Posted on 08/22/2024 1:46:23 PM PDT by george76
Boeing Starliner program manager Mark Nappi ... it's no surprise that the company's Starliner crewed flight test is taking longer than expected — so far, almost ten times longer than expected. NASA astronauts Butch Williams and Suni Wilmore are on Day 77 of their eight-day stay aboard the International Space Station.
Nappi says he regrets not doing a better job of managing expectations.
"I think we all knew that it was going to go longer than that.. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about how much longer, but I think it’s my regret that we didn’t just say ‘We’re going to stay up there until we get everything done that we want to go do.'"
What a crock of you-know-what.
There's a lot more at stake than merely deferring a discussion about how long Starliner's crewed flight test might take. At issue are little, multimillion-dollar details like Starliner hogging one of the ISS's very few docking ports. There are staffing issues, too — SpaceX's Crew-9 mission has been delayed by five weeks and its crew potentially reduced to two from four. Let's not forget that every bit of food and water on board the ISS has to be brought up from Earth at about $60 million per cargo run — and Butch & Suni's needs have increased from eight days, now to 77 days, possibly to as long as eight months.
...
2014, SpaceX received $2.6 billion to develop Crew Dragon, which has been flying manned missions since 2020. That same year — approximately 1.6 times longer until now than it took for Apollo to land men on the moon — Boeing won $4.2 billion to develop Starliner, and it has yet to successfully complete a single manned mission.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
OK but he is white, of European descent. He has much more in common genetically with whites than with sub saharans.
“How ‘bout that LEM!”
They sent them up there in that spacecraft knowing full well the Starliner was not safe to fly.
I see the same mindset here that I saw in the Challenger disaster.
Hey! No fair!
(Right now, this minute, Boeing is (probably) more than halfway through their first manned mission! That ain’t bad progress for more than a decade’s work on a NASA contract.)
Seriously. Would have given up on Grissom halfway through his first flight .. .. .. If it turned out needing 6 weeks to come back down? /sarchasm
Someone just told me today that this defective Starliner is different from the previous unmanned Starliner in that they did not install the code that would allow it to operate without personnel onboard.
I had not heard this, but honestly, have not been following it that closely.
There may be a valid technical reason why that automatous capability may not have been installed, but I don’t know what that would be. I will have to find out more about it.
I posted a few weeks back that engineers now may have better external tools to work issues, but I have begun to suspect that today they lean on those tools too much and neglect the creative engineering power of the greatest computer of all, the human brain.
Back then (I am speaking to people like YOU linMcHlp!) they didn't have these awesome external tools they could offload engineering knowledge onto, so they had to depend on their own engineering skills, and the skills of those they collaborated with. IOW, then, they had SUPERIOR engineering skills and INFERIOR tools, and now, they have INFERIOR engineering skills and SUPERIOR tools.
I had expresses this opinion in the context of the use of AI, and how I suspect there are many out there who hope that AI will somehow close that gap left by the diminishment of the engineering skills.
I came to that conclusion recently after watching this video about the SR-71, a plane that amazingly first flew in 1964: LINK: How the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird Works
The whole video is astonishingly well done and entertaining to boot, but the link above takes you to a specific point in the video where they discuss the flight controls, particularly...
"The Mixer"
The "Mixer" is, to me, a ridiculously elegant device to handle flight control in a new way that had never been done before that time (that I know of). All the movable flight surfaces at the tailing edge of the body had to move in a coordinated way to provide pitch, roll, and blends of both when a combination of pitch and roll are needed.
Nowadays, it wouldn't be very complicated, right? You have a computer that would provide input to the controls to make an unflyable plane...flyable. But back then, they did it mechanically, linked with...cables to hydraulic boosters. It is brilliant. And development was begun in 1958!!!!
It isn't that I don't think engineers can do this kind of thing today, they obviously could, I believe. But I think it would be harder for them to conceive of.
The Mixer - reminds me of the typical automatic transmission valve body, the mechanical computer (before becomine a hub for electronic switches).
Further back in time, I tend to be frustrated by an argument:
“The USA is anti-semite! ‘They’ should have bombed the Auschwitz transportation complex, but ‘they’ did not care!”
Sigh. I think about all the logistics, maintenance, parts, tools, and people . . . all taking the right steps, merely to get a single B-17 into stable flight, prepared for the next mission (2 days after ‘that last, disasterous mission’).
I have 2 WW-II era electric drills (my father’s), and they still work. I keep them in order to remind me of how great ingenuity had to make up for ‘missing tools’ - ie tools hand built, on scene, “because we needed it” to fix something.
I continue to wonder, what happened to so many of those custom-made tools that USAAF maintenance created in England.
A certain shop where I worked, had some guys who could make any tool that you described. I needed a wrench that would make it easier to adjust the camber and caster on an old Oldsmobile. I bought 2 Craftsman, large box wrenches, cut away what I was not going to use, took the remaining pieces to a guy, showing him the angle that I needed between the 2 pieces I kept . . . et viola.
Thus, without repeatedly taking the car to an alignment shop, I could test multiple front end adjustment changes.
Same for the GM 4-BBL QuadraJet carburetor, testing multiple adjustment changes.
Working on mechanical stuff, resulting in some improvement - I find that is good for the brain.
BTW, did I every tell you that you write interesting stuff, and you might consider American Thinker? (Yes; I did; nudge, again.)
Avenue 5, with Hugh Laurie from “House”
Boeing is a “matrixed organization”, one where no one in particular is in charge or responsible.
Oh yea...
Thank you
I remember watching that show it was pretty good.
House was the captain..
Very nice of you to say so, FRiend...I may consider it...:)
The human brain inside of a willing and able operator can do things AI will never be able to!
#14 What did they tell the astronauts before they sent them up there?
Answer: Good luck, you are going to need it!
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