- "After today’s successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9's second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause"
For those not familiar with the launch profile of the Falcon 9, the second stage de-orbit burn occurs after the crew/service module separates from the second stage.
They would also regret if something went wrong while returning on a Starliner that everyone knew wasn't working as it should. Returning on a Dragon was the safest choice available.
Uncontrolled reentry has been the norm for most of the space age (and is still standard practice for the Chinese, and their boosters). The far more important issue is that this a human-rated booster, and an unidentified defect impacts the safety of crew launches. This issue showed up on a de-orbit burn, but it's unlikely to be limited in scope to de-orbits only.
edit: Turns out this isn't accurate; it's still actually normal for US rocket *upper stages* to do uncontrolled reentries [0]. This is a subject of ongoing FAA rulemaking [1]. The Chinese examples are still exceptional because they involve far larger first-stage/core-stage boosters (>50 meters in length).
edit 2: If anyone was curious about the Europeans, the answer is that Ariane 5/ECA has actually *never* done a controlled upper-stage deorbit, because its LH2/LOX engine isn't designed to be able to ignite twice (deorbit burns are excluded)[2].
China also often launches from far-inland locations which puts large terrestrial populated regions beneath the booster (and booster landing) track. Perhaps less so for nominal launches, but not all launches are nominal:
China operates four launch facilities, three of which, Jiuquan, Taiyuan, and Xichang are inland. The fourth, Wenchang, is on the island of Hainan, in the South China Sea between China, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome, located in the independent country of Kazakhstan, is similarly an inland location and has seen launch debris fall over populated areas.
Is it "luck" if you intentionally chose a place smack in the middle of nowhere, such that even an off-nominal reentry will overwhelmingly occur in an extremely sparsely populated area (ie the middle of the ocean)?
Landing area is one thing, but more important and dangerous is reentry profile. Too steep, and the capsule melts down or crew inside becomes very flat from the deceleration.
There's a nuance here: non-SpaceX rocket *first*-stages typically fall into the ocean, but they do that within controlled exclusion zones, which are notified and restricted for air- and marine- traffic. *Upper*-stages are a different beast. Most (see my sibling comment) deorbit uncontrollably and impact somewhere at random.
Not sure how soon if ever Boeing is going to be putting astronauts in space again. I see Blue Origin stepping up and taking their place. Agreed though, should be a set of compatible standards for space suits.
Normally I would disagree with you, but Boeing is facing death by a thousand cuts right now. I could see the US government not letting them fail however. So I’d give it 50/50, not 100% no-fly-again
> Stich said there is a space suit already on the ISS that one of the astronauts can use for the return trip, and the Crew 9 mission will bring another suit.
Separate from everything else, I'm glad the first crewed launch from SLC-40 went smoothly. Being able to use that pad for Crew Dragon launches provides some helpful flexibility for important Falcon Heavy launches at LC-39A.
> By the time they return, the pair will have logged more than eight months in space. They expected to be gone just a week when they signed up for Boeing’s first astronaut flight that launched in June.
What kind of overtime do you think they are clocking?
Salary is set by the year, and with the calculated 6.7 milliseconds of time dilation in the reverse direction (i.e. they will be 6.7ms younger when they arrive), sounds like they should be docked a cent or so.
Naturally, a firm located in the local frame of reference has a comparative advantage when it comes to employment. Remote work just isn't viable when you can't even agree on simultaneity.
Maybe they could pay them in advance, and then put it in a safe growth account of some sort and by the time they get back they’ll never have to work again? Win-win
ChatGPT 4o-mini generates a vague "it depends" answer with no useful sources or statements that could be used to follow up with actual sources.
This is a question where I would have expected an authoritative answer to be easier to find. At least regarding your "like the military" statement, it seems like some astronauts are military, but what kind of extra pay they get seems to be hard to find.
While I'm sure it can't be measured as a convenience from the family in any way you slice it I'm not sure one can compare the way they plan their and timing expectations around an orbital test flight to that of a standard work trip.
It’s almost laughable how the general public tries to apply their own soft feelings to these people built for high-stakes work. None of these people are bothered by this and their families have become accustomed to this sort of thing and too obscenely full of pride to let their own emotions get in the way.
There is some irreversible degradation happening in space to human body, discussed recently on similar topic here. If they have ie measurably messed up heart or eye sight they could potentially sue Boeing, maybe.
> On 10 June, with all their initial Starliner testing completed, the CFT crew started working on general ISS maintenance and research activities. They started their day by measuring their temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and respiratory rate. Later, Wilmore worked on the maintenance of a computer connected to the Microgravity Science Glovebox, while Williams installed hardware to support a space fire investigation. On 11 June, the astronauts spent their time on biomedical activities, with Wilmore organizing the inventory of the Human Research Facility, and Williams working on procedures to collect microbe samples and sequence their genes. On 12 June, Wilmore checked cargo in the Harmony module and worked on maintenance of the station's bathroom, while Williams continued her gene sequencing work from the day before.[65]
> On 17 June, Williams worked on maintenance tasks and prepared the Advanced Plant Habitat for future experiments, and on 18 June she continued working on the gene sequencing study from the prior week. Meanwhile, Wilmore spent the two days working on a study of the behavior of flowing liquids in space.[69][70]
> NASA said that since their arrival on 6 June, Wilmore and Williams have been tasked with completing half of all hands-on research time conducted aboard the ISS, giving their crewmates more time to prepare for the departure of Northrop Grumman's Cygnus NG-20 spacecraft.[71]
(As you probably know, it's a bit misleading to say that Astronauts are doing science on the ISS. For the most part they are brilliant, expensive, and highly trained lab technicians who prep and repair equipment and then hit the "go" button for experiments that were designed by, and will be analyzed by, scientists on Earth.)
> they are brilliant, expensive, and highly trained lab technicians who prep and repair equipment and then hit the "go" button for experiments that were designed by, and will be analyzed by, scientists on Earth
True. I was just curious if having two extra pairs of hands was letting new experiments be done, or existing ones be done more thoroughly.
Gotcha. Yea, my impression is that they always have a pretty deep backlog of maintenance tasks that can be done any time there is downtime or extra hands. That might also be true for science, e.g., repeat some experiment with different settings/conditions. (Certainly, in case of unexpected problems/delays they already have a triage plan for which experiments are performed and which are sacrificed.)
Typically anytime someone gets lost or diverted or something else, they are eager to gather information and do as much science as possible. Some large themes (like most of Voyager) and some smaller ones like when individuals are stranded on planets, end up being much about the scientific opportunities. Mainly the attitude of looking at a situation like this as an opportunity for science both resonates with me and reminds me of the optimism of Star Trek :-)
Bigger than that, legacy US defense contractors ARE the US Military / Space Force / etc.
So IMO the golem whose values are being reflected in this failure / recovery from it is a US Government <> Commercial organism. And indirectly the United State's civilian population since the Government is formed (over centuries) to be a care-taker reflection of the civilian pop.
Yes mostly the idea that risk should be averted at all times by using the same few companies has fully captured US gov culture. And it’s only gotten much worse since they seem to think China should be the model to copy because they dump money into pet megacorps there, even though it’s still a very new concept that is far from proven sustainable in China itself. Not to mention they mostly coast off copying US innovation and preventing competition.
But mostly the issue is employing it as a long term strategy, because it worked a few times in the last as a short term boost to newly ascendant orgs (ala NASA+space industry in the 1960s) before the Iron Rule of bureaucracy kicks in at all organizations involved, be they private or public.
They do get a per diem for incidentals but no overtime or any extra duty pay for being in space. This astronaut said it was only an extra $1.20/day. Meals and lodging are provided for so maybe that's deducted from the standard govt per diem.
Man the reporting on this ordeal has been so awful and so representative of how media misleads the public into thinking things are worse than they actually are.
It isn't a rescue mission, it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications to account for the extra crew left on the station, and those crew are 'stuck' only in the sense that they're expected to stay there as part of their duties and it would be unnecessarily disruptive to operations to bring them back early. Starliner was still deemed to be safe enough to be the emergency escape option while it was docked, then the emergency escape option became seats setup in the cargo portion of the Crew-8 capsule.
Well hmm. NASA decided Starliner wasn't safe enough to use for the return journey, so the astronauts stayed on the ISS until the next ride became available.
Originally the astronauts were supposed to go back on Starliner. Now they're taking another ride back. Is that considered a rescue? Well, it depends.
If you get left behind on an island because your ride wasn't safe and another boat picks you up, is that a rescue? Now what if you're 420 kilometers up and another boat has to come get you. Is that a rescue?
If there wasn't another ride from the ISS available, would the astronauts be stranded? Yes.
In that case, if a ride suddenly became available would it be considered a rescue? Probably, yes.
Following the analogy... you're on an island. A ferry has showed up at the island every six months or so for the last 40 years. The last ferry that showed up broke before it could leave the harbor. No need to worry, though. Another ferry's coming in six months and there are plenty of supplies on the island.
Is it rescue? Maybe in the sense that you can't leave when you wanted to and now you have to wait. But not in the sense that you were ever in any real danger.
(Admittedly, maybe there is a bit more danger for these astronauts because a malfunctioning spacecraft is inherently a bit of a safety hazard. And the SpaceX operation is certainly not as routine as a ferry showing up at a dock, though it's still safe.)
It seems that it is both a bit subjective whether one calls it "rescue," and also a bit sensationalized to put in a headline too.
Cruise line A and cruise line B drop their passengers off at a remote island for 5 days, and then come to pick them up and take them home. After cruise line B drops theirs off, the cruise ships breaks down, and the passengers can't be picked up after 5 days, so they're stuck on the island with no immediate way to get off. Cruise line A says "OK, the next cruise ship we send will be at half capacity, so we can get the passengers from cruise line B off the island and get them home."
Is cruise line A rescuing the passengers from cruise line B? I'd say yes.
The main reason people don’t want to call it a rescue is because they dislike Musk. If there were no politics involved people wouldn’t be handwringing themselves so much over the word rescue.
If the spaceship that took you somewhere wasn’t able to get you back as planned and cannot get you back as planned and someone else has to go get those people, that’s a rescue.
> If the spaceship that took you somewhere wasn’t able to get you back as planned and cannot get you back as planned and someone else has to go get those people, that’s a rescue.
If you were on cruise then yes, if you are a professional team who trained for years to stay in dangerous conditions and the only thing out of ordinary is delayed transport back then not. If politics were not involved no one would call it a rescue.
Good point. If this situation is equivalent then why not I guess. But note the PBS one says "urgent need for the capsule". Unclear why. Is it urgent in this case?
In case of Russians there was a coolant leak
If you are working in Antarctica and need to wait for another transport home it sounds okay. If you urgently need treatment and must perform a surgery on yourself then that's an emergency
It's slightly more nuanced than that, in that starliner didn't actually break down. It had some issues which presented increased risk for the astronauts, but it was still operational. If there was a true emergency on ISS, they would've gone on starliner. But because there was no danger of them staying longer till the next ride, they opted out of using starliner given the increased risk.
Cruise passengers stuck on an island without other transport would be rescued because personally for them it is completely out of ordinary.
Workers who signed up to get paid to be on the island and do some work? Knowing that there is only one line of transport and it can be irregular? Going through months or years of training beforehand? Maybe "rescue" is a sensationalization when used in a news headline.
> Is cruise line A rescuing the passengers from cruise line B? I'd say yes.
IMO that's only true in line A's PR campaign, assuming they're adversarial enough to run with it.
In your analogy, the passengers are always "stuck on the island with no immediate way to get off" for at least 5 days, as they have no alternative way to get back during their planned stay. If B's cruise ship breaks down - and AFAIK in this case, "breaks down" doesn't mean the ship can't move, just that the risk of catastrophic failure during the trip crossed a preset threshold - that's more of an operational disruption. The stranded passengers are still safe and sound, they just need to wait for the next scheduled cruise to take them home.
The schedule bit matters IMO. It would be a rescue if the next scheduled ride would be way too late to help them and thus it had to be moved up to save their lives.
If you took a different boat separate from the normal ferry, intending to leave right away but now stuck unable to use it, I would say the next ferry is rescuing you.
Looked up two definitions of rescue. First, is the default that shows on Google (via Oxford Languages) [1]:
> verb. 1. save (someone) from a dangerous or distressing situation. 2. informal, keep from being lost or abandoned; retrieve.
Per this one, if you miss the last train across the bay the the Uber _would_ indeed be "rescuing" you if you felt distressed. If we consider the informal definition, I'd say you're also being rescued since one could say you were abandoned by the train and thus being retrieved by the Uber. Next, Merriam Webster [2]:
> transitive verb. to free from confinement, danger, or evil
Similarly, if you understand "rescue" as freeing someone from danger, this isn't a rescue. The astronauts aren't in danger really— they have all the supplies and support they need. Nonetheless, they certainly are in confinement, so this could still be called a rescue.
I personally do see how the fact this mission was already scheduled, and the little danger around all this, can make "rescue" feel like a little much. It's the same word used in The Martian, after all. But nonetheless I would still call it a rescue mission. These two astronauts are confined up there not by will but by circumstance, and the taxi flight was modified to sending only two people instead of the usual four, specifically to make space for these two astronauts to come back [3].
These individuals are professionals who signed up for this and are paid to do the job. This isn’t a rescue; the media is simply sensationalizing the entire story.
> individuals are professionals who signed up for this and are paid to do the job
Is the thesis only leisure travellers can be rescued? Astronauts do not sign up to fly on faulty ships. They accept the risk of it happening. But that acceptance doesn’t diminish the tragedy of a ship breaking up on reëntry nor, by extension, the emergency status of a reëntry vehicle with misbehaving manoeuvring thrusters.
This discussion reminds me of the reaction among some to the FAA grounding Falcon 9 “after the first stage used in the [August] launch crash-landed and toppled into the Atlantic Ocean while attempting to touch down on a SpaceX droneship” [1]. It doesn’t matter that everyone else tosses their spent stages into the sea. There was a plan and it went abnormally. That calls for a review. If that review can’t be concluded satisfactorily, as it wasn’t in the case of Starliner, you have an emergency. Relieving someone from an emergency is a rescue.
By some of the standards raised in this thread, a test pilot ejected from their plane and stranded in the tundra wouldn’t qualify for rescue because they were paid or weren’t in immediate and obvious mortal peril or because the ejection seat worked.
It’s space. The ground state is emergency. I am training to be a pilot. Anything going off flight plan is an emergency. If ground control gives me corrective instructions, in the course of a mistake, I hope I will have the humility to not refuse its designation as a rescue.
Like, if you want an Exhibit A for why Boeing doesn’t deserve forward trust, it’s this response.
When the ground state is emergency the definition of emergency changes because emergency cannot be the same as ground state...
If we go by technical definition of "emergency" then anything not by the plan is an emergency, but it's not used that way normally and it's not a technical publication.
If you are stuck in space with no lifeboat back then I agree it is an emergency, but they apparently have Starliner and it works. If they or Nasa are more comfortable with another option maybe that makes it an emergency or maybe not.
If it turns out Starliner doesn't work, that's an emergency. If there is radiation event coming then it's an emergency, but it is always an emergency in space regardless.
One, had. Starliner went home. Two, they didn’t. Starliner was broken. Its manoeuvring thrusters, a critical reëntry system, were misbehaving. If you’re on a plane and the oxygen system fails, that’s an emergency. You don’t have to wait for cabin pressure to fail for it to qualify, and oxygen systems aren’t even a critical system; this is closer to the flaps or landing gear behaving erratically.
Actually, NASA protocol requires more than a single layer of safety. The astronauts currently do not have a lifeboat home - that is extraordinarily irregular and I believe that it constitutes a danger to the astronauts. The spacecraft are not only for down transport, they are also shelters for radiation and particle events - which could be declared with days or hours notice. For a month these astronauts have had no viable shelter nor transport in case of emergency.
Danger is not when the last later of safety fails. Danger is when the level of risk exceeds a set threshold - and that level has been exceeded as per NASA protocol.
> not in the sense that you were ever in any real danger
The analogy breaks down because an island isn’t space. Your default state on an island tends towards remaining alive. Your default state in space is dead.
A closer analogy is a plane in flight. It takes energy and effort to keep everyone alive. Externally-assisted recovery from peril, in that situation, is a rescue. Even if it’s convenient.
