Boeing: “Uhh. Not sure why those thrusters failed, but let’s ship some astronauts.” 🧐 Seems like further mission testing with a planned vehicle recovery mission was necessary before sending up astronauts. I imagine the cost would’ve been great, but that’s aerospace. Every skipped check is likely to be paid for in lives lost.
We try to identify failure modes and use tools like Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) and fishbone analysis to track down failures and how they cascade to understand system behaviors. However, the more you increase the complexity of the system, the more difficult it is to fully think through all the possible ways things can go wrong and it’s not unheard of for things to slip through review.
Starliner has consistently been plagued by program management issues where they think they’ve caught the failure modes and implemented appropriate mitigations. They do an analysis, run some tests to prove those assumptions are correct, and fly it. In this case there was a design flaw in the thrusters that they saw on a different test flight, thought they fixed it, and flew again not knowing that they didn’t actually fix the problem.
False sense of security is a dangerous place to be when it comes to fault scenarios, but the alternative is extreme paranoia where you trust nothing. In fairness to Boeing, taking some level of risk is necessary in the space industry but I think it’s pretty obvious that they were not paranoid enough and were too trusting that they did their job right
There is an exorbitant of fluff in there though. Expertly so, it’s no ai slop, but someone very cleverly writing, getting payed by the word and rolling it out.
‘Thrusters failed, they turned off and on again, during that time the pilot had to manually fly it. Ironically thanks God afterwards.’
Is the gist of it, but there’s a lot of introspection, retrospection, repeating, rehashing and rephrasing. Reminded me of this Mitchell and Webb scetch
There was a lot more to the article than this. I’ve sat on console during launches,and reading their exchange gave me some anxiety. Trying to live troubleshoot thrusters issues would be a nightmare on an unscrewed satellite, let a lone one where it’s human rated, and the people flying it could die if you are unable to recover fast enough.
You train for this crap excessively, so everyone knows what to do, but that doesn’t make it any less nerve wracking in the moment.
I know I overstated it a bit, and there was more to it, but I’ve read the same story thrice at some point.
I want trying to downplay the astronauts archievement either, though I found them thanking the Lord over criticizing the company that made a bird so prone to failure a bit strange.
The writing style I found very curious, though it was skillfully written I think there’s art in being succinct, and that art was lacking it was almost literary edging.
This article is worth the read. Starliner was in an extremely precarious situation that we didn’t previously know about.
Boeing: “Uhh. Not sure why those thrusters failed, but let’s ship some astronauts.” 🧐 Seems like further mission testing with a planned vehicle recovery mission was necessary before sending up astronauts. I imagine the cost would’ve been great, but that’s aerospace. Every skipped check is likely to be paid for in lives lost.
but shouldn’t boeing, of all companies, known of the possible failures? this seems like the bottom line "trump"ed safety…
Aerospace industry engineer here:
We try to identify failure modes and use tools like Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) and fishbone analysis to track down failures and how they cascade to understand system behaviors. However, the more you increase the complexity of the system, the more difficult it is to fully think through all the possible ways things can go wrong and it’s not unheard of for things to slip through review.
Starliner has consistently been plagued by program management issues where they think they’ve caught the failure modes and implemented appropriate mitigations. They do an analysis, run some tests to prove those assumptions are correct, and fly it. In this case there was a design flaw in the thrusters that they saw on a different test flight, thought they fixed it, and flew again not knowing that they didn’t actually fix the problem.
False sense of security is a dangerous place to be when it comes to fault scenarios, but the alternative is extreme paranoia where you trust nothing. In fairness to Boeing, taking some level of risk is necessary in the space industry but I think it’s pretty obvious that they were not paranoid enough and were too trusting that they did their job right
There is an exorbitant of fluff in there though. Expertly so, it’s no ai slop, but someone very cleverly writing, getting payed by the word and rolling it out.
‘Thrusters failed, they turned off and on again, during that time the pilot had to manually fly it. Ironically thanks God afterwards.’
Is the gist of it, but there’s a lot of introspection, retrospection, repeating, rehashing and rephrasing. Reminded me of this Mitchell and Webb scetch
Remember when writing was Prose and poetry had rhythm?
It’s okay to say words, a few times and in different order, for effect.
There was a lot more to the article than this. I’ve sat on console during launches,and reading their exchange gave me some anxiety. Trying to live troubleshoot thrusters issues would be a nightmare on an unscrewed satellite, let a lone one where it’s human rated, and the people flying it could die if you are unable to recover fast enough.
You train for this crap excessively, so everyone knows what to do, but that doesn’t make it any less nerve wracking in the moment.
I know I overstated it a bit, and there was more to it, but I’ve read the same story thrice at some point.
I want trying to downplay the astronauts archievement either, though I found them thanking the Lord over criticizing the company that made a bird so prone to failure a bit strange.
The writing style I found very curious, though it was skillfully written I think there’s art in being succinct, and that art was lacking it was almost literary edging.