue. But so was, like, pulling my puppy out of the neighbor’s pool when it went under the cover.

Arguable because everyone has a way back already, the modification to the crew rotation mission just provides a somewhat safer way back.

Edit: And the distinction here matters. A rescue mission would be an expensive unexpected endeavour. The regular crew rotation is an expected operating cost. The modification to the details of the plan for the crew rotation haven't significantly impacted the mission goals - i.e. for the same cost there are still the same number of fresh qualified crew members up there for the same duration, just a slightly different set of people.

I like this.

Nit: it’s not a normal mission. Normal missions don’t leave two seats for folks trained on a different spacecraft. It’s a scheduled mission.

If you had said that they were left at an outpost with other people for six months it somewhat loses it's "rescue" vibes.

When a country pitches into instability and nations evacuate their citizens, are they not rescuing them?

I suppose I’d invert the question: why does framing the mission as a rescue bug you?

"SpaceX capsule used to retrieve astronauts stranded on ISS by malfunctioning starliner."

Would people really be that much happier if it was said instead that they were making room for crew marooned by an unsafe spacecraft? I think I'd normally use the word "rescue" there if it was a ship.

But yet it is true that they plan for this kind of thing and that's why they're not in any particularly significant danger due to being marooned.

In any other context this wouldn't be quibbled. If my car broke down a mile outside town and my friend gave me a lift the rest of the way, I would say he rescued me and nobody would quibble it.

The only reason it's being quibbled is because people have a stick up their ass about Elon Musk personally and that stick extends to the way they feel about SpaceX.

You shift from talking about danger or distress, to "not regular or expected".

Which is it? I think danger and urgency are marks of "rescue". If they had supplies and were in no immediate danger, I don't see how the term or the alarmism qualifies.

Hypothetically:

- you can walk outside, hitch a ride home

- fully loaded means there’s electricity and phones? Call a Taxi?

- walk to a near town shop, buy car parts and fix the car if you have the skills

None of those hypotheticals are even remotely possible in space. It’s a bad comparison.

Whenever I travel to a location, the planned return transport fails AND I would eventually be dead without outside human assistance. That’s a rescue.

In your villa example that is correct: your friend helping you is not a rescue. It’s a convenient helping hand. A space station is a different beast though.

If your villa was on a remote isolated island without anyone else on it, it would be closer to the space station but still not exactly the same. The island, depending on its size might have bountiful food/animals you can hypothetically harvest, not to mention attempting to plant and grow some seeds from the hypothetical fruits and vegetables you already have.

Very little of this is realistically possible in a space station like the one we have.

"day 30 of my 2 day vacation" is more accurate.

I don't think being in a leaky space station for eight months, where you suffer the effects of accelerated aging due to zero gravity, is equivalent to a being in a fully loaded villa for a month.

I'm using the "distress" part of "danger or distress". The average person would view the situation as distressing for the astronauts, for the average person "rescue" is appropriate term. Jeesh.

If you chose to say it was, nobody would be doing the "Well ACKSHULLY..." routine with you because that is in fact totally in line with common use of the word rescue and not worth making a stink about even if you think it sounds a little melodramatic.

The ISS situation is more extreme than your example in every way, but you're pulling the ackshully bullshit because you don't like the company that has done it.

I wonder if you, like me, have taken a vacation to travel half-way across the United States to watch a SpaceX launch, or had discussions with former heads of NASA as far back as 2011 about what the company meant/means for manned spaceflight. I wonder if you grew up around astronauts or knew people who died on Columbia.

This isn't an appeal to authority, it's a statement of experience. I'm in a pedantic HN subthread and threw in my subjective opinion regarding the use of the term "rescue" - please don't jump to assuming I'm some evil troll.

An 8 day mission turned into a months-long mission unexepctedly and SpaceX ultimately had to bump 2 trained astronauts to return them to Earth. That's the very definition of a rescue and just a wildly massive PR disaster to boot.

Beyond this, we still have no idea of what it will take to return Starliner to flightworthiness and give NASA the confidence that it can carry out an entire mission. It may be completely or just practically doomed at this point.