No astronaut has died on ISS in 30 years. Claiming they are in significant danger simply isn't accurate. Saying 'the default state in space is dead' when historically basically nobody has died in space.
> No astronaut has died on ISS in 30 years. Claiming they are in significant danger simply isn't accurate
Nobody claimed as much. A jet liner is safer than the ISS. The analogy is conservative.
> Saying 'the default state in space is dead' when historically basically nobody has died in space
Our default state at cruising altitude is dead.
Note: I’m not suggesting anyone would have died. Just that they were in a perilous place where things were going wrong. Being relieved from that position is a rescue.
> Your default state on an island tends towards remaining alive.
I'm guessing you spend most of your life indoors?
On Earth, outside of the carefully regulated homes we've built as a society, the default state is dead and it takes tremendous work and constant vigilence to avoid that fate, only ever temporarily.
And that is why if somebody finds a child wandering in the park alone, we say that the man rescued the child. Exactly as SpaceX is doing in this situation.
Yes and we also say you rescued me if I am bang out of cash and you lend me a fiver at checkout...
If you see a news headline "man rescues child" you expect a direct threat like something like from a burning house.
> if somebody finds a child wandering in the park alone, we say that the man rescued the child. Exactly as SpaceX is doing in this situation.
Plus, saying astronauts, professionals who signed up for the job knowing what it entails and went through years of training are like children wandering in the park, to paint SpaceX as their savior, is... wow.
Humans in space are less than children in the park. We've barely ventured out of our own atmosphere. Less than a 1000 people have been to orbit, and only 24 have gone to the moon. Out of those, only a dozen have landed on the moon.
And the moon is still the Earth system - we've never really left our own yard.
It sounds like everyone in this thread is in complete agreement about the complex parameters and details and yet we are arguing on the scope of the label.
It's become the normal way of thinking here on HN. Everyone is so deep inside a box that they can't even see the edges. They're brainwashed with cult behavior.
That is what is great about HN. We discuss a broad range of topics which sometimes brings us discussing off subject matter but that are still relevant to the heart of HN. Media reporting and how they influence people is definitely a topic appropriate for HN so I can see how it was brought up.
>On an island you can call for a boat or a helicopter.
Boat, yes; helicopter, no, unless the island is pretty close to civilization. Helicopters have very limited range. No helicopter is going to rescue you from some remote island in the south Pacific, unless it was launched from a rescue ship (in which case it was really the ship that rescued you; the helicopter was merely more convenient for transportation between the ship and the island than a tender boat).
With SpaceX's launch cadence they could easily shift some flights. Of course you'd need a Crew Dragon that has completed refurbishment, and need to integrate it with a rocket. A month sounds like a reasonable timeline to get an unexpected rescue mission to the ISS. Which isn't great if you need a medevac, but that's why they have enough space craft docked
You’re not just “on an island.” You’re LITERALLY STUCK on the island FAR past when you were supposed to leave. So the boat coming to get you off the island is literally rescuing you.
I know you hate Elon musk—I don’t care for him much nor do I harbor animosity towards him—but a rescue is a rescue lmao. You guys would never be this ridiculous if the situation wasn’t politically charged, or if the circumstances favored your political leaning (almost certainly progressive left).
Yeah not a fan of his cause all his big promises / lies like a used car salesman but him buying X and trying to put the brakes on the radical lefts real out there stuff I personally think did just that. He's in the middle / an independent with both conservative & liberal leanings.
The thing is that rescue implies they were imperiled by not using Starliner to return. That isn't the case, there has been a way to get them back without Starliner since they got there.
Sending this SpaceX capsule up with seats reserved for their return fixes the overall operating tempo, but it doesn't make the 2 astronauts any more or less safe.
> That isn't the case, there has been a way to get them back without Starliner since they got there.
That is pushing it until Crew 9 arrives. It's a set of straps attached to cargo pallets in the luggage compartment of the Crew 8 capsule. It's like jamming a kid in your trunk when you're out of seats.
They've never had to use this reserve plan and it was only first dreamt of when Soyuz had issues recently.
> If there wasn't another ride from the ISS available, would the astronauts be stranded? Yes.
Seems like the answer to this would be no. Starliner's risk was elevated, not guaranteed to fail. The presence of a flight-proven option was the limiting factor.
If your friend bails and you get someone else to give you a ride home, they’re getting you or retrieving you. You only call it “rescue” if you’re trying to add some drama to connect with the person who comes to get you. Like a relative, or someone you’re trying to flirt with.
Agreed, but only in the circumstance that the flirty someone else picks you up from the International Space Station after your other friend bails, otherwise seems like a poor analogy
Well, was there an accident? It seems like the astronauts staying extra long is to avoid an accident. Does their need to be an accident to call it a rescue?
Soyuz could not be used to take Jeb and Val back down. Riding a Soyuz requires a custom fitted suit, and though these astronauts had both riden Soyuz in the past, those old measurements are not good enough for a current flight.
Well, that was probably Boeing's line for the MAX disasters, until the second one occurred.
Boeing is clearly undergoing systemic collapse in engineering ability, so anything Boeing has to be treated with extreme suspicion. Its like hiring a 3-time-felon to babysit, like you can do it, but there will be 0 tolerance for any deviance.
Their worst engineers are the ones responsible for shipping planes + systems that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people.
I don't think I'm a fantastic engineer, but I'm certainly doing better than those people when considering the metric of "how many people has my software killed".
Fair point, but I don't think that makes it moot. If you work on software that can kill people, the responsibility is on you to make sure that it doesn't. If you can't, you should self-select out of working on that type of software.
If that is your reasoning then they might as well “rescue” all the other astronaut on board the ISS and shut the entire thing down.
You’re not rescuing someone from a danger that was already there and part of the mission. Them being “stuck” for a few more months doesn’t make them “in danger”
If they weren’t up there now two different astronauts would be up instead of them. And it would be part of a regular mission. Those would not need to be “rescued”
They were in danger because the Crew-8 escape plan exposed them to elevated risk on descent without proper seating or suits that could be connected to the capsule. A loss of pressure would kill them.
> it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications
Standard but modified is an oxymoron. This is an irregular mission.
NASA plans with tonnes of redundancy. That’s paying off here. Being prepared doesn’t poof away a fuck-up, it just means you can take it in stride. Starliner stranded two astronauts in space. Dragon is fixing that. Being saved from being stranded sure as hell sounds like being rescued, even if it’s close to routine.
> Starliner was still deemed to be safe enough to be the emergency escape option while it was docked
This is a threshold met by a torn parachute on a jet.
> when it was the preferred option over sticking seats in Crew-8
It was the preferred option before it failed. Between first failure and return it was not the preferred option as it was. It was preferred assuming it worked. But the assumption couldn’t be proven, in part due to Boeing’s shoddy ground sims.
It didn't, because it wasn't simply broken -- it had unexpected behavior. It ended up landing fine.
I'm uncomfortable heaping pejoratives on what we should expect NASA to do: make engineering decisions to minimize risk and maximize chance of mission success.
Increasing the reputational or financial penalties to suppliers incentivizes exactly the sort of decisions that blew up Challenger and Columbia.
> it wasn't simply broken -- it had unexpected behavior.
Unexpected behavior for NASA was broken enough to send it back empty. That was not the plan to start with. The mission was supposed to be a few days only not this long.
> what we should expect NASA to do: make engineering decisions to minimize risk and maximize chance of mission success.
The criticism is of both NASA and Boeing on what they should have done prior to the trip. How the money was spent and such. I don’t think anyone criticizes NASA for opting to keep the astronauts safe by delaying their return. It’s about what happened before that point.
If it had been a test flight using test pilots: yes, it wouldn't have been.
There's a reason astronauts for higher risk missions tend to be selected from operational and test naval aviation backgrounds, like both of the Starliner CFT astronauts were.
Calling it rescue or not doesn't matter. The primary objective was test flight for Starliner. Mission is a success, in that it proved Starliner is not safe. Now they're coming down using Dragon, which is the very expensive backup plan, and which is absolutely not what was planned.
Whether you want to call it a rescue or not and play semantics or metaphors all night is your absolute right, but it doesn't change the failure of Starliner in this case.
When I was a kid a lifeguard helped me out in rough waves in the Atlantic. I was doing ok but not great and probably should have gone in earlier. I asked if he had rescued me because I wasn't really sure what was going on ... he said he had given me an 'assist'. It probably is the right word here too.
The lifeguard spared you the word rescue because he didn't want to hurt the feelings of a child. Are we now extending the same courtesy to corporations? Corporations like Boeing no less, with hundreds of negligent homicides under their belt?
> the face value of each seat has been estimated by NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) to be around US$55 million. This contrasts with the 2014 Soyuz launch price of US$76 million per seat for NASA astronauts
>> "If we'd have had a crew on board the spacecraft, we would have followed the same back away sequence from the space station, the same deorbit burn and executed the same entry. And so it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program...
They didn't come back, though. It's still a success in the sense that it was a test mission and determining there was a problem is valuable, but Starliner is not ready
Considering both recent US vehicle losses have been on re-entry, I feel NASA is vindicated on being ultra-conservative around that stage.
So anomalies that might be acceptable during ascent would be unacceptable during decent.
Personally? I'm glad Boeing launched.
I wish they were perfect technically, but I also realize that an infinite amount of time and money doesn't protect against unknown-unknowns.
IMHO, they should be operating more like SpaceX (and the earlier days of the US space program) -- using calculated risk and engineering to decide when it's reasonable to do an inherently risky thing, when doing so is needed to move the entire program forward.
The most underrated and impressive achievement of SpaceX, IMHO, has been their designing missions for higher technical risk while managing safety impacts.
It's easy(ish) to go fast and break things.
It's much harder to go fast and break things, except also never break things when it really matters.
What is not great is the fact that vendor 1 exhibited a string of concerning anomalies and accidents. Vendor 1 may be institutionally unfit to be a leg on which the US space program stands.
Year reading the starliner wikipedia page was eye opening, every single test phase had issues, and repeated issues over a long period with the same systems (thrusters) is really damning.
“Ultimately, NASA felt it was not able to understand why the thrusters malfunctioned and decided that it was too risky to return its astronauts to Earth aboard Starliner, which will attempt to return uncrewed.”
I see this claim a lot and I honestly don't understand why people refuse to see this for the disaster it is (for Boeing).
An 8 day mission turned into a months-long mission unexepctedly and SpaceX ultimately had to bump 2 trained astronauts to return them to Earth. That's the very definition of a rescue and just a wildly massive PR disaster to boot.
Beyond this, we still have no idea of what it will take to return Starliner to flightworthiness and give NASA the confidence that it can carry out an entire mission. It may be completely or just practically doomed at this point.
It was a disaster for Boeing, it was not a disaster for the astronauts. Extending stays at the station is not unheard of for test flights, the Crew Dragon test flight also involved the crew staying longer than initially intended, as NASA decided that it'd be a more effective use of resources to do so.
SpaceX did not have to bump 2 trained astronauts to return them to Earth. That was simply the cheapest, least disruptive way to bring them back. There has always been the option of sending a dedicated Dragon for them, but that would require NASA to pay for an entire additional Dragon mission just to bring two people back who are in no urgent need of bringing back.
You go to an island for your employer, and the ferry breaks down once you get there. While your employer can send another ferry soon to bring you back, they ask if you'd be okay staying for a rotation because that'd be more convenient for them. They also arrange a means for you to leave in case of an emergency. You're enjoying the island, so you agree. The replacement ferry is not a rescue.
Starliner made the uncrewed return just fine, which means that on NASA's side, the return to flight should not be too complicated (well, besides showing that the doghouse deformation issues have been resolved) and should not involve a redo of this flight. What remains to be seen is what position Boeing takes on it, as they have been very quiet over if they're going to continue in Commercial Crew.
I don’t think the geopolitical issues directly affect ISS operational stuff whatsoever. The missions of the Roscosmos and NASA (and ESA and JAXA and CSA) teams have nothing to do with nationalism or geopolitics and I assume everyone managing them and participating in them is smart enough to realize that.
They didn’t fuck with NASA when Dubya invaded a country, after all. Every spacefaring superpower has its fingers in a bunch of mass murder pies somewhere.
There is no geopolitical upside to Russia or geopolitical downside to the US for NASA to contract Roscosmos to rescue some Americans from space. I imagine SpaceX was just faster and cheaper and already had a mission scheduled.
NASA still gives Roscosmos money, in exchange for Roscosmos doing ISS-related stuff for NASA. NASA has a contract with Roscosmos for "joint spaceflight activities" which does not expire until the end of this year. I don't know if it can be extended past this year or not, but since the contract dates to 1993, I suspect they will continue to extend it year-by-year until the ISS program is terminated.
So far this year NASA has executed 7 contract modifications (from February through September), under which it has paid Roscosmos an additional US$2.6 million. While that's not a huge amount of money, it doesn't look like there is a hard prohibition on NASA paying Roscosmos for services.
Why are you still making up bullshit? NASA isn't cooperating with Russia because their hands are tied by prewar contracts. They're cooperating with Russia because it's a mutually beneficial arrangement which was extended in 2023 after Russia's war began.
> Aug 25 (Reuters) - Russian and U.S. space authorities have agreed an additional flight for an American astronaut on board Russia's Soyuz MS spacecraft, Interfax news agency said on Friday, in a rare sign of bilateral cooperation at a time of high tension over Ukraine.
You have the same internet I do, you should be able to find this information yourself. Stop being a dumbass, unsubscribe from your reddit or wherever it is that's influencing you to think you can know things by bullshitting instead of researching.
Occhams razor might say the reasons to downplay this incident are overwhelmingly more attractive.
- Boeing is a fortune 50 company and is a direct contributor to news media advertising revenue.
- Boeing is a darling of US aerospace and a bulwark of us international projection of soft power and defense. Telling the truth will destroy the us aircraft market.
- china does not have this problem with its space program. The comac airliner also directly competes with Boeing's beleaguered 737
- loss of confidence in the us space program at the vehicle level jeopardizes trust from consumers and insurance companies in the us space products market like satellite launches.
>The comac airliner also directly competes with Boeing's beleaguered 737
Not in any remotely meaningful way. Some estimates suggest it will be more than a decade before Comac will have the manufacturing capacity to fill existing domestic orders (as of now they've built 9). Then there's the fact that their planes aren't nearly as fuel efficient as those from Boeing and Airbus - the engines may be imports but are neutered due to export restrictions. China's own airlines aren't even interested.
> it will be more than a decade before Comac will have the manufacturing capacity to fill even domestic orders
If you think that a decade is enough time for Boeing (or Airbus) to react to losing one large market and having a new competitor encroach on existing markets, then I suggest looking at past airliner development programs.
A decade is nothing in this industry. And China, specifically, is known for being able to scale manufacturing - so they may not have a decade like us Westerners think.
> The comac airliner also directly competes with Boeing's beleaguered 737
Thanks but I'll take my chances on a MAX.
Do you know what happens when a Chinese-built plane crashes in China? There is no fancy congressional inquiry, no lawsuits, no crying families on TV. No, they hose off the crash site and put them in unmarked graves and build a shoddily-constructed apartment building over top of it. Maybe the pilot's family is jailed and never heard from again. Pretend it never happened and life over there continues as usual.
Well no one is losing confidence in US space program. Since SpaceX has the overwhelming global lead in space engineering.
The main issue is, NASA for political reasons, has to keep the delusion of the 'have 2 suppliers'. Boeing is clearly nonviable anymore, but as you said, it has tremendous influence in US congress, so NASA pays them billions.
NASA's programs would be simpler if they simply just dumped all the money to SpaceX, but that could cause longer term issues. The other solution would be partnering with Airbus as the backup supplier, but that would cause political earthquake.
Calling it a rescue may or may not be accurate, but the replies to your comment show that it is at least open to discussion by people who presumably don't have a vested interest in the number of clicks on the article. That would mean that it's not really clickbait to call it this.
So if you ride a ferry on a regular basis (which I'm sure at least a handful of HN folks do) - if that ferry breaks down before the return trip, when you catch the next ferry is that a "rescue mission", or are you just catching the next ferry? Replace ferry with bus, car, taxi, airplane, your transportation mode of choice.
Calling this a rescue is, to OPs point, just dramatizing the situation for clicks. In pretty much any other circumstance, it wouldn't even make the news.
