Boeing's starliner docks at ISS after five thrusters unexpectedly shut off (opens in new tab)

The reports while it was happening suggested that they were almost down to no redundancies for the thrusters. Which would have been bad enough to disallow the capsule to approach the ISS. They managed to get enough thrusters working to still dock, but it seems that this was rather close.

So even though it worked in the end, I would assume that this is still a quite serious incident and will require some examination.

Also it seems that these problems are not well understood, which is not the kind of problem you want to have on manned spacecraft:

> Some notes from the post-docking news conference on Starliner: Engineers found a fourth helium leak after capture. The thruster issues were similar to those observed on OFT-2, and are still not fully understood.

https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/1798827111454827003

Ideally you want the iterative lesson learning to wrap up before you put the humans inside.

Generally you actually want 0 "lessons learned" in human spaceflight. Test flights especially and unmanned missions have a much higher tolerance for error. A bunch of thrusters failing with people on board could have been catastrophic and is well into the territory of "enormous problems which never should have happened".

The astronauts may have to be "rescued" with a different capsule returning the departing astronauts to earth.

SpaceX has a little advantage in that their next iteration doesn’t cost a billion dollars…

>there are lessons learned that will be applied to the next iteration.

Maybe that's why there's 20 thrusters instead of 5.

He trained for hundreds of hours to fly the capsule manually and the docking process is excruciatingly slow so it's probably not that stressful. Even when everything is working they let the astronauts have a little manual control as a treat.

Why not try for yourself: https://iss-sim.spacex.com/

You know you can always rely on a guy named "Butch Wilmore" to take control when shit hits the fan.

NASA is just the customer. Starliner is built by Boeing.

Boeing used to mean quality. Now it means cutting corners for the sake of stock price and dividends.

There is a reason why it says Boeing's Starliner and not NASA's

You should read more about failures than happened during Apollo program. Apollo 1, Apollo 13 being most famous, but even during Apollo 11 multiple things failed.

Absolutely. Even if zero additional problems crop up while they are at the ISS, the Controllers will need to have fall-back-back-back-and-further-back plans on tap, in case of yet more failures in the Service Modules' propulsion systems.

It sounds like they only recovered 4/5 thrusters.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Has SpaceX had any thruster problems when docking with the space station?

Hurray for the software that managed to work even with the failed thrusters.

They should be focused on profit, because they haven't made a profit in almost 5 years now and Boeing is a very important company to the US. If Boeing ends up going bankrupt, the US government will 100% have to bail it out.

> the US govt will step in to bail Boeing out when things go really bad

Even an optimistic bail-out scenario involves the stock being wiped clean. (For example, what we did with the automakers.)

Given the bipartisan frustration with Boeing, I'd fully expect calls for clawbacks that make failure personally painful for Boeing's leadership.

I bet the actuaries responsible for the astronauts’ life insurance just bumped the premiums up a few tiers.

Came here to post this!