SpaceX did not have to bump 2 trained astronauts to return them to Earth. That was simply the cheapest, least disruptive way to bring them back. There has always been the option of sending a dedicated Dragon for them, but that would require NASA to pay for an entire additional Dragon mission just to bring two people back who are in no urgent need of bringing back.

You go to an island for your employer, and the ferry breaks down once you get there. While your employer can send another ferry soon to bring you back, they ask if you'd be okay staying for a rotation because that'd be more convenient for them. They also arrange a means for you to leave in case of an emergency. You're enjoying the island, so you agree. The replacement ferry is not a rescue.

Starliner made the uncrewed return just fine, which means that on NASA's side, the return to flight should not be too complicated (well, besides showing that the doghouse deformation issues have been resolved) and should not involve a redo of this flight. What remains to be seen is what position Boeing takes on it, as they have been very quiet over if they're going to continue in Commercial Crew.

Another American ISS astronaut, Tracy Dyson, came back in this manner last Monday.

If you have the choice between a spacecraft that has a definite 99.7% chance of successful return (Dragon) and a spacecraft that probably has a 99.7% chance of successful return, but you can't be sure it isn't 99% (Starliner), you'd choose Dragon.

But, if you have to choose between the latter and paying an adversary, you'd just choose Starliner.

They didn’t fuck with NASA when Dubya invaded a country, after all. Every spacefaring superpower has its fingers in a bunch of mass murder pies somewhere.

There is no geopolitical upside to Russia or geopolitical downside to the US for NASA to contract Roscosmos to rescue some Americans from space. I imagine SpaceX was just faster and cheaper and already had a mission scheduled.

Soyuz MS-27, scheduled for March 2025 with the American Jonny Kim, or Christopher Williams as the backup.

SpaceX Crew 10, scheduled for February 2025 with the Russian Kirill Peskov.

That is entirely different from actively paying Russia for a flight, where, for starters, there's the political problem of having to give Russia money and somehow avoiding politicians turning that into an issue (especially considering the election year). Then there's the problem that it'd give Russia leverage to demand a loosening of restrictions. Russia has already been complaining about the sanctions limiting their access to components for spacecraft.

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_NAS1510110_8000_-...

So far this year NASA has executed 7 contract modifications (from February through September), under which it has paid Roscosmos an additional US$2.6 million. While that's not a huge amount of money, it doesn't look like there is a hard prohibition on NASA paying Roscosmos for services.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/russia-us-agree-add...

August 25, 2023

> Aug 25 (Reuters) - Russian and U.S. space authorities have agreed an additional flight for an American astronaut on board Russia's Soyuz MS spacecraft, Interfax news agency said on Friday, in a rare sign of bilateral cooperation at a time of high tension over Ukraine.

You have the same internet I do, you should be able to find this information yourself. Stop being a dumbass, unsubscribe from your reddit or wherever it is that's influencing you to think you can know things by bullshitting instead of researching.

Originally the astronauts were supposed to go back on Starliner. Now they're taking another ride back. Is that considered a rescue? Well, it depends.

If you get left behind on an island because your ride wasn't safe and another boat picks you up, is that a rescue? Now what if you're 420 kilometers up and another boat has to come get you. Is that a rescue?

If there wasn't another ride from the ISS available, would the astronauts be stranded? Yes.

In that case, if a ride suddenly became available would it be considered a rescue? Probably, yes.

Is it rescue? Maybe in the sense that you can't leave when you wanted to and now you have to wait. But not in the sense that you were ever in any real danger.

(Admittedly, maybe there is a bit more danger for these astronauts because a malfunctioning spacecraft is inherently a bit of a safety hazard. And the SpaceX operation is certainly not as routine as a ferry showing up at a dock, though it's still safe.)

It seems that it is both a bit subjective whether one calls it "rescue," and also a bit sensationalized to put in a headline too.

If I miss the last train across the bay, my uber isn’t rescuing me. I can always stay up to 5am by making a shady deal at the endup.

