Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky.
Six hours after departing the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness.
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There were some snags during reentry, including more thruster issues, but Starliner made a “bull’s-eye landing,” said NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.
Boeing insisted it was safe, but nobody at NASA seemed to be inclined to trust Boeing's word on that.
The next few flights should be made with people from the C-suite and the Board of Directors of Boeing. Let them put thier cushy asses on the line.
2 comments:
Unless the suites change the culture, Boeing is going the way of the Dodo. I won't ever fly in a Boeing plane or spacecraft until they do. Maybe not even then.
Boeing executives comments fly in the face of actual lack of performance:
"Boeing did not participate in the Houston news briefing. But two of the company’s top space and defense officials, Ted Colbert and Kay Sears, told employees in a note that they backed NASA’s ruling (to not return the astronauts).
“While this may not have been how we originally envisioned the test flight concluding, we support NASA’s decision for Starliner and are proud of how our team and spacecraft performed,” the executives wrote.
Starliner’s crew demo capped a journey filled with delays and setbacks. After the space shuttles retired more than a decade ago, NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX for orbital taxi service. Boeing ran into so many problems on its first test flight with no one aboard in 2019 that it had to repeat it. The 2022 do-over uncovered even more flaws and the repair bill topped $1 billion."
Taking pride in delivering defective vehicles tells me all I need to know. Boeing execs haven't a clue what design teamwork, quality control, and test to failure to determine margins is all about.
A side note: The company I worked for recently bought a company that had cobbled together a vacuum system and was selling it domestically. The field failures began to outnumber on going production with returns filling up the repair department. So the line was shut down, failures evaluated, and a redesign program implemented. 2 years later the new system passed all final quality testing and regulatory requirements. That testing included field trials in the harshest environments with customers operating systems around the clock. That testing was crucial to eliminating a number of unforeseen issues. No system is perfect, but some minor failures to date all had soft landings. Robustness continues to be added.
And all the customers who got shitty product were made whole.
Look on the bright side, the Trump/Vance plane is a 737-800.
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