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John Simmons a.k.a. "Lakeroadster"
NAR 113985
My Fleet with Build Data: Lakeroadster's Rocket Shop

Space travel is hard, but boy it sure seems Boeing is making it look even harder. Certainly making it look harder than SpaceX does.

If Boeing were not the old hand in all this I think maybe the criticisms would be a bit more lenient. But, SpaceX is the relatively new upstart here and they certainly make it look much easier than Boeing has.

Earl

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Earl L. Cagle, Jr.
NAR# 29523
TRA# 962
SAM# 73
Owner/Producer
Point 39 Productions

Rocket-Brained Since 1970

+1 to exactly what Earl said above.

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When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, AGITATION, CHAOS, TURMOIL, FIASCOS, AGGRAVATION, INSTIGATION, NUISANCE-ACTION, and HAVOC !

C'mon Earl. That's rubbish. Unless it's a major anomaly, the public doesn't hear about the dozen or more little glitches that occur on every single spaceflight for every single provider. If you think the SpaceX missions have been flawless, you're kidding yourself. It looks easy because you don't see the warts.

As for "old hands," I personally think that is part of Boeing's problems. Their team includes a lot of old "shuttle sustainment" folks who never designed from scratch. Before Starliner, "Boeing" hadn't designed a manned spacecraft since Rockwell (whom Boeing purchased) built Shuttle in the 1970s. One wonders if their management was part of the challenge too. Almost certainly.

Henry is just trying to calm the vitriol. Commendable but quixotic on this forum.

I don?t think its rubbish when one (in this case Boeing) essentially forces the customer to change their manned flight schedules and crews (at who knows what cost and bother) to accommodate one?s shortcomings with one?s hardware.

NASA really had no choice but to bring Starliner home empty. After all the analyses and testing that was done to try to figure out the thruster issue on the ground and not be able to reach any concrete conclusions, that basically ?forces? the customer (NASA) to do what they did. Had NASA chose to bring the crew home on Starliner and then something happened, NASA would have been scorched by the media and the public and rightfully so and NASA knew it. So, they really had no other choice than the choice they excercised.

Now, if I?m Boeing, after ALL the problems and delays they have had ALREADY on this project and THEN had THIS happen on the first manned mission of the craft, I would be feeling very, very, very badly for how I have inconvenienced my customer (and the country) and would feel like crawling in a hole.

Do issues happen with space-bound hardware? Yes. Is spacelfight hard, as Henry said? Yes, and I agreed with him. And certainly SpaceX has had issues and anomalies too one could surmise (and I am no ultra-proud SpaceX fanboy, either), but I?ve not seen/heard the litany of issues and delays from them as we have heard/seen from Boeing.

But, I still say Boeing is making this look really, really bad for themselves and is not a good reflection on the perception of their hardware. And I would suspect there are any number of NASA management folks (and probably more than one astronaut type, if truth be known) that wish they really did not have deal with these problems on the Boeing hardware, sad as it all is for Boeing.

Earl

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Earl L. Cagle, Jr.
NAR# 29523
TRA# 962
SAM# 73
Owner/Producer
Point 39 Productions

Rocket-Brained Since 1970