But yeah, this is a black eye on boeing and definitely something that nobody wants to have to deal with.

> verb. 1. save (someone) from a dangerous or distressing situation. 2. informal, keep from being lost or abandoned; retrieve.

Per this one, if you miss the last train across the bay the the Uber _would_ indeed be "rescuing" you if you felt distressed. If we consider the informal definition, I'd say you're also being rescued since one could say you were abandoned by the train and thus being retrieved by the Uber. Next, Merriam Webster [2]:

> transitive verb. to free from confinement, danger, or evil

Similarly, if you understand "rescue" as freeing someone from danger, this isn't a rescue. The astronauts aren't in danger really— they have all the supplies and support they need. Nonetheless, they certainly are in confinement, so this could still be called a rescue.

I personally do see how the fact this mission was already scheduled, and the little danger around all this, can make "rescue" feel like a little much. It's the same word used in The Martian, after all. But nonetheless I would still call it a rescue mission. These two astronauts are confined up there not by will but by circumstance, and the taxi flight was modified to sending only two people instead of the usual four, specifically to make space for these two astronauts to come back [3].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=rescue%20meaning

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rescue

[3] https://apnews.com/article/boeing-spacex-nasa-astronauts-sta...

The ISS isn’t Treasure Island. There is always an elevated degree of peril. Particularly in an emergency condition.

It’s space. The ground state is emergency. I am training to be a pilot. Anything going off flight plan is an emergency. If ground control gives me corrective instructions, in the course of a mistake, I hope I will have the humility to not refuse its designation as a rescue.

Like, if you want an Exhibit A for why Boeing doesn’t deserve forward trust, it’s this response.

If we go by technical definition of "emergency" then anything not by the plan is an emergency, but it's not used that way normally and it's not a technical publication.

If you are stuck in space with no lifeboat back then I agree it is an emergency, but they apparently have Starliner and it works. If they or Nasa are more comfortable with another option maybe that makes it an emergency or maybe not.

If it turns out Starliner doesn't work, that's an emergency. If there is radiation event coming then it's an emergency, but it is always an emergency in space regardless.

One, had. Starliner went home. Two, they didn’t. Starliner was broken. Its manoeuvring thrusters, a critical reëntry system, were misbehaving. If you’re on a plane and the oxygen system fails, that’s an emergency. You don’t have to wait for cabin pressure to fail for it to qualify, and oxygen systems aren’t even a critical system; this is closer to the flaps or landing gear behaving erratically.

If it fails then that's an emergency, but that regardless of the presence of the boat.

Noted the absence of Starliner, but not 100% convinced personally

Danger is not when the last later of safety fails. Danger is when the level of risk exceeds a set threshold - and that level has been exceeded as per NASA protocol.

Is the thesis only leisure travellers can be rescued? Astronauts do not sign up to fly on faulty ships. They accept the risk of it happening. But that acceptance doesn’t diminish the tragedy of a ship breaking up on reëntry nor, by extension, the emergency status of a reëntry vehicle with misbehaving manoeuvring thrusters.

This discussion reminds me of the reaction among some to the FAA grounding Falcon 9 “after the first stage used in the [August] launch crash-landed and toppled into the Atlantic Ocean while attempting to touch down on a SpaceX droneship” [1]. It doesn’t matter that everyone else tosses their spent stages into the sea. There was a plan and it went abnormally. That calls for a review. If that review can’t be concluded satisfactorily, as it wasn’t in the case of Starliner, you have an emergency. Relieving someone from an emergency is a rescue.

By some of the standards raised in this thread, a test pilot ejected from their plane and stranded in the tundra wouldn’t qualify for rescue because they were paid or weren’t in immediate and obvious mortal peril or because the ejection seat worked.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-falcon-9-grounded-faa-cr...

The analogy breaks down because an island isn’t space. Your default state on an island tends towards remaining alive. Your default state in space is dead.

A closer analogy is a plane in flight. It takes energy and effort to keep everyone alive. Externally-assisted recovery from peril, in that situation, is a rescue. Even if it’s convenient.

