36 thoughts on “Starliner”

  1. ‘…second problem came with hundreds of feet of P-213 glass cloth tape inside the spacecraft found to be flammable.
    Say what? After the Apollo 1 fire how in the world did they make that mistake? Isn’t there a list of approved fireproof tapes for aeronautical use already? *Boggle*

    1. It’s a fiberglass cloth tape with an acrylic adhesive, and a release compound.

      Acryclic glass cloth tape

      It’s recommended for aerospace and space applications, and meets outgassing standards, but space applications typically are vacuum environments. That might be as far as Boeing’s thoughts went.

      But a look at its safety data sheet is a bit concerning.

      5 – Fire fighting measures

      (a) Fire extinguishing agent – Dry chemical, CO2, water spray or regular foam
      (b) Special exposure hazards in a fire -No information available
      Hazardous combustion products – No information available
      Explosion data – No information available
      Sensitivity to Mechanical Impact – No information available
      Sensitivity to Static Discharge – No information available

      How much money and how many engineering hours did they spend on this capsule?

      Now just ignoring the vast range of non-flammable adhesives on the market, why not use regular fiberglass tape and brush it with sodium silicate (water glass) like you were coating a fresh egg or concrete garage floor, unless perhaps that would tend to crack into tiny fragments that could be inhaled?

      The whole mess indicates a lack of seriousness and rigor in the design process.

      1. No Information five times! Well then you don’t have any data to suggest it is a fire hazard beyond what Dry Chemical or CO2 can handle!

        /sarc
        My God Boeing, when do you want me to fly? Never?
        Maybe they should take the issue off-line during the next telecon?
        /no-sarc

  2. Today on Mr. Rodger’s Launch Pad:
    Good morning everyone. I just got back from a brisk walk outside. Let me finish putting on my moon slippers. There we go. Today I want to talk to you about spaceships! Can you say Old Space? Of course you can. Let’s see what Picture Picture can tell us about it. Oh look, it’s a bag of money….

  3. The MBAs took over Boeing. Elon Musk has an MBA from the same institution as TRUMP!! I think you can see where this is going. Arse Technica needs to fire that idiot Berger and have all the space articles written by Beth Mole. Covid-19 crippled Starliner. It didn’t cripple SpaceX because Musk is an anti-vaxxer and all his employees are DEAD!! As for Boeing, when you’ve lost the support of a commie website, you’ve lost. Musk is a henchman of Xi. He’ll win EVERY TIME!!!

        1. Sorry to hear that. Hopefully you are on the mend.

          Interesting. I never knew there was a nomenclature symmetry between my Kzinti reference and the name my father gave me.

          I became somewhat concerned when you didn’t respond to this thread nor the commentary in which I specifically referred a particularly good idea as possibly belonging to your work.

          1. I survived the “bacterial infection” that’s killed off a number of celebrities of late (and a couple of my friends). As I lay marinating in enough cipro to stop an anthrax outbreak, my wife says, “See? I told you not to mess around with Madonna. NOW look at you!” I hear the Bacterial Girl is out of the hospital. (I wonder how many purported C19 deaths were accompanied by septic shock?) Anyways, I’ve lost a bit of weight and have grown a proto-beard, and grateful I’m basically healthy for my age.

    2. I assume you are trying to be satirical. Berger is the best ARS has and Beth Mole is a lefttard hack of the lowest order. I have caught her pushing deliberately-deceptive lefty agenda driven articles on multiple occasions. Lying by omission is her favorite technique.

      One piece on child deaths by guns was one. Of course, what she deliberately danced around was a 19 year old gang banger was a child by the standard of her article and the majority of the child gun deaths (won’t you please think of the children?) is actually caused by teen aged gang bangers in inner cities.

  4. McDonnells revenge….

    And of COURSE cost-plus affects the outcome. They have no motivation to deliver on time, on budget, or to spec: The more they spend, the more they make.

    1. Starliner is fixed cost, which is why they can say that Boeing has lost money on it and it isn’t a lie.
      The cost-plus mentality has infected all of Boeing (or at least their space branch) because after you do anything for decades a certain way you end up not being able to do it any other way.
      It’s like expecting Ford workers to move to Toyota in Japan and work there. Even without the language barrier, the way they work and the relationships with other workers and management is completely different.
      At this point they either go back to cost-plus (which would only work through political pressure) or they burn Boeing space to the ground and start over.