I respectfully partially disagree. Sure, the term "rescue" is a bit over the top and evokes "Apollo 13" vibes. OTOH, Boeing has "$14.8bn in Pentagon contracts in 2022" [1]. Boeing has plane crash issues for years now across more than 1 model. And its space program just had an embarrassing failure. Given their failures, the amount of revenue they get from the US federal gov, and their level of influence over various aspects of defense funding/spending, I do not think this story should be dismissed as an overly sensational, run-of-the-mill story that does not make the news.
IMO, US citizens/taxpayers would be very justified to be pissed about the failures of a company that their tax dollars heavily fund (from the same article I referenced above, its like 37% of their revenue). The series of very public failures that affect people directly (planes) and affect their tax dollars (recent series of failures of their space program) certainly warrants outrage and coverage. that's my 2 cents
I'd just call it the next ferry. If there was an extra boat sent before the next ferry was due, that could be a rescue mission (or just a replacement boat).
When my friend's car broke down on the mountain 15 minutes from both of our homes and I brought them a jacket and McDonalds while they wait for a tow, that was a rescue.
You are the captain and pilot of the ferry. And it is such a complicated ferry that you are extensively trained on how to navigate it. It is, in fact, so complicated and different that there are other ferries around but you can only sail yours. You can't just hop on another one and do the same trip.
You took this ferry to an island in the middle of nowhere and after you got there you realized the ferry was broken. Nobody knows how bad... it might snap in half in the middle of the return trip.
You have plenty of provisions for the next few months and you are not alone on the island. Other ferries still come and go but you can't just hop on those, you don't know how to operate them.
They sent one of those other ferries just for you with a smaller crew to accommodate you. Without it you are not coming back.
If you're in the ocean and your ship breaks down and another ship adjusts its plans to come pick you up, is that a rescue?
If there were no changes needed to the subsequent flight to accommodate two additional riders, sure, not a rescue. But there are, and that's important from multiple perspectives (not least of which is cost)
I agree that calling it a rescue is a bit much, but this is hardly a case of missing a bus or ferry and catching the next one.
If you missed a ferry, expecting to be away from your family for a week, only to find you are stuck on a desolate island for 8+ months you would probably feel like you were being rescued.
My understanding is the astronauts don’t mind staying longer because they enjoy it and for some (all?) it may be their last mission in space, in part due to the decommissioning.
You are leaving out the tiny detail that compared to a ferry there are very limited opportunities to catch the next ferry. If a ferry breaks down you aren’t stuck in the island for 8 months. You could charter a boat, get a helicopter, go for a swim.
Significant unexpected planning and spending have to go into getting them a different ride home.
It’s closer to your car breaking down in a remote area. Would a tow truck be a rescue? I would think so.
It's similar to your car breaking down in a remote area only if you've trained extensively for that area (almost your entire life), have food and supplies for the entire duration, have friends and entertainment, and can do your job as well as novel career options the entire time as well.
It's overly dramatic to call it a rescue mission. It just is. It's not great that they're up there longer than planned, but they're not going to explode or fly off into space.
> Replace ferry with bus, car, taxi, airplane, your transportation mode of choice.
I mean I've certainly been stuck at an airport because I had a ticket for a flight that ended up getting canceled, which necessitated me remaining at the airport for an extended period of time. I had an expectation of getting a new ticket for a new flight, but none of that changed the fact that I was indeed stuck.
"Rescue" conveys a much more negative situation than "unplanned itinerary change where the astronauts are safe and which they are happy about because they get to spend more time in space".
I bet if you asked each of them if they could extend such a unique experience - one they're unlikely to experience again - would they say yes? IN. A. FCKING. HEARTBEAT.
The postive's overwhelm the negatives by an infinite amount.
When you have extremely limited supplies, are as isolated from humanity as possible, and there are only 2 vehicles capable of transporting you, and one of them is reigniting a cold war with you, you are considered imperiled. I'm sorry. If dragon did not exist, the rescue mission would still be embroiled in diplomacy and not in orbit already.
You only get the luxury of your non-rescue position due to hindsight.
It is a rescue mission. The original mission was supposed to be a couple weeks and that extended to nearly 8 months due to unrecoverable issues with Starliner. That’s not a crew rotation, it’s a major failure of Starliner. As for the escape option while docked, even a leaky boat is better than no boat if the ship is sinking, but the fact is NASA elected to not return the crew on Starliner for safety reasons.
I guess I'm a victim of this reporting to some extent, because I remember this situation going on for months, and I keep thinking every time it's mentioned (often) how terrible it must be for these astronauts and why something isn't done about it. But I know almost nothing regarding details. I know I despise Boeing and that I admire astronauts and that reading this headline, I thought 'its about fucking time!'
But if I realize the entire situation has been misrepresented, I think I will be annoyed with myself. Is this really all nonsense? Is the situation normal, or common?
They went up on an experimental spacecraft on its shakedown cruise. They’re coming down on a different spacecraft than planned — a different make of spacecraft, even. That’s never happened before, and is neither normal nor common. The spacecraft type they flew up will almost certainly never fly again because of how badly the shakedown went. That’s never happened before to a manned design to my knowledge — certainly not normal or common.
There’s been a bit of reporting on Boeing “considering” whether to cancel the remains of this program. There’s been no reporting on any decision — likely because Boeing hasn’t made one. But there’s zero financial upside to continuing, and zero PR upside to continuing… and I just don’t see any world in which Boeing, in its current state, continues to spend billions of dollars of its own money to set up more and more elaborate shows of its own (well understood, internally) incompetence. So, complete speculation on my side, but I’m comfortable enough making that speculation without a throwaway account.
The most likely explanation of the effect you're observing is that the server, having done a database fetch to get you the profile once, is not interested in doing it over and over again.
It's cached. You do not have a uniquely broken upvote button.
I've tested this many times by up-voting predictably stable comments, noting the karma number before and hours later. No effect. No exceptions. Additionally, there was a time where this limitation didn't exist. I am pretty sure I triggered a flag for my tendency to up-vote controversial and underdog content.
I don't think dang is right about everything, but I get the impression that he's honest and expect he'd confirm this limitation on my username. Ask. But I'm not grovelling for equal rights on HN and will make no inquiries to insiders.
Also, if your interpretation was correct, there's this really big parallel contrary reality where the upvote system works and entries are accepted and processed, hence the ever changing karma number of each active user. Perhaps it's the ad blocker, but it's not normal
I don't think dang is right about everything, but I get the impression that he's honest and expect he'd confirm this limitation on my username. Ask. But I'm not grovelling for equal rights on HN and will make no inquiries to insiders.
I once had this limitation on my own account. It was because I had upvoted certain grayed out comments that were flamewar fodder. I did that because there were equally bad counter-comments in the thread that weren't voted down (grayed), and out of a misguided commitment to balance I wanted to fight for the losing side.
When I emailed dang to ask about my voting limitation he explained why my account had been penalized. I said I wouldn't vote up bad comments in the future and he restored my comment voting. Now when bad arguments attract bad counter-arguments I just downvote instead of trying to boost the somewhat-less-bad side.
You don't have to send email about this if you don't want to, but it doesn't require groveling to fix.
Thanks a bunch for this comment. It clarifies and it helps, especially with the samatman types obsessed with caches... and proving me wrong for reasons I'm quite content never knowing.
I think some folks see the apparent simplicity of HN and assume it's primitive and clean, with nothing too sophisticated running in the background.
There were issues with Boeing's Starliner that made it difficult for NASA to quantify the risk of bringing the test crew back on it. NASA still believed that the risk was likely to be negligible, but since they had the option of taking a fully proven spacecraft back home, they opted to send Starliner home empty.
The astronauts were/are comfortable on the ISS. There are plenty of supplies, and more have gone up as part of regular resupplies. IIRC the only discomfort for them was having to use makeshift sleeping places until the previous crew departed. As astronauts, they pretty much live to go into space, so they were happy, of course with the minor caveat of the disappointment regarding their primary mission not panning out and of having to be away from family for a few months. Especially considering that they are unlikely to get to be in space again as the ISS is due for retirement by the end of the decade and NASA wants to give space travel experience to the astronauts intended for the Moon.
Putting it differently, the biggest issue/inconvenience with this situation was that Starliner was taking up a docking port and causing things to have to be rescheduled. Prior to launch, crew are trained to operate certain experiments, or to do servicing space walks. Since the crew being launched had to be reordered, these plans had to be reworked.
There are a lot of people focusing in on the fact that they will be returning in February, but they're completely ignoring the fact that they're perfectly capable of coming back early, that option is actively not being chosen as having them stay till then would be more optimal for station operational planning.
It's worth noting that the astronauts in question have little to no control over the schedule, so "perfectly capable of coming back early" isn't a fair assessment in this context.
Coming back "early" would also occur at a cost of either tens of millions of dollars for an extra launch, or at a cost of valuable experiments not getting run because the space station was empty of personnel. NASA policy would prohibit the remaining astronauts from... well, remaining, because they have to have a lifeboat, which the two "rescuees" would have just used to go home. Thus, all of them would have to go home.
IOW, painting this as "normal operations" in any sense is disingenuous. The danger levels may not be overly exacerbated, but it was a very costly failure, and it may well be a drastic inconvenience to the astronauts. We likely won't know the truth of the latter until they write their memoirs.
It's easy to manage spin when the opinions being spun are in orbit on a restricted communication system.
> I guess I'm a victim of this reporting to some extent, because I remember this situation going on for months, and I keep thinking every time it's mentioned (often) how terrible it must be for these astronauts and why something isn't done about it.
I'm not Butch or Suni, but I think the astronauts most negatively affected by this would be the two that got bumped from Crew 9. Astronauts define their careers by the amount and quality of the time they are blessed to spend in space. Chris Hadfield, e.g., has taken it for granted that the pair would feel lucky to be "stranded" for a few months, and would have plenty of meaningful work to occupy their time.
“Normal” and “common” would still be the last words on my mind considering the amount of planning and money that goes into sending people to space and back. The only normal situation would be they go there and then back alive on the same mission as originally planned. Any divergence from that is totally abnormal.
"It isn't a rescue mission, it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications..."
Rescue definition: an act of saving or being saved from danger or distress. The mission to take astronauts off the space station clearly fits this definition - an extended, unplanned and indefinite stay in space has to be distressing at the least.
Has the HN standard become that you can argue the most ridiculous thing if you make that argument against the media?
Edit: "regular crew rotation" implies normal and expected but the point is, even if the crew is in no danger, this wasn't regular or expected.
I can sorta see why some would quibble over "rescue", because it's not like they're in immediate danger, but at the same time they're stranded because their ride malfunctioned and left them somewhere rather inhospitable. And I think "normal and expected crew rotation" as someone put it undersells the fact that while there isn't a special trip for them only, they had to bump other people off the flight just to get them, specifically.
Would people really be that much happier if it was said instead that they were making room for crew marooned by an unsafe spacecraft? I think I'd normally use the word "rescue" there if it was a ship.
But yet it is true that they plan for this kind of thing and that's why they're not in any particularly significant danger due to being marooned.
> I can sorta see why some would quibble over "rescue", because it's not like they're in immediate danger, but at the same time they're stranded because their ride malfunctioned and left them somewhere rather inhospitable
In any other context this wouldn't be quibbled. If my car broke down a mile outside town and my friend gave me a lift the rest of the way, I would say he rescued me and nobody would quibble it.
The only reason it's being quibbled is because people have a stick up their ass about Elon Musk personally and that stick extends to the way they feel about SpaceX.
> normal and expected crew rotation, they just kicked a few people off the mission so that there would be open seats
That’s neither normal nor expected!
Go back to the age of exploration. A crew’s ship strands them on an island. Another ship was due to come anyway in 6 weeks, and the crew have enough food to last them that interval. They use witches to tell the coming crew of their problems, and that ship agrees to lighten its load to make room for the stranded.
This is a rescue! It’s an easy rescue. But so was, like, pulling my puppy out of the neighbor’s pool when it went under the cover.
Is it a rescue? Maybe. Is it a rescue mission? No. It's a normal crew rotation mission that has happened to (arguably) rescue a few people on the way. The mission itself is ordinary, expected, and planned prior to any crisis.
Arguable because everyone has a way back already, the modification to the crew rotation mission just provides a somewhat safer way back.
Edit: And the distinction here matters. A rescue mission would be an expensive unexpected endeavour. The regular crew rotation is an expected operating cost. The modification to the details of the plan for the crew rotation haven't significantly impacted the mission goals - i.e. for the same cost there are still the same number of fresh qualified crew members up there for the same duration, just a slightly different set of people.
If my car breaks down while I'm at my fully-loaded villa on day 2 of my 30 day vacation, my friend coming to pick me up isn't a rescue mission.
You shift from talking about danger or distress, to "not regular or expected".
Which is it? I think danger and urgency are marks of "rescue". If they had supplies and were in no immediate danger, I don't see how the term or the alarmism qualifies.
Whenever I travel to a location, the planned return transport fails AND I would eventually be dead without outside human assistance. That’s a rescue.
In your villa example that is correct: your friend helping you is not a rescue. It’s a convenient helping hand. A space station is a different beast though.
If your villa was on a remote isolated island without anyone else on it, it would be closer to the space station but still not exactly the same. The island, depending on its size might have bountiful food/animals you can hypothetically harvest, not to mention attempting to plant and grow some seeds from the hypothetical fruits and vegetables you already have.
Very little of this is realistically possible in a space station like the one we have.
> If my car breaks down while I'm at my fully-loaded villa on day 2 of my 30 day vacation, my friend coming to pick me up isn't a rescue mission.
If you chose to say it was, nobody would be doing the "Well ACKSHULLY..." routine with you because that is in fact totally in line with common use of the word rescue and not worth making a stink about even if you think it sounds a little melodramatic.
The ISS situation is more extreme than your example in every way, but you're pulling the ackshully bullshit because you don't like the company that has done it.
>but you're pulling the ackshully bullshit because you don't like the company that has done it.
I wonder if you, like me, have taken a vacation to travel half-way across the United States to watch a SpaceX launch, or had discussions with former heads of NASA as far back as 2011 about what the company meant/means for manned spaceflight. I wonder if you grew up around astronauts or knew people who died on Columbia.
This isn't an appeal to authority, it's a statement of experience. I'm in a pedantic HN subthread and threw in my subjective opinion regarding the use of the term "rescue" - please don't jump to assuming I'm some evil troll.
If my car breaks down while I'm at my fully-loaded villa on day 2 of my 30 day vacation, my friend coming to pick me up isn't a rescue mission.
I don't think being in a leaky space station for eight months, where you suffer the effects of accelerated aging due to zero gravity, is equivalent to a being in a fully loaded villa for a month.
I'm using the "distress" part of "danger or distress". The average person would view the situation as distressing for the astronauts, for the average person "rescue" is appropriate term. Jeesh.
Yeah, something people forget is routine things happen. But people like to think of events as singular unexpected grand things even if they’re just part of an older expected thing. Take D-day for instance. We make movies about the landings and how dramatic it was, but the truth: a regular troop rotation into territory, something routine for the armed forces.
Let's be honest. The mental gymnastics to avoid calling it a rescue is just a political knee jerk reaction to Elon Musk's ownership in SpaceX.
If you lose your ability to become objective based on your view no amount of philosophical discourse is going to be meaningful.
It's comments like this why "cope & seeth" has flourished in the modern lexicon
Personally, that's a part of it. I might it find more tasteful if Shotwell and her team (the actual heroes) were ones getting the credit here, but Musk will get the headlines.
But it's not a political knee jerk reaction. It's an actual jerk reaction to him being such an actual jerk. The guy, and his current cohot, are distateful wankers. Excuse my English.
I read somewhere someone who compared news to the presenters at a horse race. If you just look, it might be a boring uneventful race. But if you listen to the presenters, it’s very exciting. “Now horse A is in front!!! Oh wait. Horse B takes the lead!! Wait. Horse A is coming back.” For example, EV taxes in Europe “There are rumors on EV taxes!! Wait some guy says there will be no extra taxes!! Oh wait. Rumors for 40%!! No 30%!! Breaking news!! It’s 40%!”
Unfortunately, they've taken to doing things like saying Horse C is in the lead when it's actually Horse B and telling everyone Horse A has gone lame when it's clearly neck in neck with Horse B while pretending that Horse D doesn't exist because they don't like the jockey.