Nobody claimed as much. A jet liner is safer than the ISS. The analogy is conservative.

> Saying 'the default state in space is dead' when historically basically nobody has died in space

Our default state at cruising altitude is dead.

Note: I’m not suggesting anyone would have died. Just that they were in a perilous place where things were going wrong. Being relieved from that position is a rescue.

Maybe not if the jet is a Boeing though?

And I'd rather be with the Starliner at 400 km up than without the Starliner at 400 km up.

But neither seem to be of comparable safety to the other options available.

It is likewise as foolish to try decoupling the peril of space and the peril of orbit and deorbit.

I'm guessing you spend most of your life indoors?

On Earth, outside of the carefully regulated homes we've built as a society, the default state is dead and it takes tremendous work and constant vigilence to avoid that fate, only ever temporarily.

If you see a news headline "man rescues child" you expect a direct threat like something like from a burning house.

> if somebody finds a child wandering in the park alone, we say that the man rescued the child. Exactly as SpaceX is doing in this situation.

Plus, saying astronauts, professionals who signed up for the job knowing what it entails and went through years of training are like children wandering in the park, to paint SpaceX as their savior, is... wow.

And the moon is still the Earth system - we've never really left our own yard.

It’s Saturday, can’t we have a semantic punt?

ergo mars man BAD

Cruise line A and cruise line B drop their passengers off at a remote island for 5 days, and then come to pick them up and take them home. After cruise line B drops theirs off, the cruise ships breaks down, and the passengers can't be picked up after 5 days, so they're stuck on the island with no immediate way to get off. Cruise line A says "OK, the next cruise ship we send will be at half capacity, so we can get the passengers from cruise line B off the island and get them home."

Is cruise line A rescuing the passengers from cruise line B? I'd say yes.

IMO that's only true in line A's PR campaign, assuming they're adversarial enough to run with it.

In your analogy, the passengers are always "stuck on the island with no immediate way to get off" for at least 5 days, as they have no alternative way to get back during their planned stay. If B's cruise ship breaks down - and AFAIK in this case, "breaks down" doesn't mean the ship can't move, just that the risk of catastrophic failure during the trip crossed a preset threshold - that's more of an operational disruption. The stranded passengers are still safe and sound, they just need to wait for the next scheduled cruise to take them home.

The schedule bit matters IMO. It would be a rescue if the next scheduled ride would be way too late to help them and thus it had to be moved up to save their lives.

Workers who signed up to get paid to be on the island and do some work? Knowing that there is only one line of transport and it can be irregular? Going through months or years of training beforehand? Maybe "rescue" is a sensationalization when used in a news headline.

If the spaceship that took you somewhere wasn’t able to get you back as planned and cannot get you back as planned and someone else has to go get those people, that’s a rescue.

If you were on cruise then yes, if you are a professional team who trained for years to stay in dangerous conditions and the only thing out of ordinary is delayed transport back then not. If politics were not involved no one would call it a rescue.

In case of Russians there was a coolant leak

If you are working in Antarctica and need to wait for another transport home it sounds okay. If you urgently need treatment and must perform a surgery on yourself then that's an emergency

Starliner’s manoeuvring thrusters weren’t working!

We didn’t know that!

> because there was no danger of them staying longer till the next ride

I suppose it’s a step forward that we’ve normalised the baseline dangers (and costs, personal and financial) of being in space.

I know you hate Elon musk—I don’t care for him much nor do I harbor animosity towards him—but a rescue is a rescue lmao. You guys would never be this ridiculous if the situation wasn’t politically charged, or if the circumstances favored your political leaning (almost certainly progressive left).

It’s a fairly new vehicle, newer than the Dragon capsule.

On a space station your options are considerably more limited.

Boat, yes; helicopter, no, unless the island is pretty close to civilization. Helicopters have very limited range. No helicopter is going to rescue you from some remote island in the south Pacific, unless it was launched from a rescue ship (in which case it was really the ship that rescued you; the helicopter was merely more convenient for transportation between the ship and the island than a tender boat).

