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.
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.