The top comment is questioning the use of this word.
It seems likely that when the story originally appeared on HN, it had the accurate title reflecting the title of the article. Thus the comment from dotnet00, which I'm neutral on. But then, it would appear, the title was altered, to dampen a controversy? Is this how things are done around here? Anyone know more?
When a single word starts sucking most of the thread's attention and leading to acrimonious nitpickery, it's an easy call to take that word out of the title.
In the present case, for example, it behooves us all to learn about the real situation that is actually happening, rather than arguing about whether or not it deserves the term 'rescue', a semantic dispute which seems correlated with people's priors on the most divisive associations (e.g. the Elonian Dimension) and is therefore mostly a proxy for a repetitive and tedious argument.
Thank you for explaining that! Seems a tough call doing that versus flagging the root comment of the acrimony, but maybe that alternate approach would have a bigger (too big) cost in disruption once there is such a small continent of comments built out under the top comment.
We can do that too, or at least mark the low-quality subthreads offtopic (which downranks them). But if we don't take the provocation out of the title, it'll only generate more of the same.
There's also your brilliant practice of collecting off-topic threads under a "sweep" comment, which strikes me as astoundingly effective at re-railing derailed discussions.
> they changed it to match the title of the article itself from AP
No--
AP:
SpaceX launches rescue mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck in space until next year
Original HN title:
SpaceX launches rescue mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS
Current HN title:
SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS
I would think it’s not. I’ve also never once seen dang claim that the moderation team do their job without bias. Indeed, I suspect he’d even go as far as to say that the primary purpose of moderation is to promote a certain bias.
That said, it’s also very easy to see what HN’s intended bias is since the publish it; it’s explained in the “on-topic” and “off-topic” paragraphs at the top of the guidelines page.
To everyone saying "oh, the astronauts like having to be up there. It is an opportunity."
You get that they have no choice, right? And that for multiple reasons they are going to put the best spin on the event. For one, for their own sanity, they are going to be as positive and optimistic as possible. For two, there is likely a huge PR pressure to be as positive and optimistic as possible.
Being in space is a pretty big deal. It comes with lots of health risks, and they are isolated from their loved ones. For example, they might be missing funerals for friends or family members, they might be missing milestones of their children, etc... etc...
It also means their forward flight time is curtailed. The near future holds manned missions more exciting than the ISS. There is a real possibility someone who might have gone to the Moon or even Mars doesn’t, now, because of Boeing.
Neither Sunita, nor Butch are candidates for Artemis missions. They are both very experienced senior astronauts in their early 60s (kind of why they were chosen to be test pilots). This was likely to be one of their last trips to space as NASA astronauts regardless.
Mars??? That’s more than a bit of a stretch. The astronauts in the ISS right now weren’t up there for a significantly longer period of time compared to their peers. Absolutely no way it would disqualify them from a mission happening a decade from now which is an absolute best case scenario for mars and frankly even the moon the way the current political climate is in the US.
Ignoring the fact that, again, the astronauts in question weren’t in space for any appreciably longer time than anyone else on the ISS.
They’ll be too old to participate in the mars mission a minimum of a decade from now.
You have literally no idea what the radiation exposure allowances will be for a manned mission to mars when it happens, or what advancements we’ll make to radiation shielding should we ever actually send a manned mission to mars.
> You have literally no idea what the radiation exposure allowances will be for a manned mission to mars when it happens
These are well known and documented, to the degree we know things about human deep spaceflight.
> what advancements we’ll make to radiation shielding should we ever actually send a manned mission to mars
These are unknown. But they will, barring new technology, require mass. Which means more shielding comes at a cost. Which incentivises low-rad experienced astronauts.
It’s still an opportunity. You can have more kids, but most people probably only get maximum one chance in their life to spend half a year in space, even if they are extremely lucky.
It’s also not like they didn’t know that death or delay or anomalous/inconvenient conditions weren’t possibly on the table. They’re test pilots, after all. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one, even if it takes a year.
Sunita Williams (one of the two stranded) is up there for her fifth(!) trip to the ISS. I can’t speak for her but if I had to guess I don’t think she minds being in space, even if it’s unplanned.
> You can have more kids, but most people probably only get maximum one chance in their life to spend half a year in space
That's not generally how having kids works haha. As you mentioned Sunita Williams has been to space five times. She's also 59 and the only information I found on kids is that she was looking to adopt a kid in 2012. It doesn't sound like she'll be having any more kids.
> Sunita Williams (one of the two stranded) is up there for her fifth(!) trip to the ISS [...] I don’t think she minds being in space, even if it’s unplanned.
Personally, I've been many times to New York. It's a very fun city. But if I booked a weeklong trip that against my will it became a yearlong one, I'd mind it.
I also can't speak for Sunita Williams, just for me in this hypothetical NYC stranding. It could be a very fun year, for sure. I'd certainly try to make the most of it. But I'd mind it.
> Personally, I've been many times to New York. It's a very fun city. But if I booked a weeklong trip that against my will it became a yearlong one, I'd mind it.
You didn’t spend years of your life and beat out 1,000 other candidates just to earn the opportunity to visit New York. Your full time job does not primarily consist of preparing and training to go to New York. You don’t get up every day and go to a job that earns a federal government salary when you could earn twice as much in the private sector because that’s the only way you can achieve your childhood dream of occasionally visiting New York. You certainly didn’t volunteer to take a test flight on a vehicle that could very plausibly catastrophically fail and kill you because that was the only way you’d ever be able to go to New York again. And if you did get stuck in New York, you probably wouldn’t become mayor.
Millions of people have “become an astronaut” as their childhood dream. Less than one in a thousand people who apply to astronaut selection actually become astronauts. And then they have to wait years to actually go to space. I don’t know why anybody would go through all of that if they didn’t really want to go to space. And while everyone else is either getting full ISS rotations or planned to fly to the moon, Butch and Suni have been assigned to an eight day test flight that’s been repeatedly delayed for years. It’s arguably the worst assignment you can get these days other than no assignment at all (and to be fair, it’s also not the first assignment for either of them). I’m sure they would have preferred if their six month stay on the ISS was planned as such ahead of time, but spending six months on the ISS is the normal mission that everyone else gets anyway—and it’s not like a normal ISS flight is scheduled for the personal convenience of the astronauts assigned to it, either.
Yeah, they don’t have a choice now that they’re in space, but if you’re an astronaut you can also just retire and make a lot more money in the private sector if you don’t really want to go to space again, and I think that it’s a pretty slim chance that a veteran astronaut would stick around and devote years of their career to an eight day flight test but would be really unhappy about being “stuck” on ISS for an otherwise normal rotation period.
Currently SpaceX makes up 90% of global launch mass in the past year. It may as well be the western world’s space program pretty soon, with China and Russia only launching their own military payloads.
What I was really driving at was that some are using the wrong definition of "space program." It's a good thing that space transportation is becoming a reliable service or utility, but that's something quite different than being the space program. If we came to think of launch as a very large part of what constitutes a space program, that's only because we allowed the costs of launch to become entirely too high, such that it dominated budgets.
I think it's both the incompetence of the incumbents, and the impressive work of SpaceX that got us to where we are. With the vast majority of companies, especially tech companies, I think the leadership gets far too much credit. In most organizations I have been a part of, they succeed in spite of the leadership, not because of it.
In the case of SpaceX though, I am less sure. Reading the Walter Isaacson biography on Elon Musk was quite fascinating and illuminating about his leadership style. I would never work for him myself, but he does have some really fascinating philosophies.
I actually don't know what we're arguing, since I already misinterpreted the dude that I responded to, but there's no one else that could have done this.
No-one would've believed it possible, no-one even conceived of the notion that it was worth while to try.
And there's not another billionaire around who'd've been willing to bet the house on it.
I don't know how much of a roll he had in the designs (other than "make it pointy") but the fact remains that he's the man who built the team that somehow managed to achieve the hitherto impossible.
My biggest concern with him is that he's pushing a pace that in some cases will go beyond the point of diminishing returns, and even beyond that into the territory that invites burnout.
When you're building teams of the best minds on earth, you probably don't want to be burning through them like candles.
Not sure what you mean by that. Are you suggesting that Elon/SpaceX sabotaged Boeing Starliner program? Because it seems pretty obvious that Boeing did that all on their own.
How much of SpaceX’s boring day to day stuff (including ~all of the F9 stuff) do you think he has a hand in anymore?
Isn’t he running Tesla, Twitter, Neuralink, The Boring Company, Starlink, and the Starship R&D, including its first-of-it’s-kind Raptor engine design which just hit major version 3? And also raising the remainder of his 12 kids (~8?) that are still speaking to him?
I’m fairly certain that most of the “boring” stuff at SpaceX happens despite Musk, not because of him. Ms. Shotwell’s (the SpaceX COO) name doesn’t come up nearly as often as his does, and I suspect she does at least an order of magnitude more work there.
Indeed, several SpaceX staff wrote an open letter complaining about him and his antics being a distraction that hinders them.
In literally every thread about SpaceX people who don't like Musk (and sometimes others), people bring up Shotwell. Of course her name doesn't come up as often as Musk, Musk is literally one of the most famous people on earth, a highly controversial public figure and one of the richest people on the plant, who also owns and leads the company.
For most other tech companies people done even know the Nr.2 person in the company, and that includes companies much bigger then SpaceX. So if anything Shotwell comes up more often then literally any other Nr.2 person in a major tech company. I couldn't tell you the relevant people at Nvidia, or Google, or Microsoft.
Also the letter was more about the external image, that Musk reflected on them. There was no actual argument in the later work inside SpaceX was slowed down because of it. And from the continued progress SpaceX has made before and after that, there is no evidence of that it actually did.
But of course its also self evident that the CEO isn't doing 'boring day to day stuff', but neither is Shotwell.
The numbers 2-4 at Apple come up quite often, but “how annoying it is to work with Tim Cook” isn’t a recurring thread, despite his also being one of the most famous, wealthy, and powerful people on Earth as well.
Joel Spoksky’s meeting with Bill Gates about Excel is famous lore in our circles as well, although I doubt Spolsky was ever even top 10 at Microsoft.
I don't know who 2-4 at Apple are, and I think most non Apple fans don't know them, and neither to most Apple fans.
And there is a big difference between people generally known and being a character in on famous 'lore' story.
I challenge you to compare all threads about SpaceX and Amazon and and see who gets more mentions, Shotwell or Vogels. I have never hared about Vogels despite reading many theads on Amazon, that said, I don't read many about AWS details.
Musk is pretty clear about the fact that Shotwell handles the 'boring' operational stuff, so, F9, FH, and very likely includes Starlink now. These have customer-related constraints, which Gwynne is much better at handling.
Elon does decision making for the R&D programs, i.e. Starship, where his style works better.
Imagine being so petty and filled with Elon derangement syndrome that you have to not only comment on his family but cast dispersions on his relationship with his children. Pathetic and speaks volumes on the person making the statement.
I’ve nothing substantive to add, but I note that the logic gymnastics on display in comments from all perspectives is somehow telling. Of something. Not sure what.
It's just more evidence of the corrosive effect that injecting politics into everywhere has had, especially intersectional politics where unrelated domains are pushed to influence each other for political or ideological reasons in unrelated domains.
It's HN, arguing about semantics is what people do :)
If the half page of arguing by analogies to holidays about what is and isn't a rescue feels like an unwarranted response to a headline, the comments insisting the only reason people could consider labelling accommodating them on the next scheduled return flight a 'rescue mission' overly dramatic is deep love for Boeing or deep hatred for Elon's politics are wild.
HN is leftie programmer sock space but loves tech and there is no denying the SpaceX and Starlink tech is good, but Elon is a trumpie so there is a dissonance where certain people cannot admit this or their whole world-view crashes so it is easier to say "Elon bad!!" or downplay that this is an emergency rescue mission as seen.
> buying a social media platform for the express purpose of influencing elections is most likely not going to win you any favours.
The irony is that was going on before he bought Twitter. Stopping it may have been the reason he bought it.
We know Twitter at the behest of the US gov't censored the Hunter Biden laptop story but allowed speech that wrongly claimed it was "Russian disinformation". That could be considered election interference because it was a major scandal for the Democrats.
Twitter probably over censored the story. Considering all of the crazy demonstrably fake news surrounding this, I can see how handling this was probably difficult to get right.
If the right wing wants to stop getting over censored, maybe they should hold themselves a little more accountable to the mass amounts of fake news they share.
But again. Hunter Biden was not running for president. The right is still pushing fake news (Ohio) as part of their campaigns.
I don't see anything in the comment guidelines banning humor. I do however see that it asks us to be kind, not sneer at the rest of the community here, and to stop the tired comparisons to Reddit.
The voting and flagging systems, along with the work of the moderators, are perfectly capable at managing the comments. No need to try to police them yourself.
You've clearly read the guidelines attentively so I'm surprised that your take is that if shallow jokes are not explicitly banned then they are welcome?
> Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
I interpret that part as saying that generic jokes and boring puns should be avoided. (The trope being a long chain of commenters trying to one up the previous pun, with zero substance)
Personally I'm neutral when it comes to puns in child comments.
But I really don't like top comments that consist of only a pun. Make an insightful comment and conclude with your pun, if you really must.
SpaceX is the first word of both the headline and article?
Personally I was glad they omitted the obligatory clickbait mention of his name, but yeah it is a little conspicuous how they only show this restraint on the good news...
Not in this article but I read an ABC News article where they vehemently avoided to mention SpaceX when they talked about the Starliner’s problem and the decision of NASA. Literally not even a single word. Hilarious :D
1. The US would’ve been paying Russia about 10x the cost if SpaceX didn’t exist.
2. Boeing was awarded a ~$3B contract within the Artemis mission and, so far, the outcome is that they can’t safely bring back the astronauts they sent to space.
Those two factors alone indicate that it’s more a mutually beneficial relationship between SpaceX and the government with, arguably, SpaceX providing more benefit relative to the government.
You're pretty good at writing clickbait headlines yourself. Those huge checks are a DoD contract for unblockable internet coms not some handout and for $20 million a month it sounds like Elon is giving them a deal, at least compared to what Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman get every year. They don't just suck the teat, they eat half of it.
This is facutally false. Starbase has no license to launch even 1/10 of the flights that are legal from the Cape. SpaceX just majorly invested into a second crew launch facility at the LC40. And SpaceX is building a Starship launch site at 39A. They have publicly stated that Starbase is for production and experimental development mostly. Please actually inform yourself before posting.
what do you mean? crew-9 launched from the cape, like all crewed missions. in fact, it was the first crewed mission to launch from SCL-40 instead of the usual 39a.
There was an anomaly in the second stage deorbit burn (which did not impact the payload). Falcon is apparently grounded.
https://www.space.com/spacex-pause-launches-crew-9-falcon-9-... ("SpaceX pausing launches to study Falcon 9 issue on Crew-9 astronaut mission")
- "After today’s successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9's second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause"
FAA pedantry will tell you they are not ground, they merely may not have a license to fly more missions.
Also, it's unclear yet whether the FAA has pulled the license - SpaceX has potentially paused voluntarily.
For anyone out of the loop, the aforementioned FAA pedantry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TobeGL4Ma8&t=80
For those not familiar with the launch profile of the Falcon 9, the second stage de-orbit burn occurs after the crew/service module separates from the second stage.
[dead]
If something happens to Dragon (non-zero chance) they are going to regret not coming back on Boeing's space-Yugo.
They would also regret if something went wrong while returning on a Starliner that everyone knew wasn't working as it should. Returning on a Dragon was the safest choice available.
"the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause"
reality: "It crashed somewhere in the ocean, we don't know why but we pretend it was safe, though we just got lucky"
Uncontrolled reentry has been the norm for most of the space age (and is still standard practice for the Chinese, and their boosters). The far more important issue is that this a human-rated booster, and an unidentified defect impacts the safety of crew launches. This issue showed up on a de-orbit burn, but it's unlikely to be limited in scope to de-orbits only.
edit: Turns out this isn't accurate; it's still actually normal for US rocket *upper stages* to do uncontrolled reentries [0]. This is a subject of ongoing FAA rulemaking [1]. The Chinese examples are still exceptional because they involve far larger first-stage/core-stage boosters (>50 meters in length).
edit 2: If anyone was curious about the Europeans, the answer is that Ariane 5/ECA has actually *never* done a controlled upper-stage deorbit, because its LH2/LOX engine isn't designed to be able to ignite twice (deorbit burns are excluded)[2].
