It's very likely to not blow up. The engineers who studied the issue all think it's much more likely to work just fine with lower thrust levels.
Why not just fly the crew back in it then? "likely to work fine" is not sufficient level of certainty for NASA (anymore, because of bitter lessons). They need to be able to quantify the risk. And this is not possible, because an uncertain amount of damage was already done inside the thruster dog houses when they overheated and some material in them melted, and they cannot be inspected.
What guaranteed the unmanned return was that when they did new ground tests with the equipment, the damage was not consistent between tests. This means they cannot model what happened, and they cannot inspect the current state of the dog houses, meaning that no sane engineer will sign off on it, even though the damage is probably not very large and they can prevent future damage by using a less aggressive flight plan.
> is not sufficient level of certainty for NASA (anymore, because of bitter lessons).
It never was. If you trip into a known failed safe situation the mission rules immediately change. This has been true since manned space flight started.
While Boeing - the union of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas - needs some fundamental changes, Boeing the company represents a significant trained workforce for aerospace construction.
Saying "welp... guess we'll close up shop and ship those jobs somewhere else. Time to learn French and go work for Airbus (The ArianeGroup is Airbus and Safran)."
Wishing for the demise of Boeing represents an irrecoverable loss of industrial capacity for the US.
It is an incredible but true fact there’s often no known way to repair large organizations once they have gotten sufficiently sick. They have to be dissolved and new companies have to be built from the ground up. As you suggest, this is incredibly destructive. The employees and expertise aren’t destroyed — they start and join the new companies — but the relationships and institutional knowledge is largely lost. But it is recoverable, and the alternative is often worse.
> All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
There is no scripted formula to repair a large organization. Each one needs to be addressed in a way that is particular to that organization, its culture, and its ultimate desired end state.
One could look at the Gil Amelio to Steve Jobs Apple - that was a turn around of a not small organization. However, what worked for Apple certainly won't work for Boeing.
A true scientist would come to the conclusion that at this point in time it's time to give up on the great liberal democracy project. A true scientist has the scale needed to recognize that capitalism, as practiced under liberal aims, does not have the desire nor the ability to satisfy modern industrialism's education prerequisite. A societal culture that has prioritized the reverse of education is what has led to the United States's incompetence at technology and industry. The United States was never going to succeed in this arena.
The kid gets a failing grade. Pick someone else that is a better candidate at mission success. Select someone that's serious about doing real work.
Maybe capitalism's competitor, whatever that may be, is better at heralding space travel and mass production?
China does appear to be a good replacement and contender for a sustainable modern empire (according to whatever objective analysis would support that claim). But, if they flirt with liberty and the pursuit of happiness even one bit, then it's game over and futile for this strain of politics too.
Excellent question. And the answer is, of course, very simple: Being American (or, more generally, a liberal-democracy subordinated entity), you should expect even Elon Musk's SpaceX to be a bad bet. SpaceX will display its inherent inability too, eventually.
I'm only minimizing the value of the Enlightenment's liberty proposition (liberalism) as a result of the scientific observation that entropy most definitely accelerates through liberal-democratic ideas and enterprises. Don't propose liberalism and then I won't appear aloof when I'm actually watching the situation very closely.
That's the problem of the generic establishment's dominant principle: there's a pedagogic influence where a trend towards aggressive responses to criticisms of popular science is valuable and, really, should be expected. Capital rewards and incentives go to the distributed liberal justice warriors when they implement regurgitations of trite and irrelevant talking points. Like an objective optimizing GPT-4 model that focuses on “no true X” meme tokens. Civilization's trained citizens miss details that matter, as they're limited to the compliant programming script they must follow and never deviate from.
Besides violating some sacred cow and norms, how does the "no true Scotsman" fallacy proposal relate to the fact that no true scientist would ever consider the Boeing aerospace company or Elon Musk anything close to engineering geniuses? Because, otherwise, you're just avoiding the objective commentary's point and discussion it leads to. Whether this evasion is intentional or not.
Lol. Who else is in this class? Little Piotr Communism dropped out of school 30 years ago. China's busy just trying to catch up. Everybody else can't seem to figure out how to pass econ-101.
Oh please. The answer was globalization. People couldn't get along well enough to make that work so here we are.
There is no magic sauce that will make economies work for everyone. Specialization is how we built civilization tens of thousands of years ago. It's how we get off the struggle bus today. But if nations can't rely on a global trade order then they all have to build everything.
I hope it does not. We do not need more space debris in orbit or more risk to the station and crew.
Also if it lands okay then they are more likely to deduce and correct what the issues are for a possible future mission (though at this point I do not know the likelyhood that Starliner will get another chance)
It would only "blow up" on reentry, don’t think there’s much risk of an actual pressure vessel rupture or hypergolic explosion. So no space debris at least, just littering the ocean.
The problematic thrusters are in the service module, which separates and burns up on reentry. So even if it lands OK, they won't learn anything new about the thruster problem by recovering the capsule.
If it were to blow up it would almost certainly be in the atmosphere due to entering at a bad angle or something. This would leave no debris in orbit and would not endanger the station or crew.