Of course NASA would never give into outside pressures - cough, Challenger, cough. And what I read on the internets is so massively factual.

Boeing is clearly undergoing systemic collapse in engineering ability, so anything Boeing has to be treated with extreme suspicion. Its like hiring a 3-time-felon to babysit, like you can do it, but there will be 0 tolerance for any deviance.

I don't think I'm a fantastic engineer, but I'm certainly doing better than those people when considering the metric of "how many people has my software killed".

Well, was there an accident? It seems like the astronauts staying extra long is to avoid an accident. Does their need to be an accident to call it a rescue?

NASA was uncomfortable with the amount of risk in a new vehicle exhibiting anomalous behavior, for its first crewed re-entry.

The headline here should be: "US glad to have two separate suppliers for crewed transport"

If your friend bails and you get someone else to give you a ride home, they’re getting you or retrieving you. You only call it “rescue” if you’re trying to add some drama to connect with the person who comes to get you. Like a relative, or someone you’re trying to flirt with.

> Rescue: to help someone or something out of a dangerous, harmful, or unpleasant situation.

These are professional, paid astronaut. They both have decades of experience and both have experience being up in space.

If I were to bet they’re probably happy to spend more time on the ISS because I doubt they have many more missions left to do in their careers.

They’re in no danger. There’s no harm done to them.

You’re not rescuing someone from a danger that was already there and part of the mission. Them being “stuck” for a few more months doesn’t make them “in danger”

If they weren’t up there now two different astronauts would be up instead of them. And it would be part of a regular mission. Those would not need to be “rescued”

Seems like the answer to this would be no. Starliner's risk was elevated, not guaranteed to fail. The presence of a flight-proven option was the limiting factor.

That's a pretty weird bar to set?

Sending this SpaceX capsule up with seats reserved for their return fixes the overall operating tempo, but it doesn't make the 2 astronauts any more or less safe.

That is pushing it until Crew 9 arrives. It's a set of straps attached to cargo pallets in the luggage compartment of the Crew 8 capsule. It's like jamming a kid in your trunk when you're out of seats.

They've never had to use this reserve plan and it was only first dreamt of when Soyuz had issues recently.

Unbelievable.

Standard but modified is an oxymoron. This is an irregular mission.

NASA plans with tonnes of redundancy. That’s paying off here. Being prepared doesn’t poof away a fuck-up, it just means you can take it in stride. Starliner stranded two astronauts in space. Dragon is fixing that. Being saved from being stranded sure as hell sounds like being rescued, even if it’s close to routine.

> Starliner was still deemed to be safe enough to be the emergency escape option while it was docked

This is a threshold met by a torn parachute on a jet.

It didn't, because it wasn't simply broken -- it had unexpected behavior. It ended up landing fine.

I'm uncomfortable heaping pejoratives on what we should expect NASA to do: make engineering decisions to minimize risk and maximize chance of mission success.

Increasing the reputational or financial penalties to suppliers incentivizes exactly the sort of decisions that blew up Challenger and Columbia.

Were the astronauts in it when it landed?

Unexpected behavior for NASA was broken enough to send it back empty. That was not the plan to start with. The mission was supposed to be a few days only not this long.

> what we should expect NASA to do: make engineering decisions to minimize risk and maximize chance of mission success.

The criticism is of both NASA and Boeing on what they should have done prior to the trip. How the money was spent and such. I don’t think anyone criticizes NASA for opting to keep the astronauts safe by delaying their return. It’s about what happened before that point.

It's not a question of broken / not-broken. It's a question of known-risk / unknown-risk. The return mission had too much of the latter.

I'm as much of a Boeing skeptic as anyone here, but the knee-jerk-ism to vilify them over this is unreasonable.

NASA manages risk.

SpaceX blows up rockets, so they can move fast, until they get it right.

Boeing is trying to operate as a legacy space company (read: endlessly trying to reduce risk) while also competing with SpaceX.

I'm glad they launched Starliner for a crewed mission!

No one died, because it was safe enough.

No one would have died, had they returned on it, because it was safe enough.