[0] https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/osisite/wp-content/uploads/OS... ("Uncontrolled reentries are currently used for 35% of U.S. missions (62% if we exclude SpaceX)") (as of 2023?)
[1] https://spacenews.com/new-upper-stage-disposal-rules-help-no...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945... ("it is not possible to perform a controlled reentry of the Upper Composite")
China also often launches from far-inland locations which puts large terrestrial populated regions beneath the booster (and booster landing) track. Perhaps less so for nominal launches, but not all launches are nominal:
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ys0DOsZmr7g>
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=peJ6gErODic>
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=-SFRNImP7p8>
China operates four launch facilities, three of which, Jiuquan, Taiyuan, and Xichang are inland. The fourth, Wenchang, is on the island of Hainan, in the South China Sea between China, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Space_Administr...>
Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome, located in the independent country of Kazakhstan, is similarly an inland location and has seen launch debris fall over populated areas.
Is it "luck" if you intentionally chose a place smack in the middle of nowhere, such that even an off-nominal reentry will overwhelmingly occur in an extremely sparsely populated area (ie the middle of the ocean)?
Sounds like planning, not luck.
Landing area is one thing, but more important and dangerous is reentry profile. Too steep, and the capsule melts down or crew inside becomes very flat from the deceleration.
This isn't the capsule; it's the second stage.
There are no humans on the second stage reentry. It burns up.
All rockets before Falcon always crashed in the ocean.
There's a nuance here: non-SpaceX rocket *first*-stages typically fall into the ocean, but they do that within controlled exclusion zones, which are notified and restricted for air- and marine- traffic. *Upper*-stages are a different beast. Most (see my sibling comment) deorbit uncontrollably and impact somewhere at random.
with the scale of the planet, it would be more like really unlucky if it actually hit someone
What's the suit situation here? Did SpaceX make two new suits for them to use on the way back, or are they using their Boeing suits to fly back?
I'd imagine the former, but genuinely curious this time.
I believe new suits where made/available somehow. The SpaceX and Boeing suits are not compatible with the others space craft.
They should be! Have we not learned anything from Apollo? :D Or atleast provision an adapter or something.
Not sure how soon if ever Boeing is going to be putting astronauts in space again. I see Blue Origin stepping up and taking their place. Agreed though, should be a set of compatible standards for space suits.
Normally I would disagree with you, but Boeing is facing death by a thousand cuts right now. I could see the US government not letting them fail however. So I’d give it 50/50, not 100% no-fly-again
Boeing and gov employed sunk cost fallacy. Even if they do cancel it they’ll just restart the same project in 5yrs for twice the cost and a new name
Yep, Boeing indirectly employs millions in the US. They are going to get a taxpayer funded bailout and golden parachutes whether or not we like it.
Blue origin so far is a litigation company masquerading as a space company. I'll believe it when I see it.
The goal of two commercial vehicles was dissimilar redundancy. But yeah this should be worked on in the not too distant future.
Found the answer:
> Stich said there is a space suit already on the ISS that one of the astronauts can use for the return trip, and the Crew 9 mission will bring another suit.
https://fortune.com/2024/08/24/boeing-starliner-astronauts-n...
Makes for a fantastic story tho.
“Did I ever tell you about that time I was stuck in space for eight whole months? No?”
Separate from everything else, I'm glad the first crewed launch from SLC-40 went smoothly. Being able to use that pad for Crew Dragon launches provides some helpful flexibility for important Falcon Heavy launches at LC-39A.
> By the time they return, the pair will have logged more than eight months in space. They expected to be gone just a week when they signed up for Boeing’s first astronaut flight that launched in June.
What kind of overtime do you think they are clocking?
And will that overtime take into account the effect of time dilation?!
They are probably salary, not hourly.
I wonder if they astronauts are like the military where they get extra on deployment.
Salary is set by the year, and with the calculated 6.7 milliseconds of time dilation in the reverse direction (i.e. they will be 6.7ms younger when they arrive), sounds like they should be docked a cent or so.
This brings up an interesting question of salary for near-lightspeed travel. Is it Earth's frame of reference, or the astronauts?
Naturally, a firm located in the local frame of reference has a comparative advantage when it comes to employment. Remote work just isn't viable when you can't even agree on simultaneity.
Dear sir
Your packets are too blueshifted for my receiver to decode, please slow down.
Time to deploy trusted AI managers to all reference frames.
You'll have to take that up with HR: Human Relativity.
For an extensive discussion of similar issues, see Paul Krugman 1978, "The Theory of Interstellar Trade:" https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf.
Maybe they could pay them in advance, and then put it in a safe growth account of some sort and by the time they get back they’ll never have to work again? Win-win
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/boeing-starliner-saga-do-n... claims "[There’s] no hazard pay, there’s no overtime, there’s no comp time". The top two threads on https://www.reddit.com/r/nasa/comments/1f0hi3o/how_do_astron... a) suggest a government pay scale with hazard pay for NASA astronauts, b) point out that they are likely paid as active duty Navy members instead.
On https://www.facebook.com/AstroClay/posts/do-astronauts-get-p... an astronaut (verified account of a NASA astronaut) mentions only a small per-diem.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2264/do-astronauts... has a lengthy, but inconclusive discussion.
ChatGPT 4o-mini generates a vague "it depends" answer with no useful sources or statements that could be used to follow up with actual sources.
This is a question where I would have expected an authoritative answer to be easier to find. At least regarding your "like the military" statement, it seems like some astronauts are military, but what kind of extra pay they get seems to be hard to find.
Heh I’d hate to be their families too. Sometimes I travel for work, if a week turned into 8 months it would be mayhem.
The return flight will be in February too— they'll be missing thanksgiving, and all the winter holidays oof
I’m sure they’ll just be happy to have them back alive
While I'm sure it can't be measured as a convenience from the family in any way you slice it I'm not sure one can compare the way they plan their and timing expectations around an orbital test flight to that of a standard work trip.
It’s almost laughable how the general public tries to apply their own soft feelings to these people built for high-stakes work. None of these people are bothered by this and their families have become accustomed to this sort of thing and too obscenely full of pride to let their own emotions get in the way.
There is some irreversible degradation happening in space to human body, discussed recently on similar topic here. If they have ie measurably messed up heart or eye sight they could potentially sue Boeing, maybe.
How much do astronauts get paid anyways? According to chatGPT they don’t get overtime pay though might receive bonuses for situations like this.
And wasn't the mission already on the schedule? The title says "launches mission for 2 astronauts.."
The original mission was to bring 4. Two astronauts got bumped to make room for the Starliner crew.
Is there a good link for the unexpected science these two have been doing and will do?
Yea NASA does not do a great job explaining what science is happening on the ISS You could maybe start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Crew_Flight_Test#ISS_st...
> On 10 June, with all their initial Starliner testing completed, the CFT crew started working on general ISS maintenance and research activities. They started their day by measuring their temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and respiratory rate. Later, Wilmore worked on the maintenance of a computer connected to the Microgravity Science Glovebox, while Williams installed hardware to support a space fire investigation. On 11 June, the astronauts spent their time on biomedical activities, with Wilmore organizing the inventory of the Human Research Facility, and Williams working on procedures to collect microbe samples and sequence their genes. On 12 June, Wilmore checked cargo in the Harmony module and worked on maintenance of the station's bathroom, while Williams continued her gene sequencing work from the day before.[65]
> On 17 June, Williams worked on maintenance tasks and prepared the Advanced Plant Habitat for future experiments, and on 18 June she continued working on the gene sequencing study from the prior week. Meanwhile, Wilmore spent the two days working on a study of the behavior of flowing liquids in space.[69][70]
> NASA said that since their arrival on 6 June, Wilmore and Williams have been tasked with completing half of all hands-on research time conducted aboard the ISS, giving their crewmates more time to prepare for the departure of Northrop Grumman's Cygnus NG-20 spacecraft.[71]
(As you probably know, it's a bit misleading to say that Astronauts are doing science on the ISS. For the most part they are brilliant, expensive, and highly trained lab technicians who prep and repair equipment and then hit the "go" button for experiments that were designed by, and will be analyzed by, scientists on Earth.)
> they are brilliant, expensive, and highly trained lab technicians who prep and repair equipment and then hit the "go" button for experiments that were designed by, and will be analyzed by, scientists on Earth
True. I was just curious if having two extra pairs of hands was letting new experiments be done, or existing ones be done more thoroughly.
Gotcha. Yea, my impression is that they always have a pretty deep backlog of maintenance tasks that can be done any time there is downtime or extra hands. That might also be true for science, e.g., repeat some experiment with different settings/conditions. (Certainly, in case of unexpected problems/delays they already have a triage plan for which experiments are performed and which are sacrificed.)
A fellow Star Trek fan?
I am, but I’m missing the reference?
Typically anytime someone gets lost or diverted or something else, they are eager to gather information and do as much science as possible. Some large themes (like most of Voyager) and some smaller ones like when individuals are stranded on planets, end up being much about the scientific opportunities. Mainly the attitude of looking at a situation like this as an opportunity for science both resonates with me and reminds me of the optimism of Star Trek :-)
So is this a reflection on Boeing engineering culture? Seems it would be, I remember comments from previous articles saying it is.
Bigger than that, legacy US defense contractors ARE the US Military / Space Force / etc.
So IMO the golem whose values are being reflected in this failure / recovery from it is a US Government <> Commercial organism. And indirectly the United State's civilian population since the Government is formed (over centuries) to be a care-taker reflection of the civilian pop.
Yes mostly the idea that risk should be averted at all times by using the same few companies has fully captured US gov culture. And it’s only gotten much worse since they seem to think China should be the model to copy because they dump money into pet megacorps there, even though it’s still a very new concept that is far from proven sustainable in China itself. Not to mention they mostly coast off copying US innovation and preventing competition.
But mostly the issue is employing it as a long term strategy, because it worked a few times in the last as a short term boost to newly ascendant orgs (ala NASA+space industry in the 1960s) before the Iron Rule of bureaucracy kicks in at all organizations involved, be they private or public.
Bill should be sent to Boeing.
‘Towing’ Fee Is Asked by Grumman https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/18/archives/towing-fee-is-as...
Do those guys get paid overtime?
They do get a per diem for incidentals but no overtime or any extra duty pay for being in space. This astronaut said it was only an extra $1.20/day. Meals and lodging are provided for so maybe that's deducted from the standard govt per diem.
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=53939670306845...
I declined a job offer from Boeing recently because they can't execute anymore. Complete clown show run by accountants.
+1 (not me) opened job, interviewed, withdrew job, months later, re-opened job.
Illustrated that the hiring people were just fine, but the larger Organization was, in this case, disorganized.
Man the reporting on this ordeal has been so awful and so representative of how media misleads the public into thinking things are worse than they actually are.
It isn't a rescue mission, it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications to account for the extra crew left on the station, and those crew are 'stuck' only in the sense that they're expected to stay there as part of their duties and it would be unnecessarily disruptive to operations to bring them back early. Starliner was still deemed to be safe enough to be the emergency escape option while it was docked, then the emergency escape option became seats setup in the cargo portion of the Crew-8 capsule.
Well hmm. NASA decided Starliner wasn't safe enough to use for the return journey, so the astronauts stayed on the ISS until the next ride became available.
Originally the astronauts were supposed to go back on Starliner. Now they're taking another ride back. Is that considered a rescue? Well, it depends.
If you get left behind on an island because your ride wasn't safe and another boat picks you up, is that a rescue? Now what if you're 420 kilometers up and another boat has to come get you. Is that a rescue?
If there wasn't another ride from the ISS available, would the astronauts be stranded? Yes.
In that case, if a ride suddenly became available would it be considered a rescue? Probably, yes.
Following the analogy... you're on an island. A ferry has showed up at the island every six months or so for the last 40 years. The last ferry that showed up broke before it could leave the harbor. No need to worry, though. Another ferry's coming in six months and there are plenty of supplies on the island.
Is it rescue? Maybe in the sense that you can't leave when you wanted to and now you have to wait. But not in the sense that you were ever in any real danger.
(Admittedly, maybe there is a bit more danger for these astronauts because a malfunctioning spacecraft is inherently a bit of a safety hazard. And the SpaceX operation is certainly not as routine as a ferry showing up at a dock, though it's still safe.)
It seems that it is both a bit subjective whether one calls it "rescue," and also a bit sensationalized to put in a headline too.
Maybe this is better:
Cruise line A and cruise line B drop their passengers off at a remote island for 5 days, and then come to pick them up and take them home. After cruise line B drops theirs off, the cruise ships breaks down, and the passengers can't be picked up after 5 days, so they're stuck on the island with no immediate way to get off. Cruise line A says "OK, the next cruise ship we send will be at half capacity, so we can get the passengers from cruise line B off the island and get them home."
Is cruise line A rescuing the passengers from cruise line B? I'd say yes.
The main reason people don’t want to call it a rescue is because they dislike Musk. If there were no politics involved people wouldn’t be handwringing themselves so much over the word rescue.
If the spaceship that took you somewhere wasn’t able to get you back as planned and cannot get you back as planned and someone else has to go get those people, that’s a rescue.
> If the spaceship that took you somewhere wasn’t able to get you back as planned and cannot get you back as planned and someone else has to go get those people, that’s a rescue.
If you were on cruise then yes, if you are a professional team who trained for years to stay in dangerous conditions and the only thing out of ordinary is delayed transport back then not. If politics were not involved no one would call it a rescue.
Seems like similar things in the past were called rescues: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/russia-launches-res...
Good point. If this situation is equivalent then why not I guess. But note the PBS one says "urgent need for the capsule". Unclear why. Is it urgent in this case?
In case of Russians there was a coolant leak
If you are working in Antarctica and need to wait for another transport home it sounds okay. If you urgently need treatment and must perform a surgery on yourself then that's an emergency
> In case of Russians there was a coolant leak
Starliner’s manoeuvring thrusters weren’t working!
They really hate that Elon is actually sending a ~~submarine~~ capsule to get people stranded in a ~~cave~~ metal tube.
It's slightly more nuanced than that, in that starliner didn't actually break down. It had some issues which presented increased risk for the astronauts, but it was still operational. If there was a true emergency on ISS, they would've gone on starliner. But because there was no danger of them staying longer till the next ride, they opted out of using starliner given the increased risk.
> It had some issues which presented increased risk for the astronauts, but it was still operational
We didn’t know that!
> because there was no danger of them staying longer till the next ride
I suppose it’s a step forward that we’ve normalised the baseline dangers (and costs, personal and financial) of being in space.
Cruise passengers stuck on an island without other transport would be rescued because personally for them it is completely out of ordinary.
Workers who signed up to get paid to be on the island and do some work? Knowing that there is only one line of transport and it can be irregular? Going through months or years of training beforehand? Maybe "rescue" is a sensationalization when used in a news headline.
> Is cruise line A rescuing the passengers from cruise line B? I'd say yes.
IMO that's only true in line A's PR campaign, assuming they're adversarial enough to run with it.
In your analogy, the passengers are always "stuck on the island with no immediate way to get off" for at least 5 days, as they have no alternative way to get back during their planned stay. If B's cruise ship breaks down - and AFAIK in this case, "breaks down" doesn't mean the ship can't move, just that the risk of catastrophic failure during the trip crossed a preset threshold - that's more of an operational disruption. The stranded passengers are still safe and sound, they just need to wait for the next scheduled cruise to take them home.
The schedule bit matters IMO. It would be a rescue if the next scheduled ride would be way too late to help them and thus it had to be moved up to save their lives.
If you took a different boat separate from the normal ferry, intending to leave right away but now stuck unable to use it, I would say the next ferry is rescuing you.
No? Because if you’re not in danger, you’re not being rescued. You’re just being transported.
If I miss the last train across the bay, my uber isn’t rescuing me. I can always stay up to 5am by making a shady deal at the endup.
But yeah, this is a black eye on boeing and definitely something that nobody wants to have to deal with.
Looked up two definitions of rescue. First, is the default that shows on Google (via Oxford Languages) [1]:
> verb. 1. save (someone) from a dangerous or distressing situation. 2. informal, keep from being lost or abandoned; retrieve.