      1. Boeing never learned the lessons of the Small ICBM program, where Martin Marietta used the most brilliant buy-in strategy ever, and all of the booster stage bidders quickly followed suit. You low ball your bid on a fixed price contract, but negotiate the terms so closely that any action the buyer requests that’s not specifically in the contract is out of scope, and requires a contract change order. You wouldn’t believe how detailed you have to be on the bidder’s side to make that work, but they did. It guards against requirements creep, which is good. But it also allowed the contractors to screw up, and when asked to make things work cry “Out of scope!”

        The Air Force had to comply; they had no legal recourse. Bu the contractors hadn’t counted on the BMO Commander being an idiot who sought another star by sending the difference between his procurement budget and the contract values back to the Treasury – irretrievably. We weren’t a year into the program before it was broke from all of the “bail out” change orders to the contracts. Fortunately, the Berlin Wall fell after two failed SICBM test flights, and President George H.W. Bush magnanimously cancelled the program as a gesture of good will to the collapsing Soviet Union (just before SICBM would have collapsed on its own).

        1. I’d forgotten about Midgetman, a program that couldn’t exist today because its moniker is disrespectful to vertically enabled individuals. ^_^

          I had to look it up. Missilery.info link

          1989 GAO report

          The report notes that they intended to save money by storing them at existing missile US missile bases, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of having a mobile missile.

          1. When they abandoned the rail option for what eventually became the LGM-118A and then proposed “dunce-pack” I really started to write off the idea of survivable land-based missiles, figuring we’d secretly moved to a launch on warning strategy instead.

          2. It would never have been mobile. They would have stuck it in Minuteman silos, just as they did Peacekeeper. Anti-nuke and anti-war activists will never allow it to happen with any ICBM in any countries except Russia and China.

          3. You sound a little sour grapes there. Another option would be to build out lots of silos separated by enough distance to allow r-squared effects survival and then build a new 3 warhead missile that could be moved on trucks. Along with trucks moving around with dummy loads. All roads and silos within a secured Air Base location with AP escorts with low thresholds for arrests, i.e. seen, arrested, violently resist, get shot. Explain to the anti-nuke nutjobs that want to make the world safe for WWII again that this scheme actually *decreases* the chance of a nuclear attack and moves *us* away from sketchy launch on warning scenarios. Having options is always a good thing. The land-based missile part of the triad is in desperate need of an upgrade. I’ll note that China is full speed ahead on land based ICBMs.

          4. What you describe is the Peacekeeper Multiple Protective Shelter Site basing mode. The plan was to build a large number of horizontal shelters to accommodate a smaller number of missiles. The missiles would periodically be shuffled among the shelters as a Preservation of Location Uncertainty (PLU) measure. The cost of that was prohibitive, so they figured that they’d just build enough shelters for the operational missiles plus spares. Each shelter would have a missile, and PLU would be arranged by shuffling the front ends (Reentry System and RV) among the missiles. You’d have 50 active missiles and 20 spares, but only 50 would have an active front end at any time.

            Even that was too expensive, both in terms of capital cost and operations. The process of moving a nuclear weapon – not to mention 10 of them at a time – is mind-boggling in terms of the number of people (mostly security) involved. Needless to say, moving an entire missile with 10 warheads on it is even more of a production.

          5. I’d never considered the idea of moving only the RVs. That does make a lot more sense. Probably too many to move with 10 per missile. Now if you were down to 3 and you could just remove them intact along with the nosecones as a single assembly maybe that gets even cheaper?

            Was security really that expensive? Did I pick the wrong career path not being an AP?

          6. At this point I’m not sure I’d trust a new ICBM build out to anyone but SpaceX. But then again, knowing that company they probably couldn’t afford to have half their workforce quit.

            The government should negotiate new contract terms with SpaceX to allow some blue suits and green fatigues to cycle through their engineering and factory floor and maybe spawn a new MissileX company? But then again SpaceX doesn’t do solids. And you want solids.

  5. A big part of the problem with Starliner (and other such programs) is visible in the postings across the internet of people claiming to be current or former NASA and contractor personnel. I look at the proclamations of NSF user VSECOTSPE, who thinks Starship IFT-1 was a “boneheaded mistake,” and can only guess at what a huge negative impact he must have had on the US space program of the past 40 years. Now multiply him by thousands. FAA? Congressional aids? Boeing, etc? USAF? NRO? And so on down the line. Pork is probably the only reason we have a civilian space program

    1. I’m VSECOTSPE. I did not write that Starship or its last flight test were a mistake, boneheaded or otherwise. I wrote that launching without the water deluge system was a boneheaded mistake. To put false words in my mouth is defamatory.