And why should NASA have delayed a manned test flight further when there was an acceptable Plan B?

By this measure the door blowing off the Alaska Airlines flight wasn’t an emergency.

There's a reason astronauts for higher risk missions tend to be selected from operational and test naval aviation backgrounds, like both of the Starliner CFT astronauts were.

Not when it was the preferred option over sticking seats in Crew-8, right up until Starliner's software changes for uncrewed return started.

It was the preferred option before it failed. Between first failure and return it was not the preferred option as it was. It was preferred assuming it worked. But the assumption couldn’t be proven, in part due to Boeing’s shoddy ground sims.

- Boeing is a fortune 50 company and is a direct contributor to news media advertising revenue.

- Boeing is a darling of US aerospace and a bulwark of us international projection of soft power and defense. Telling the truth will destroy the us aircraft market.

- china does not have this problem with its space program. The comac airliner also directly competes with Boeing's beleaguered 737

- loss of confidence in the us space program at the vehicle level jeopardizes trust from consumers and insurance companies in the us space products market like satellite launches.

The main issue is, NASA for political reasons, has to keep the delusion of the 'have 2 suppliers'. Boeing is clearly nonviable anymore, but as you said, it has tremendous influence in US congress, so NASA pays them billions.

NASA's programs would be simpler if they simply just dumped all the money to SpaceX, but that could cause longer term issues. The other solution would be partnering with Airbus as the backup supplier, but that would cause political earthquake.

Not in any remotely meaningful way. Some estimates suggest it will be more than a decade before Comac will have the manufacturing capacity to fill even domestic orders (as of now they've built 9). Then there's the fact that their planes aren't nearly as fuel efficient as those from Boeing and Airbus - the engines may be imports but are neutered due to export restrictions. China's own airlines aren't even interested.

  > it will be more than a decade before Comac will have the manufacturing capacity to fill even domestic orders

A decade is nothing in this industry. And China, specifically, is known for being able to scale manufacturing - so they may not have a decade like us Westerners think.

Thanks but I'll take my chances on a MAX.

Do you know what happens when a Chinese-built plane crashes in China? There is no fancy congressional inquiry, no lawsuits, no crying families on TV. No, they hose off the crash site and put them in unmarked graves and build a shoddily-constructed apartment building over top of it. Maybe the pilot's family is jailed and never heard from again. Pretend it never happened and life over there continues as usual.

Whether you want to call it a rescue or not and play semantics or metaphors all night is your absolute right, but it doesn't change the failure of Starliner in this case.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/astronauts-would-h...

The US spent extra money funding two separate vendors.

One vendor exhibited a high level of risk in their first return.

The astronauts were able to be returned on the second, already proven vendor.

That's a great place to be in!

The alternative, having to return astronauts on a high risk vehicle because it's the only option, is not a place we ever want to be in.

  > One vendor exhibited a high level of risk in their first return.
  > The astronauts were able to be returned on the second, already proven vendor.

It's easy(ish) to go fast and break things.

It's much harder to go fast and break things, except also never break things when it really matters.

So anomalies that might be acceptable during ascent would be unacceptable during decent.

Personally? I'm glad Boeing launched.

I wish they were perfect technically, but I also realize that an infinite amount of time and money doesn't protect against unknown-unknowns.

IMHO, they should be operating more like SpaceX (and the earlier days of the US space program) -- using calculated risk and engineering to decide when it's reasonable to do an inherently risky thing, when doing so is needed to move the entire program forward.

Is it though?

> the face value of each seat has been estimated by NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) to be around US$55 million. This contrasts with the 2014 Soyuz launch price of US$76 million per seat for NASA astronauts

If you lose your ability to become objective based on your view no amount of philosophical discourse is going to be meaningful. It's comments like this why "cope & seeth" has flourished in the modern lexicon

But it's not a political knee jerk reaction. It's an actual jerk reaction to him being such an actual jerk. The guy, and his current cohot, are distateful wankers. Excuse my English.

Clearly the current administration have been doing this willy nilly. Excuse my English.

You only get the luxury of your non-rescue position due to hindsight.