Per this one, if you miss the last train across the bay the the Uber _would_ indeed be "rescuing" you if you felt distressed. If we consider the informal definition, I'd say you're also being rescued since one could say you were abandoned by the train and thus being retrieved by the Uber. Next, Merriam Webster [2]:
> transitive verb. to free from confinement, danger, or evil
Similarly, if you understand "rescue" as freeing someone from danger, this isn't a rescue. The astronauts aren't in danger really— they have all the supplies and support they need. Nonetheless, they certainly are in confinement, so this could still be called a rescue.
I personally do see how the fact this mission was already scheduled, and the little danger around all this, can make "rescue" feel like a little much. It's the same word used in The Martian, after all. But nonetheless I would still call it a rescue mission. These two astronauts are confined up there not by will but by circumstance, and the taxi flight was modified to sending only two people instead of the usual four, specifically to make space for these two astronauts to come back [3].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=rescue%20meaning
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rescue
[3] https://apnews.com/article/boeing-spacex-nasa-astronauts-sta...
> if you’re not in danger, you’re not being rescued. You’re just being transported
The ISS isn’t Treasure Island. There is always an elevated degree of peril. Particularly in an emergency condition.
These individuals are professionals who signed up for this and are paid to do the job. This isn’t a rescue; the media is simply sensationalizing the entire story.
> individuals are professionals who signed up for this and are paid to do the job
Is the thesis only leisure travellers can be rescued? Astronauts do not sign up to fly on faulty ships. They accept the risk of it happening. But that acceptance doesn’t diminish the tragedy of a ship breaking up on reëntry nor, by extension, the emergency status of a reëntry vehicle with misbehaving manoeuvring thrusters.
This discussion reminds me of the reaction among some to the FAA grounding Falcon 9 “after the first stage used in the [August] launch crash-landed and toppled into the Atlantic Ocean while attempting to touch down on a SpaceX droneship” [1]. It doesn’t matter that everyone else tosses their spent stages into the sea. There was a plan and it went abnormally. That calls for a review. If that review can’t be concluded satisfactorily, as it wasn’t in the case of Starliner, you have an emergency. Relieving someone from an emergency is a rescue.
By some of the standards raised in this thread, a test pilot ejected from their plane and stranded in the tundra wouldn’t qualify for rescue because they were paid or weren’t in immediate and obvious mortal peril or because the ejection seat worked.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-falcon-9-grounded-faa-cr...
But there's no emergency situation at the moment.
> there’s no emergency situation at the moment
It’s space. The ground state is emergency. I am training to be a pilot. Anything going off flight plan is an emergency. If ground control gives me corrective instructions, in the course of a mistake, I hope I will have the humility to not refuse its designation as a rescue.
Like, if you want an Exhibit A for why Boeing doesn’t deserve forward trust, it’s this response.
When the ground state is emergency the definition of emergency changes because emergency cannot be the same as ground state...
If we go by technical definition of "emergency" then anything not by the plan is an emergency, but it's not used that way normally and it's not a technical publication.
If you are stuck in space with no lifeboat back then I agree it is an emergency, but they apparently have Starliner and it works. If they or Nasa are more comfortable with another option maybe that makes it an emergency or maybe not.
If it turns out Starliner doesn't work, that's an emergency. If there is radiation event coming then it's an emergency, but it is always an emergency in space regardless.
> they apparently have Starliner and it works
One, had. Starliner went home. Two, they didn’t. Starliner was broken. Its manoeuvring thrusters, a critical reëntry system, were misbehaving. If you’re on a plane and the oxygen system fails, that’s an emergency. You don’t have to wait for cabin pressure to fail for it to qualify, and oxygen systems aren’t even a critical system; this is closer to the flaps or landing gear behaving erratically.
But the oxygen system is fine, right? Let me check the article again
If it fails then that's an emergency, but that regardless of the presence of the boat.
Noted the absence of Starliner, but not 100% convinced personally
Actually, NASA protocol requires more than a single layer of safety. The astronauts currently do not have a lifeboat home - that is extraordinarily irregular and I believe that it constitutes a danger to the astronauts. The spacecraft are not only for down transport, they are also shelters for radiation and particle events - which could be declared with days or hours notice. For a month these astronauts have had no viable shelter nor transport in case of emergency.
Danger is not when the last later of safety fails. Danger is when the level of risk exceeds a set threshold - and that level has been exceeded as per NASA protocol.
If you stay until 5am at the endup, you'll probably have to get rescued anyway.
How is being stranded in space "not in danger"?
> not in the sense that you were ever in any real danger
The analogy breaks down because an island isn’t space. Your default state on an island tends towards remaining alive. Your default state in space is dead.
A closer analogy is a plane in flight. It takes energy and effort to keep everyone alive. Externally-assisted recovery from peril, in that situation, is a rescue. Even if it’s convenient.
No astronaut has died on ISS in 30 years. Claiming they are in significant danger simply isn't accurate. Saying 'the default state in space is dead' when historically basically nobody has died in space.
> No astronaut has died on ISS in 30 years. Claiming they are in significant danger simply isn't accurate
Nobody claimed as much. A jet liner is safer than the ISS. The analogy is conservative.
> Saying 'the default state in space is dead' when historically basically nobody has died in space
Our default state at cruising altitude is dead.
Note: I’m not suggesting anyone would have died. Just that they were in a perilous place where things were going wrong. Being relieved from that position is a rescue.
> A jet liner is safer than the ISS.
Maybe not if the jet is a Boeing though?
To be fair, I'd rather be in a 737 Max at 30,000 ft than without the 737 Max at 30,000 ft.
And I'd rather be with the Starliner at 400 km up than without the Starliner at 400 km up.
But neither seem to be of comparable safety to the other options available.
No speeder has ever died on the highway either. It's only the crashing drivers who died.
It is likewise as foolish to try decoupling the peril of space and the peril of orbit and deorbit.
> Your default state on an island tends towards remaining alive.
I'm guessing you spend most of your life indoors?
On Earth, outside of the carefully regulated homes we've built as a society, the default state is dead and it takes tremendous work and constant vigilence to avoid that fate, only ever temporarily.
And that is why if somebody finds a child wandering in the park alone, we say that the man rescued the child. Exactly as SpaceX is doing in this situation.
Yes and we also say you rescued me if I am bang out of cash and you lend me a fiver at checkout...
If you see a news headline "man rescues child" you expect a direct threat like something like from a burning house.
> if somebody finds a child wandering in the park alone, we say that the man rescued the child. Exactly as SpaceX is doing in this situation.
Plus, saying astronauts, professionals who signed up for the job knowing what it entails and went through years of training are like children wandering in the park, to paint SpaceX as their savior, is... wow.
Humans in space are less than children in the park. We've barely ventured out of our own atmosphere. Less than a 1000 people have been to orbit, and only 24 have gone to the moon. Out of those, only a dozen have landed on the moon.
And the moon is still the Earth system - we've never really left our own yard.
unlike the moon ISS is shielded by magnetic field and receives less radiation. It is actually our yard more than a park
You are invited to stretch the analogy as far as you would like in order to win an internet argument. Have a nice day.
Saying astronauts on ISS are children in the park and saying "rescuing a child" from the park is newsworthy headline is the stretch...
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It sounds like everyone in this thread is in complete agreement about the complex parameters and details and yet we are arguing on the scope of the label.
The real problem is that the company doing the rescue is SpaceX, and that's owned by Elon. And HN does not like Elon.
Yes, the comments are a reflection of that. What a level of moral twisting
It's become the normal way of thinking here on HN. Everyone is so deep inside a box that they can't even see the edges. They're brainwashed with cult behavior.
reddit and tv says mars man BAD
ergo mars man BAD
That is what is great about HN. We discuss a broad range of topics which sometimes brings us discussing off subject matter but that are still relevant to the heart of HN. Media reporting and how they influence people is definitely a topic appropriate for HN so I can see how it was brought up.
> yet we are arguing on the scope of the label
It’s Saturday, can’t we have a semantic punt?
I’m on the other side of the international date line, you insensitive clod.
If I can't bikeshed at the office on Saturday, I'll bikeshed on HN on Saturday.
There's plenty of middle managers on HN on the weekends.
Your analogy might (and even that's a stretch ) work for 6 hours not for 6 months!
On an island you can call for a boat or a helicopter. You can relax and eat all your food knowing those options exist.
On a space station your options are considerably more limited.
>On an island you can call for a boat or a helicopter.
Boat, yes; helicopter, no, unless the island is pretty close to civilization. Helicopters have very limited range. No helicopter is going to rescue you from some remote island in the south Pacific, unless it was launched from a rescue ship (in which case it was really the ship that rescued you; the helicopter was merely more convenient for transportation between the ship and the island than a tender boat).
With SpaceX's launch cadence they could easily shift some flights. Of course you'd need a Crew Dragon that has completed refurbishment, and need to integrate it with a rocket. A month sounds like a reasonable timeline to get an unexpected rescue mission to the ISS. Which isn't great if you need a medevac, but that's why they have enough space craft docked
Your analogy is flawed. Starliner has not been in service for 40 years, as in your example.
It’s a fairly new vehicle, newer than the Dragon capsule.
You’re not just “on an island.” You’re LITERALLY STUCK on the island FAR past when you were supposed to leave. So the boat coming to get you off the island is literally rescuing you.
I know you hate Elon musk—I don’t care for him much nor do I harbor animosity towards him—but a rescue is a rescue lmao. You guys would never be this ridiculous if the situation wasn’t politically charged, or if the circumstances favored your political leaning (almost certainly progressive left).
Yeah not a fan of his cause all his big promises / lies like a used car salesman but him buying X and trying to put the brakes on the radical lefts real out there stuff I personally think did just that. He's in the middle / an independent with both conservative & liberal leanings.
The thing is that rescue implies they were imperiled by not using Starliner to return. That isn't the case, there has been a way to get them back without Starliner since they got there.
Sending this SpaceX capsule up with seats reserved for their return fixes the overall operating tempo, but it doesn't make the 2 astronauts any more or less safe.
> That isn't the case, there has been a way to get them back without Starliner since they got there.
That is pushing it until Crew 9 arrives. It's a set of straps attached to cargo pallets in the luggage compartment of the Crew 8 capsule. It's like jamming a kid in your trunk when you're out of seats.
They've never had to use this reserve plan and it was only first dreamt of when Soyuz had issues recently.
> If there wasn't another ride from the ISS available, would the astronauts be stranded? Yes.
Seems like the answer to this would be no. Starliner's risk was elevated, not guaranteed to fail. The presence of a flight-proven option was the limiting factor.
> Starliner's risk was elevated, not guaranteed to fail.
That's a pretty weird bar to set?
Sells ads I guess.
If your friend bails and you get someone else to give you a ride home, they’re getting you or retrieving you. You only call it “rescue” if you’re trying to add some drama to connect with the person who comes to get you. Like a relative, or someone you’re trying to flirt with.
Agreed, but only in the circumstance that the flirty someone else picks you up from the International Space Station after your other friend bails, otherwise seems like a poor analogy
> Is that a rescue?
Well, was there an accident? It seems like the astronauts staying extra long is to avoid an accident. Does their need to be an accident to call it a rescue?
There was not, considering Starliner landed safely about a month ago.
NASA was uncomfortable with the amount of risk in a new vehicle exhibiting anomalous behavior, for its first crewed re-entry.
The headline here should be: "US glad to have two separate suppliers for crewed transport"
Three, if you are willing to count Soyuz. Are we still using Soyuz?
Soyuz could not be used to take Jeb and Val back down. Riding a Soyuz requires a custom fitted suit, and though these astronauts had both riden Soyuz in the past, those old measurements are not good enough for a current flight.
Yeah, we have an active seat-trading arrangement with the Russians where they send cosmonauts to ride Dragon and we send astronauts to ride Soyuz.
What if NASAs decision was largely influenced by social media hysteria and not objective engineering?
Of course NASA would never give into outside pressures - cough, Challenger, cough. And what I read on the internets is so massively factual.
Well, that was probably Boeing's line for the MAX disasters, until the second one occurred.
Boeing is clearly undergoing systemic collapse in engineering ability, so anything Boeing has to be treated with extreme suspicion. Its like hiring a 3-time-felon to babysit, like you can do it, but there will be 0 tolerance for any deviance.
They build a plane with 15M parts every single day. Their worst engineer is better than 99% of those on HN.
Their worst engineers are the ones responsible for shipping planes + systems that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people.
I don't think I'm a fantastic engineer, but I'm certainly doing better than those people when considering the metric of "how many people has my software killed".
You need to add a metric of "how many people can my software kill if it misbehaves", otherwise your point is moot.
Fair point, but I don't think that makes it moot. If you work on software that can kill people, the responsibility is on you to make sure that it doesn't. If you can't, you should self-select out of working on that type of software.
These are big words.
From the Cambridge dictionary:
> Rescue: to help someone or something out of a dangerous, harmful, or unpleasant situation.
These are professional, paid astronaut. They both have decades of experience and both have experience being up in space.
If I were to bet they’re probably happy to spend more time on the ISS because I doubt they have many more missions left to do in their careers.
They’re in no danger. There’s no harm done to them.
Of course there is danger. They're in space! Even when things are going to plan it's dangerous.
If that is your reasoning then they might as well “rescue” all the other astronaut on board the ISS and shut the entire thing down.
You’re not rescuing someone from a danger that was already there and part of the mission. Them being “stuck” for a few more months doesn’t make them “in danger”
If they weren’t up there now two different astronauts would be up instead of them. And it would be part of a regular mission. Those would not need to be “rescued”
They were in danger because the Crew-8 escape plan exposed them to elevated risk on descent without proper seating or suits that could be connected to the capsule. A loss of pressure would kill them.
> it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications
Standard but modified is an oxymoron. This is an irregular mission.
NASA plans with tonnes of redundancy. That’s paying off here. Being prepared doesn’t poof away a fuck-up, it just means you can take it in stride. Starliner stranded two astronauts in space. Dragon is fixing that. Being saved from being stranded sure as hell sounds like being rescued, even if it’s close to routine.
> Starliner was still deemed to be safe enough to be the emergency escape option while it was docked
This is a threshold met by a torn parachute on a jet.
>This is a threshold met by a torn parachute on a jet.
Not when it was the preferred option over sticking seats in Crew-8, right up until Starliner's software changes for uncrewed return started.
> when it was the preferred option over sticking seats in Crew-8
It was the preferred option before it failed. Between first failure and return it was not the preferred option as it was. It was preferred assuming it worked. But the assumption couldn’t be proven, in part due to Boeing’s shoddy ground sims.
> Starliner stranded two astronauts in space.
It didn't, because it wasn't simply broken -- it had unexpected behavior. It ended up landing fine.
I'm uncomfortable heaping pejoratives on what we should expect NASA to do: make engineering decisions to minimize risk and maximize chance of mission success.
Increasing the reputational or financial penalties to suppliers incentivizes exactly the sort of decisions that blew up Challenger and Columbia.
> it wasn't simply broken -- it had unexpected behavior.
Unexpected behavior for NASA was broken enough to send it back empty. That was not the plan to start with. The mission was supposed to be a few days only not this long.
> what we should expect NASA to do: make engineering decisions to minimize risk and maximize chance of mission success.
The criticism is of both NASA and Boeing on what they should have done prior to the trip. How the money was spent and such. I don’t think anyone criticizes NASA for opting to keep the astronauts safe by delaying their return. It’s about what happened before that point.
> Unexpected behavior for NASA was broken enough to send it back empty.
It's not a question of broken / not-broken. It's a question of known-risk / unknown-risk. The return mission had too much of the latter.
I'm as much of a Boeing skeptic as anyone here, but the knee-jerk-ism to vilify them over this is unreasonable.
NASA manages risk.
SpaceX blows up rockets, so they can move fast, until they get it right.
Boeing is trying to operate as a legacy space company (read: endlessly trying to reduce risk) while also competing with SpaceX.
I'm glad they launched Starliner for a crewed mission!
No one died, because it was safe enough.
No one would have died, had they returned on it, because it was safe enough.
And why should NASA have delayed a manned test flight further when there was an acceptable Plan B?
> it had unexpected behavior. It ended up landing fine
By this measure the door blowing off the Alaska Airlines flight wasn’t an emergency.
