Astronauts would have been fine on Boeing's Starliner during landing, NASA says

[Admin]

With Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is safely back on Earth, NASA says Crew Flight Test astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams could have returned onboard.

Astronauts would have been fine on Boeing's Starliner during landing, NASA says : Read more

 

[IronY]

"Astronauts would have been fine"​

Hindsight is always better than Foresight.
You made the right decision NASA.

 

[Delirious35]

Profits above safety. What a nice company. May they lose a lot of contracts in the future.

 

[danR]

Better stranded than dead.
Decisions are made on what you know, not what you find out.

 

[skynr13]

I really think these astronauts are a couple of chickens for not trying to make it back on this Starliner. After all the previous two launches had troubles too and made it back just fine. Articles say they are highly trained in aeronautics, so where is the proof of their pudding?

 

[SciFi Sam]

I understand Starliner experienced a loss of a thuster during its return after detaching from the trunk. A backup redundant thruster took the place of the failed primary, permitting normal descent and landing thereafter. Also, I understand there was communication failure during descent following RF blackout/reacquisition of signal. If true, "Starliner's uncrewed landing [did not] perform as expected". This isn't a "normal" reentry operation, further underscoring a pattern of substandard performance.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Space travel has not been very safe. Using rough data from a variety of imprecise sources, it seems that there have been about 700 human trips into space (or toward space if you count disasters during the ascent phase) and about 30 fatalities from all countries combined, 14 of which were U.S. space shuttle accidents. So, the fatality rate per person-trip is something like 4%. It should be somewhat similar per flight, even with the high number of fatalities for those 2 shuttle disasters because of the fact that there are usually more than on crew per flight, often 3 or 4.

So, if you were already embarking on a mission that has a chance of about 1 in 25 of killing you, and you learned that several things were wrong with the vehicle, which was made by a company that was just convicted of negligence in designing and manufacturing aircraft, I think it would be only a sign of intelligence if you demanded that the problems be fixed before you risk you life to test the thing.

That said, there has been no indication that either of the astronauts were unwilling to fly the Boeing capsule back to Earth. The hesitancy seemed to be getting expressed by the engineers on the ground who were concerned for their safety.

 

[Kehk in a MiG]

Better stranded than dead.

I assure you they are fine. When they heard they would be there till February, they were probably elated. Astronauts love being in space!

 

[Patrick Ford]

Profits above safety. What a nice company. May they lose a lot of contracts in the future.

At least this time, Boeing's failures are on their dime and not on US taxpayers.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

At least this time, Boeing's failures are on their dime and not on US taxpayers.

While Boeing is not (so far as I know) getting additional compensation for their continuing program to get their capsule certified, it still must be costing NASA money. Not only is a lot of review and testing effort being expended by NASA, it also lost 2 crew slots on a SpaceX flight to the International Space Station. How much of that is compensated by their 2 astronauts being "stuck" there for an additional 9 months isn't clear. But, there have been delays in other launches, cargo swapouts, etc. due to Boeing turning an 8 day test into a 9 month tour.

And, then there is the basic question of Boeing already getting far more money than SpaceX for essentially the same job, but not yet succeeding, compared to SpaceX succeeding and continuing to get the job done at lower cost per launch.

So, if the whole project results in failure to get their capsule crew-certified in time to actually ferry astronauts to the ISS, it will have cost the "taxpayers" a lot that was ultimately wasted.