      I’m also the former NASA program executive who, among other things, started the Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) program, the program that literally saved SpaceX. Mr. Barton clearly does not know me or my accomplishments. To argue that I had a “huge negative impact” on the civil space program over several decades is an argument from ignorance.

      Mr. Barton should refrain from making untrue and potentially costly remarks going forward. If Mr. Barton has a problem with the fact that I corrected him on obvious schedule details regarding Starship RTF, he can PM me at nasaspaceflight.com instead of creepily spreading personal lies across multiple websites.

  6. For a bunch of space enthusiasts I’ve found some of the crowd at NASAspaceflight to be remarkably thick.
    Most seem to have swallowed the global warming Koolaid, just like Casey Handmer, who really should do some more research.

      1. That is such a lazy trope. There is much to criticize about Obama’s space policy, but there was never a “Muslim outreach,” despite Bolden’s dumb interview with Al Jazeera.

  7. My mind is boggled at how Boeing could spend that much money on a project, and still not having it fly. I wonder if the cost-plus culture infected the program?

    Now do Musk and him spending 40x that on Twitter. I think it was a whole lot more than cost plus culture in his case.

    1. You “do Musk.” Explain to us how and why what is going on with TwitterX, a software services company, is in any way relevant to a discussion of the aerospace incompetency of Boeing and their failure to deliver a product others have managed to put into production. Use simple words with few syllables since you don’t seem to think much of our intelligence.

        1. Are you talking about Robert Oler? He hangs out in the comments of Space News and The Space Review occasionally. He can be frustrating but I wouldn’t call him an idiot.

  8. “My mind is boggled at how Boeing could spend that much money on a project, and still not having it fly. I wonder if the cost-plus culture infected the program?”

    It isn’t so much the “cost plus” culture, but the government procurement culture. Boeing Commercial Airplane used to keep a strict firewall between it and its Military Airplane and Space arms. Its “purchase” of MDAC brought in the latter’s management philosophy, which was government-program centric by then. That was also the reason MDAC was failing at almost everything it did. As a result, Boeing can’t do commercial airplanes very well any more, and it hasn’t been able to do government work any better than other big companies steeped in the same culture.

    “Ideally”, the government contractor developing something for production wants have get the program to Critical Design Review, then have it cacelled (for whatever reason). By that time, the contractor has expended all of the money needed to qualify whatever he’s developing, and build all of the production facilities and tooling – in other words, he’s spent the bulk of the projected program money. Now, though, he doesn’t have to put the item in production, where additional problems of unknown magnitude can arise. But he does get contract termination liability payments, to compensate for what he “would have” made in production. Usually, that more than pays for any cost overruns he has incurred during development, and leaves a healthy profit.

    Starliner hasn’t gotten to that point..yet.

    1. Is it possible that Boeing might swap in a new deck of cards if they can get past the CDR and negotiate a new contract for “operation and production” of Starliner capsules? Maybe the “re-usability” criterion might not be as good as expected, due to under performing components in the original design (see above). And so NASA will need to buy more capsules than previously thought at a price that will enable Boeing to pull its bacon out of the fire?

  9. One plus for Starliner is it’s still basically a 7-seater. There’s a fifth seat mount Boeing has the right to sell (presumably to an entity buying a 6 month stay at ISS). The two cargo racks can easily be converted to seat mounts if NASA allows it. There’s already a fifth sleep station aboard ISS (there are 4 in Node 2 and one in Columbus). There’s room for two more in Kibo. There’d have to be an ECLSS upgrade for that, but it looks like SpaceX is designing fixed lower bay seats for Dragon 2 since the last Soyuz incident. Once the Axiom segment gets started, that’s 4 and then 8 more crew. Although the ISS haters would go berserk, there’s a path to keeping ISS aloft until 2050 with a crew of 12-15 (or more, if the Russian segment is replaced with PMM + another Axion hub). It’d be a worthwhile engineering challenge, if nothing else. Refurb would have to be on Node 1 and Destiny, with lesser work on the rest (which is newer and in better shape). Orbital Reef, Vast, Starship, yadda, yadda, yadda. (Although if it were up to me, I’d put a very large station as L1SE and call it Stardock…)

  10. They underestimated SpaceX’s ability to complete the task and probably expected the contract to eventually turn into a cost-plus contract.

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