If it had been a test flight using test pilots: yes, it wouldn't have been.
There's a reason astronauts for higher risk missions tend to be selected from operational and test naval aviation backgrounds, like both of the Starliner CFT astronauts were.
>It ended up landing fine.
Were the astronauts in it when it landed?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684804
Calling it rescue or not doesn't matter. The primary objective was test flight for Starliner. Mission is a success, in that it proved Starliner is not safe. Now they're coming down using Dragon, which is the very expensive backup plan, and which is absolutely not what was planned.
Whether you want to call it a rescue or not and play semantics or metaphors all night is your absolute right, but it doesn't change the failure of Starliner in this case.
When I was a kid a lifeguard helped me out in rough waves in the Atlantic. I was doing ok but not great and probably should have gone in earlier. I asked if he had rescued me because I wasn't really sure what was going on ... he said he had given me an 'assist'. It probably is the right word here too.
The lifeguard spared you the word rescue because he didn't want to hurt the feelings of a child. Are we now extending the same courtesy to corporations? Corporations like Boeing no less, with hundreds of negligent homicides under their belt?
> very expensive
Is it though?
> the face value of each seat has been estimated by NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) to be around US$55 million. This contrasts with the 2014 Soyuz launch price of US$76 million per seat for NASA astronauts
>> "If we'd have had a crew on board the spacecraft, we would have followed the same back away sequence from the space station, the same deorbit burn and executed the same entry. And so it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/astronauts-would-h...
They didn't come back, though. It's still a success in the sense that it was a test mission and determining there was a problem is valuable, but Starliner is not ready
Considering both recent US vehicle losses have been on re-entry, I feel NASA is vindicated on being ultra-conservative around that stage.
So anomalies that might be acceptable during ascent would be unacceptable during decent.
Personally? I'm glad Boeing launched.
I wish they were perfect technically, but I also realize that an infinite amount of time and money doesn't protect against unknown-unknowns.
IMHO, they should be operating more like SpaceX (and the earlier days of the US space program) -- using calculated risk and engineering to decide when it's reasonable to do an inherently risky thing, when doing so is needed to move the entire program forward.
Russian roulette is safe! I played once and didn't die!
The point that half this comment section is missing is this is the sort of thing we want to encourage.
The US spent extra money funding two separate vendors.
One vendor exhibited a high level of risk in their first return.
The astronauts were able to be returned on the second, already proven vendor.
That's a great place to be in!
The alternative, having to return astronauts on a high risk vehicle because it's the only option, is not a place we ever want to be in.
The most underrated and impressive achievement of SpaceX, IMHO, has been their designing missions for higher technical risk while managing safety impacts.
It's easy(ish) to go fast and break things.
It's much harder to go fast and break things, except also never break things when it really matters.
What is not great is the fact that vendor 1 exhibited a string of concerning anomalies and accidents. Vendor 1 may be institutionally unfit to be a leg on which the US space program stands.
Year reading the starliner wikipedia page was eye opening, every single test phase had issues, and repeated issues over a long period with the same systems (thrusters) is really damning.
This is actually an incredibly stupid thing to say which reflects poorly on NASA management
“Ultimately, NASA felt it was not able to understand why the thrusters malfunctioned and decided that it was too risky to return its astronauts to Earth aboard Starliner, which will attempt to return uncrewed.”
Too risky? Stranded? Rescued (hopefully)?
I see this claim a lot and I honestly don't understand why people refuse to see this for the disaster it is (for Boeing).
An 8 day mission turned into a months-long mission unexepctedly and SpaceX ultimately had to bump 2 trained astronauts to return them to Earth. That's the very definition of a rescue and just a wildly massive PR disaster to boot.
Beyond this, we still have no idea of what it will take to return Starliner to flightworthiness and give NASA the confidence that it can carry out an entire mission. It may be completely or just practically doomed at this point.
It was a disaster for Boeing, it was not a disaster for the astronauts. Extending stays at the station is not unheard of for test flights, the Crew Dragon test flight also involved the crew staying longer than initially intended, as NASA decided that it'd be a more effective use of resources to do so.
SpaceX did not have to bump 2 trained astronauts to return them to Earth. That was simply the cheapest, least disruptive way to bring them back. There has always been the option of sending a dedicated Dragon for them, but that would require NASA to pay for an entire additional Dragon mission just to bring two people back who are in no urgent need of bringing back.
You go to an island for your employer, and the ferry breaks down once you get there. While your employer can send another ferry soon to bring you back, they ask if you'd be okay staying for a rotation because that'd be more convenient for them. They also arrange a means for you to leave in case of an emergency. You're enjoying the island, so you agree. The replacement ferry is not a rescue.
Starliner made the uncrewed return just fine, which means that on NASA's side, the return to flight should not be too complicated (well, besides showing that the doghouse deformation issues have been resolved) and should not involve a redo of this flight. What remains to be seen is what position Boeing takes on it, as they have been very quiet over if they're going to continue in Commercial Crew.
They could also pay Russia to bring them back to Kazakhstan on a Soyuz.
Another American ISS astronaut, Tracy Dyson, came back in this manner last Monday.
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I don’t think the geopolitical issues directly affect ISS operational stuff whatsoever. The missions of the Roscosmos and NASA (and ESA and JAXA and CSA) teams have nothing to do with nationalism or geopolitics and I assume everyone managing them and participating in them is smart enough to realize that.
They didn’t fuck with NASA when Dubya invaded a country, after all. Every spacefaring superpower has its fingers in a bunch of mass murder pies somewhere.
There is no geopolitical upside to Russia or geopolitical downside to the US for NASA to contract Roscosmos to rescue some Americans from space. I imagine SpaceX was just faster and cheaper and already had a mission scheduled.
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NASA still gives Roscosmos money, in exchange for Roscosmos doing ISS-related stuff for NASA. NASA has a contract with Roscosmos for "joint spaceflight activities" which does not expire until the end of this year. I don't know if it can be extended past this year or not, but since the contract dates to 1993, I suspect they will continue to extend it year-by-year until the ISS program is terminated.
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_NAS1510110_8000_-...
So far this year NASA has executed 7 contract modifications (from February through September), under which it has paid Roscosmos an additional US$2.6 million. While that's not a huge amount of money, it doesn't look like there is a hard prohibition on NASA paying Roscosmos for services.
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Why are you still making up bullshit? NASA isn't cooperating with Russia because their hands are tied by prewar contracts. They're cooperating with Russia because it's a mutually beneficial arrangement which was extended in 2023 after Russia's war began.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/russia-us-agree-add...
August 25, 2023
> Aug 25 (Reuters) - Russian and U.S. space authorities have agreed an additional flight for an American astronaut on board Russia's Soyuz MS spacecraft, Interfax news agency said on Friday, in a rare sign of bilateral cooperation at a time of high tension over Ukraine.
You have the same internet I do, you should be able to find this information yourself. Stop being a dumbass, unsubscribe from your reddit or wherever it is that's influencing you to think you can know things by bullshitting instead of researching.
So “regular” they had to bump two astronauts who had trained for a mission on ISS.
Occhams razor might say the reasons to downplay this incident are overwhelmingly more attractive.
- Boeing is a fortune 50 company and is a direct contributor to news media advertising revenue.
- Boeing is a darling of US aerospace and a bulwark of us international projection of soft power and defense. Telling the truth will destroy the us aircraft market.
- china does not have this problem with its space program. The comac airliner also directly competes with Boeing's beleaguered 737
- loss of confidence in the us space program at the vehicle level jeopardizes trust from consumers and insurance companies in the us space products market like satellite launches.
>The comac airliner also directly competes with Boeing's beleaguered 737
Not in any remotely meaningful way. Some estimates suggest it will be more than a decade before Comac will have the manufacturing capacity to fill existing domestic orders (as of now they've built 9). Then there's the fact that their planes aren't nearly as fuel efficient as those from Boeing and Airbus - the engines may be imports but are neutered due to export restrictions. China's own airlines aren't even interested.
A decade is nothing in this industry. And China, specifically, is known for being able to scale manufacturing - so they may not have a decade like us Westerners think.
> The comac airliner also directly competes with Boeing's beleaguered 737
Thanks but I'll take my chances on a MAX.
Do you know what happens when a Chinese-built plane crashes in China? There is no fancy congressional inquiry, no lawsuits, no crying families on TV. No, they hose off the crash site and put them in unmarked graves and build a shoddily-constructed apartment building over top of it. Maybe the pilot's family is jailed and never heard from again. Pretend it never happened and life over there continues as usual.
Well no one is losing confidence in US space program. Since SpaceX has the overwhelming global lead in space engineering.
The main issue is, NASA for political reasons, has to keep the delusion of the 'have 2 suppliers'. Boeing is clearly nonviable anymore, but as you said, it has tremendous influence in US congress, so NASA pays them billions.
NASA's programs would be simpler if they simply just dumped all the money to SpaceX, but that could cause longer term issues. The other solution would be partnering with Airbus as the backup supplier, but that would cause political earthquake.
Calling it a rescue may or may not be accurate, but the replies to your comment show that it is at least open to discussion by people who presumably don't have a vested interest in the number of clicks on the article. That would mean that it's not really clickbait to call it this.
If your car dies at night in the middle of a desert. Is the tow truck rescuing you?
This is a matter of perspective. The mission is what you call it.
Sure, it’s not a “rescue”, it’s just an “unplanned itinerary change to another vessel”.
Also, they’re not “marooned”, they’re “getting an extended work opportunity”.
So if you ride a ferry on a regular basis (which I'm sure at least a handful of HN folks do) - if that ferry breaks down before the return trip, when you catch the next ferry is that a "rescue mission", or are you just catching the next ferry? Replace ferry with bus, car, taxi, airplane, your transportation mode of choice.
Calling this a rescue is, to OPs point, just dramatizing the situation for clicks. In pretty much any other circumstance, it wouldn't even make the news.
I respectfully partially disagree. Sure, the term "rescue" is a bit over the top and evokes "Apollo 13" vibes. OTOH, Boeing has "$14.8bn in Pentagon contracts in 2022" [1]. Boeing has plane crash issues for years now across more than 1 model. And its space program just had an embarrassing failure. Given their failures, the amount of revenue they get from the US federal gov, and their level of influence over various aspects of defense funding/spending, I do not think this story should be dismissed as an overly sensational, run-of-the-mill story that does not make the news.
IMO, US citizens/taxpayers would be very justified to be pissed about the failures of a company that their tax dollars heavily fund (from the same article I referenced above, its like 37% of their revenue). The series of very public failures that affect people directly (planes) and affect their tax dollars (recent series of failures of their space program) certainly warrants outrage and coverage. that's my 2 cents
[1]: https://www.airforce-technology.com/features/boeing-pleads-g...
or
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/01/02/ho...
If you're on an island, the ferry breaks down and the next one is in three months, yeah it's a rescue mission.
I don't know why people want to quibble about usage that seems clear.
I'd just call it the next ferry. If there was an extra boat sent before the next ferry was due, that could be a rescue mission (or just a replacement boat).
> just call it the next ferry
The next ferry doesn’t have room. It has to change its plans to accommodate you.
When my friend's car broke down on the mountain 15 minutes from both of our homes and I brought them a jacket and McDonalds while they wait for a tow, that was a rescue.
Like it's not much, but come on.
A more apt analogy would be:
You are the captain and pilot of the ferry. And it is such a complicated ferry that you are extensively trained on how to navigate it. It is, in fact, so complicated and different that there are other ferries around but you can only sail yours. You can't just hop on another one and do the same trip.
You took this ferry to an island in the middle of nowhere and after you got there you realized the ferry was broken. Nobody knows how bad... it might snap in half in the middle of the return trip.
You have plenty of provisions for the next few months and you are not alone on the island. Other ferries still come and go but you can't just hop on those, you don't know how to operate them.
They sent one of those other ferries just for you with a smaller crew to accommodate you. Without it you are not coming back.
Is it a rescue?
If you're in the ocean and your ship breaks down and another ship adjusts its plans to come pick you up, is that a rescue?
If there were no changes needed to the subsequent flight to accommodate two additional riders, sure, not a rescue. But there are, and that's important from multiple perspectives (not least of which is cost)
I agree that calling it a rescue is a bit much, but this is hardly a case of missing a bus or ferry and catching the next one.
If you missed a ferry, expecting to be away from your family for a week, only to find you are stuck on a desolate island for 8+ months you would probably feel like you were being rescued.
My understanding is the astronauts don’t mind staying longer because they enjoy it and for some (all?) it may be their last mission in space, in part due to the decommissioning.
We don't really know. Some of them may have missed out on something personally important back on Earth (graduation, wedding, funeral, birth) etc.
And most people like visiting islands. That doesn't change the fact that this was supposed to be 8 days not 8 months.
It’s a downsized crew, right? As in they purposely are sending up fewer people so that there is room to bring back everyone?
You are leaving out the tiny detail that compared to a ferry there are very limited opportunities to catch the next ferry. If a ferry breaks down you aren’t stuck in the island for 8 months. You could charter a boat, get a helicopter, go for a swim.
Significant unexpected planning and spending have to go into getting them a different ride home.
It’s closer to your car breaking down in a remote area. Would a tow truck be a rescue? I would think so.
It's similar to your car breaking down in a remote area only if you've trained extensively for that area (almost your entire life), have food and supplies for the entire duration, have friends and entertainment, and can do your job as well as novel career options the entire time as well.
It's overly dramatic to call it a rescue mission. It just is. It's not great that they're up there longer than planned, but they're not going to explode or fly off into space.
> Replace ferry with bus, car, taxi, airplane, your transportation mode of choice.
I mean I've certainly been stuck at an airport because I had a ticket for a flight that ended up getting canceled, which necessitated me remaining at the airport for an extended period of time. I had an expectation of getting a new ticket for a new flight, but none of that changed the fact that I was indeed stuck.
"Rescue" conveys a much more negative situation than "unplanned itinerary change where the astronauts are safe and which they are happy about because they get to spend more time in space".
Bone deterioration equating to decades in a matter of months, heart health impact, time away from family... it's negative.
I bet if you asked each of them if they could extend such a unique experience - one they're unlikely to experience again - would they say yes? IN. A. FCKING. HEARTBEAT.
The postive's overwhelm the negatives by an infinite amount.
You might be right, only they can say. I just don't take their statements in a press conference at face value, but yeah there is that silver lining.
When you have extremely limited supplies, are as isolated from humanity as possible, and there are only 2 vehicles capable of transporting you, and one of them is reigniting a cold war with you, you are considered imperiled. I'm sorry. If dragon did not exist, the rescue mission would still be embroiled in diplomacy and not in orbit already.
You only get the luxury of your non-rescue position due to hindsight.
But dragon does exist. This is like saying you’re stranded when you’re car camping in the woods.
Helicopters exist, but when one picks me up from my campsite in the woods, I'm probably being rescued.
It is a rescue mission. The original mission was supposed to be a couple weeks and that extended to nearly 8 months due to unrecoverable issues with Starliner. That’s not a crew rotation, it’s a major failure of Starliner. As for the escape option while docked, even a leaky boat is better than no boat if the ship is sinking, but the fact is NASA elected to not return the crew on Starliner for safety reasons.
I guess I'm a victim of this reporting to some extent, because I remember this situation going on for months, and I keep thinking every time it's mentioned (often) how terrible it must be for these astronauts and why something isn't done about it. But I know almost nothing regarding details. I know I despise Boeing and that I admire astronauts and that reading this headline, I thought 'its about fucking time!'
But if I realize the entire situation has been misrepresented, I think I will be annoyed with myself. Is this really all nonsense? Is the situation normal, or common?
> Is the situation normal, or common?
They went up on an experimental spacecraft on its shakedown cruise. They’re coming down on a different spacecraft than planned — a different make of spacecraft, even. That’s never happened before, and is neither normal nor common. The spacecraft type they flew up will almost certainly never fly again because of how badly the shakedown went. That’s never happened before to a manned design to my knowledge — certainly not normal or common.
>>The spacecraft type they flew up will almost certainly never fly again because of how badly the shakedown went.
I haven't seen this in the reporting. Can you share any context for it?
