Boeing's Starliner Transparency Is Still Cloudy
NASA, Boeing to Provide Outcome of Starliner Orbital Flight Test Reviews
“NASA and Boeing will host a media teleconference at 11 a.m. EST Friday, March 6, to discuss the outcome of the joint independent review team investigation into the primary issues detected during the company’s uncrewed Orbital Flight Test in December as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.”
Keith’s note: The first I learned of this event was a Tweet hours after it was over. I guess I would not invite me either. Maybe they will be a little more forthcoming next week when they are in the hot seat and NASA is sitting next to them.
Not all news media were invited to participate in this #Starliner media update – in spite of the stated claim to be doing this "In the spirit of transparency" by @BoeingSpace Hmm, was it something we said John Mullholand? https://t.co/86oOaHCt9J
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) February 28, 2020
Read the media feeds on Twitter. This confirmed ClickOnOrlando’s report of no end to end test.
Boeing screwed the pooch and is desperately trying to minimize it.
https://www.clickorlando.co…
Prudent. But, there comes a point when doing that when one just looks like some idiot tap-dancing on the deck of a sinking ship.
All the comments about systems performing better than expected sound kind of off. The systems should perform exactly as expected, or you did something wrong in your model.
Not necessarily. Most spacecraft have sizable margin on just about everything. For example, it’s common to see electronics designed to survive 150% or more of the expected radiation dose. That’s because the actual dose is uncertain, how well-shielded one part is by other spacecraft structures is hard to model reliably and how much a given part can take isn’t certain. So, if (usually when) things go better than expected, you get a spacecraft with a longer operating lifetime than planned. That’s not a bad thing. That’s also true of power, telemetry, etc.
On the other hand, there are places where over performance is definitely bad. If a rocket has a higher specific impulse than expected, that might sound good. But it probably means it’s also producing more thrust than expected. And that means the mechanical loads on everything on the spacecraft are greater than expected. That isn’t such a good thing. But I see your point: Even when over engineering the system isn’t bad, it also isn’t something to brag about.
Favorite Boeing Statement thus far , NASA did not require us to test end to end and testing the whole flight would take 25hrs we decided to just test bits and pieces !! FTW ??
Agree. A 25 hour test, or series of 25 hour tests, seems to be a reasonable expectation on a $4.8B program. Similar tests would be done on smaller programs.
But, I also don’t understand why NASA didn’t require it, or didn’t identify the lack of this end-to-end testing as a risk during their reviews/oversight of the program?
It would actually been 48 hours. Not that this is a big difference.
In practice, abbreviating software tests is a relatively common practice within NASA and their usual contractors. It can be done by splitting it up into several, shorter tests, just taking out some of the dead time when nothing is happening, or running on a non-flight emulator which runs faster than real time. None of those are particularly good ideas, and there are plenty of ways problems can slip though that sort of test. But those approaches aren’t uncommon.
There two things about it I don’t understand (well, more than two…) It seems like the usual practice is to have people around and watching for the full duration of the test. Potentially a dozen, one per subsystem. If it’s just a software test, with flight computers but without any hardware which could be damaged, I don’t see why they couldn’t start the test on Friday afternoon, go home for the weekend, and come back to look at the results on Monday morning to look at the results.
Second, so what? Even if you do have a dozen, well-paid engineers working shifts for a couple days, why is that a big deal? At a guess, even assuming high overhead, and extra pay for working shifts, it wouldn’t cost more than a quarter million. It might cause some complaints from those engineers’ families. But, not to seem heartless, projects like this involve a lot of travel for many of those engineers (all the parts aren’t made in the same place, so integration tests often involve someone going somewhere.) So if working odd hours for a couple days is a problem, engineers’ families are probably already upset. Is another project knocking on the door to use the test facilities? Managing schedules and access to facilities one of the things project managers are supposed to do for a living.
In practice, I suspect it was more than a 48 hour test. If they decided a full end-to-end test was necessary in _this_ case, and applied that philosophy across the board, how many other, long-duration tests would have been required? That could pile up to a serious amount of time, effort and money. But some other companies don’t seem to have that problem. Maybe they have more efficient ways to conduct tests.
There are systems that cannot be exactly modeled given a lack of flight-to-ground testing repeatability.
Hard to believe Boeing Actually still seem to think NASA might allow them to fly astronauts !! If NASA does I will truly just shake my head !!
Meanwhile it appears that the Artemis 1 test flight is slipping further into the distant future…
https://spacepolicyonline.c…
Jurczyk: Artemis I to Launch in Mid-Late 2021, HLS Contracts Within Weeks
By Marcia Smith | Posted: March 1, 2020 3:36 pm ET | Last Updated: March 1, 2020 3:42 pm ET
Looks like more money for Boeing…
Just a reminder that back in 2017, NASA was saying that there will be a flight around the Moon in 2019.
Given what we in 2020 know, NASA must have known in 2017 that flight in 2019 would have never happened (indeed, could never have happened). IOW, they straight up lied to us the taxpaying citizen.
Some of the announced launch dates have been honestly described. If memory serves, the slip from this fall to spring of 2021 was accompanied by a statement that “everything would have to go right” for that to actually happen. (Or words to that effect; I don’t remember the exact phrasing.)
https://www.nasaspaceflight…
This is what I’m talking about (but there are many similar statements and presentations):
The first SLS mission, EM-1, according to the HEOMD 28 March 2017 presentation, shows an uncrewed EM-1 mission launching on an SLS Block 1 vehicle in 2018
Given what we know in 2020 there is no way NASA bureaucrats were only simply mistaken in stating a 2018 EM-1 mission. They had to have known when that statement was made that it was impossible to meet. Therefore they straight up lied about the SLS progress. I’m glad Gerst is gone as everything was done with his oversight.