There’s been a bit of reporting on Boeing “considering” whether to cancel the remains of this program. There’s been no reporting on any decision — likely because Boeing hasn’t made one. But there’s zero financial upside to continuing, and zero PR upside to continuing… and I just don’t see any world in which Boeing, in its current state, continues to spend billions of dollars of its own money to set up more and more elaborate shows of its own (well understood, internally) incompetence. So, complete speculation on my side, but I’m comfortable enough making that speculation without a throwaway account.
Because I cannot upvote comments on HN, I'll clutter the thread by thanking both you and the other fellow who gave pretty good explanations.
It appears you're referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30742539
The most likely explanation of the effect you're observing is that the server, having done a database fetch to get you the profile once, is not interested in doing it over and over again.
It's cached. You do not have a uniquely broken upvote button.
No. Definitely no.
I've tested this many times by up-voting predictably stable comments, noting the karma number before and hours later. No effect. No exceptions. Additionally, there was a time where this limitation didn't exist. I am pretty sure I triggered a flag for my tendency to up-vote controversial and underdog content.
I don't think dang is right about everything, but I get the impression that he's honest and expect he'd confirm this limitation on my username. Ask. But I'm not grovelling for equal rights on HN and will make no inquiries to insiders.
Also, if your interpretation was correct, there's this really big parallel contrary reality where the upvote system works and entries are accepted and processed, hence the ever changing karma number of each active user. Perhaps it's the ad blocker, but it's not normal
As an experiment, I upvoted your comment.
But first, I loaded your profile.
Then I refreshed it several times.
At no point did your karma score change on your profile.
It's caching.
I don't think dang is right about everything, but I get the impression that he's honest and expect he'd confirm this limitation on my username. Ask. But I'm not grovelling for equal rights on HN and will make no inquiries to insiders.
I once had this limitation on my own account. It was because I had upvoted certain grayed out comments that were flamewar fodder. I did that because there were equally bad counter-comments in the thread that weren't voted down (grayed), and out of a misguided commitment to balance I wanted to fight for the losing side.
When I emailed dang to ask about my voting limitation he explained why my account had been penalized. I said I wouldn't vote up bad comments in the future and he restored my comment voting. Now when bad arguments attract bad counter-arguments I just downvote instead of trying to boost the somewhat-less-bad side.
You don't have to send email about this if you don't want to, but it doesn't require groveling to fix.
Thanks a bunch for this comment. It clarifies and it helps, especially with the samatman types obsessed with caches... and proving me wrong for reasons I'm quite content never knowing.
I think some folks see the apparent simplicity of HN and assume it's primitive and clean, with nothing too sophisticated running in the background.
Why can't you upvote comments on HN?
There were issues with Boeing's Starliner that made it difficult for NASA to quantify the risk of bringing the test crew back on it. NASA still believed that the risk was likely to be negligible, but since they had the option of taking a fully proven spacecraft back home, they opted to send Starliner home empty.
The astronauts were/are comfortable on the ISS. There are plenty of supplies, and more have gone up as part of regular resupplies. IIRC the only discomfort for them was having to use makeshift sleeping places until the previous crew departed. As astronauts, they pretty much live to go into space, so they were happy, of course with the minor caveat of the disappointment regarding their primary mission not panning out and of having to be away from family for a few months. Especially considering that they are unlikely to get to be in space again as the ISS is due for retirement by the end of the decade and NASA wants to give space travel experience to the astronauts intended for the Moon.
Putting it differently, the biggest issue/inconvenience with this situation was that Starliner was taking up a docking port and causing things to have to be rescheduled. Prior to launch, crew are trained to operate certain experiments, or to do servicing space walks. Since the crew being launched had to be reordered, these plans had to be reworked.
There are a lot of people focusing in on the fact that they will be returning in February, but they're completely ignoring the fact that they're perfectly capable of coming back early, that option is actively not being chosen as having them stay till then would be more optimal for station operational planning.
It's worth noting that the astronauts in question have little to no control over the schedule, so "perfectly capable of coming back early" isn't a fair assessment in this context.
Coming back "early" would also occur at a cost of either tens of millions of dollars for an extra launch, or at a cost of valuable experiments not getting run because the space station was empty of personnel. NASA policy would prohibit the remaining astronauts from... well, remaining, because they have to have a lifeboat, which the two "rescuees" would have just used to go home. Thus, all of them would have to go home.
IOW, painting this as "normal operations" in any sense is disingenuous. The danger levels may not be overly exacerbated, but it was a very costly failure, and it may well be a drastic inconvenience to the astronauts. We likely won't know the truth of the latter until they write their memoirs.
It's easy to manage spin when the opinions being spun are in orbit on a restricted communication system.
> I guess I'm a victim of this reporting to some extent, because I remember this situation going on for months, and I keep thinking every time it's mentioned (often) how terrible it must be for these astronauts and why something isn't done about it.
I'm not Butch or Suni, but I think the astronauts most negatively affected by this would be the two that got bumped from Crew 9. Astronauts define their careers by the amount and quality of the time they are blessed to spend in space. Chris Hadfield, e.g., has taken it for granted that the pair would feel lucky to be "stranded" for a few months, and would have plenty of meaningful work to occupy their time.
“Normal” and “common” would still be the last words on my mind considering the amount of planning and money that goes into sending people to space and back. The only normal situation would be they go there and then back alive on the same mission as originally planned. Any divergence from that is totally abnormal.
"It isn't a rescue mission, it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications..."
Rescue definition: an act of saving or being saved from danger or distress. The mission to take astronauts off the space station clearly fits this definition - an extended, unplanned and indefinite stay in space has to be distressing at the least.
Has the HN standard become that you can argue the most ridiculous thing if you make that argument against the media?
Edit: "regular crew rotation" implies normal and expected but the point is, even if the crew is in no danger, this wasn't regular or expected.
I can sorta see why some would quibble over "rescue", because it's not like they're in immediate danger, but at the same time they're stranded because their ride malfunctioned and left them somewhere rather inhospitable. And I think "normal and expected crew rotation" as someone put it undersells the fact that while there isn't a special trip for them only, they had to bump other people off the flight just to get them, specifically.
Would people really be that much happier if it was said instead that they were making room for crew marooned by an unsafe spacecraft? I think I'd normally use the word "rescue" there if it was a ship.
But yet it is true that they plan for this kind of thing and that's why they're not in any particularly significant danger due to being marooned.
> I can sorta see why some would quibble over "rescue", because it's not like they're in immediate danger, but at the same time they're stranded because their ride malfunctioned and left them somewhere rather inhospitable
In any other context this wouldn't be quibbled. If my car broke down a mile outside town and my friend gave me a lift the rest of the way, I would say he rescued me and nobody would quibble it.
The only reason it's being quibbled is because people have a stick up their ass about Elon Musk personally and that stick extends to the way they feel about SpaceX.
This launch was normal and expected crew rotation, they just kicked a few people off the mission so that there would be open seats on the way back.
> normal and expected crew rotation, they just kicked a few people off the mission so that there would be open seats
That’s neither normal nor expected!
Go back to the age of exploration. A crew’s ship strands them on an island. Another ship was due to come anyway in 6 weeks, and the crew have enough food to last them that interval. They use witches to tell the coming crew of their problems, and that ship agrees to lighten its load to make room for the stranded.
This is a rescue! It’s an easy rescue. But so was, like, pulling my puppy out of the neighbor’s pool when it went under the cover.
Is it a rescue? Maybe. Is it a rescue mission? No. It's a normal crew rotation mission that has happened to (arguably) rescue a few people on the way. The mission itself is ordinary, expected, and planned prior to any crisis.
Arguable because everyone has a way back already, the modification to the crew rotation mission just provides a somewhat safer way back.
Edit: And the distinction here matters. A rescue mission would be an expensive unexpected endeavour. The regular crew rotation is an expected operating cost. The modification to the details of the plan for the crew rotation haven't significantly impacted the mission goals - i.e. for the same cost there are still the same number of fresh qualified crew members up there for the same duration, just a slightly different set of people.
> Is it a rescue mission? No. It's a normal crew rotation mission that has happened to (arguably) rescue a few people on the way
I like this.
Nit: it’s not a normal mission. Normal missions don’t leave two seats for folks trained on a different spacecraft. It’s a scheduled mission.
Only seems like a rescue if you specify that they're alone on the island to be honest.
If you had said that they were left at an outpost with other people for six months it somewhat loses it's "rescue" vibes.
> If you had said that they were left at an outpost with other people for six months it somewhat loses it's "rescue" vibes
When a country pitches into instability and nations evacuate their citizens, are they not rescuing them?
I suppose I’d invert the question: why does framing the mission as a rescue bug you?
I think rescue implies a higher degree of imminent peril.
I agree. The dictionary definitions mostly involve urgency or distress in the situation. This would be more like a retrieval I think.
"SpaceX capsule used to retrieve astronauts stranded on ISS by malfunctioning starliner."
Yes, to rescue two other people stranded on the ISS who were supposed to return home weeks ago.
If my car breaks down while I'm at my fully-loaded villa on day 2 of my 30 day vacation, my friend coming to pick me up isn't a rescue mission.
You shift from talking about danger or distress, to "not regular or expected".
Which is it? I think danger and urgency are marks of "rescue". If they had supplies and were in no immediate danger, I don't see how the term or the alarmism qualifies.
Your villa is totally incomparable to space or a space station.
Hypothetically:
- you can walk outside, hitch a ride home
- fully loaded means there’s electricity and phones? Call a Taxi?
- walk to a near town shop, buy car parts and fix the car if you have the skills
None of those hypotheticals are even remotely possible in space. It’s a bad comparison.
You mixed the numbers there.
"day 30 of my 2 day vacation" is more accurate.
I would describe rescue as:
Whenever I travel to a location, the planned return transport fails AND I would eventually be dead without outside human assistance. That’s a rescue.
In your villa example that is correct: your friend helping you is not a rescue. It’s a convenient helping hand. A space station is a different beast though.
If your villa was on a remote isolated island without anyone else on it, it would be closer to the space station but still not exactly the same. The island, depending on its size might have bountiful food/animals you can hypothetically harvest, not to mention attempting to plant and grow some seeds from the hypothetical fruits and vegetables you already have.
Very little of this is realistically possible in a space station like the one we have.
> If my car breaks down while I'm at my fully-loaded villa on day 2 of my 30 day vacation, my friend coming to pick me up isn't a rescue mission.
If you chose to say it was, nobody would be doing the "Well ACKSHULLY..." routine with you because that is in fact totally in line with common use of the word rescue and not worth making a stink about even if you think it sounds a little melodramatic.
The ISS situation is more extreme than your example in every way, but you're pulling the ackshully bullshit because you don't like the company that has done it.
>but you're pulling the ackshully bullshit because you don't like the company that has done it.
I wonder if you, like me, have taken a vacation to travel half-way across the United States to watch a SpaceX launch, or had discussions with former heads of NASA as far back as 2011 about what the company meant/means for manned spaceflight. I wonder if you grew up around astronauts or knew people who died on Columbia.
This isn't an appeal to authority, it's a statement of experience. I'm in a pedantic HN subthread and threw in my subjective opinion regarding the use of the term "rescue" - please don't jump to assuming I'm some evil troll.
I will repeat myself, you wouldn't be doing this pedantic nitpicking bullshit with the word 'rescue' in any other context.
No need to repeat yourself, it serves only to self-gratify.
Oh yeah that's annoying. But please, tell me more about all your vacations.
I really hope you're as young as you you're acting.
If my car breaks down while I'm at my fully-loaded villa on day 2 of my 30 day vacation, my friend coming to pick me up isn't a rescue mission.
I don't think being in a leaky space station for eight months, where you suffer the effects of accelerated aging due to zero gravity, is equivalent to a being in a fully loaded villa for a month.
I'm using the "distress" part of "danger or distress". The average person would view the situation as distressing for the astronauts, for the average person "rescue" is appropriate term. Jeesh.
Easy to say while we're safe down on Earth.
could I ask, under what conditions would you consider it a rescue?
Yeah, something people forget is routine things happen. But people like to think of events as singular unexpected grand things even if they’re just part of an older expected thing. Take D-day for instance. We make movies about the landings and how dramatic it was, but the truth: a regular troop rotation into territory, something routine for the armed forces.
I can’t tell if you’re joking? D-Day being ‘a regular troop rotation’ is an amazing description.
No
It is a rescue mission
Let's be honest. The mental gymnastics to avoid calling it a rescue is just a political knee jerk reaction to Elon Musk's ownership in SpaceX.
If you lose your ability to become objective based on your view no amount of philosophical discourse is going to be meaningful. It's comments like this why "cope & seeth" has flourished in the modern lexicon
The government would be doing the exact same thing to avoid bad PR if this didn't involve him.
Accusing me of taking issue with Elon's ownership is funny, considering that usually I'm accused of being an Elon shill :)
Then maybe you're just a contrarian?
Personally, that's a part of it. I might it find more tasteful if Shotwell and her team (the actual heroes) were ones getting the credit here, but Musk will get the headlines.
But it's not a political knee jerk reaction. It's an actual jerk reaction to him being such an actual jerk. The guy, and his current cohot, are distateful wankers. Excuse my English.
Politicians should not, indeed in the US it can be illegal for government branches to, make decisions based on the political views of a vendor’s CEO.
Clearly the current administration have been doing this willy nilly. Excuse my English.
what gives you the idea that Shotwell is more responsible for SpaceX’s success than Musk?
Lol, people still shilling for Boeing at this point.
Unbelievable.
Pointing out overly sensational and misleading reporting is not shilling for Boeing.
I read somewhere someone who compared news to the presenters at a horse race. If you just look, it might be a boring uneventful race. But if you listen to the presenters, it’s very exciting. “Now horse A is in front!!! Oh wait. Horse B takes the lead!! Wait. Horse A is coming back.” For example, EV taxes in Europe “There are rumors on EV taxes!! Wait some guy says there will be no extra taxes!! Oh wait. Rumors for 40%!! No 30%!! Breaking news!! It’s 40%!”
Unfortunately, they've taken to doing things like saying Horse C is in the lead when it's actually Horse B and telling everyone Horse A has gone lame when it's clearly neck in neck with Horse B while pretending that Horse D doesn't exist because they don't like the jockey.
Community Notes template for multiple contexts.
I am absolutely convinced that the 24 hour news cycle is the problem in society at large, at least in the US. Everything else draws from that.
Social media, full of bullshit to drive eyes to constant news feed. Political divide literally caused by the 24 hour cycle.
It needs to end.
See also Jelle's Marble Runs
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHu99vdz-A
[dead]
Was the title edited after the fact by mods?
The original title has the word "rescue."
The top comment is questioning the use of this word.
It seems likely that when the story originally appeared on HN, it had the accurate title reflecting the title of the article. Thus the comment from dotnet00, which I'm neutral on. But then, it would appear, the title was altered, to dampen a controversy? Is this how things are done around here? Anyone know more?
> Is this how things are done around here?
Yes. Often I add a comment (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but this time I didn't.
When a single word starts sucking most of the thread's attention and leading to acrimonious nitpickery, it's an easy call to take that word out of the title.
Striving for accurate and neutral titles is one of the best established principles of HN moderation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It has a big influence on discussion quality.
In the present case, for example, it behooves us all to learn about the real situation that is actually happening, rather than arguing about whether or not it deserves the term 'rescue', a semantic dispute which seems correlated with people's priors on the most divisive associations (e.g. the Elonian Dimension) and is therefore mostly a proxy for a repetitive and tedious argument.
Thank you for explaining that! Seems a tough call doing that versus flagging the root comment of the acrimony, but maybe that alternate approach would have a bigger (too big) cost in disruption once there is such a small continent of comments built out under the top comment.
We can do that too, or at least mark the low-quality subthreads offtopic (which downranks them). But if we don't take the provocation out of the title, it'll only generate more of the same.
There's also your brilliant practice of collecting off-topic threads under a "sweep" comment, which strikes me as astoundingly effective at re-railing derailed discussions.
They regularly tamp down on sensationalist headlines.
I'd prefer they just block articles that use sensationalist headlines (when possible without blocking the entire topic).
Many good and substantive articles have sensationalist headlines, so that wouldn't work.
Particularly at large publications, headlines are written by specialists in sensationalism (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
they changed it to match the title of the article itself from AP, not to tamp it down necessarily. This is what they actually usually do.
> they changed it to match the title of the article itself from AP
No--
i prefer the current approach especially when comments are already attached
Is that even possible to do in an unbiased way?
I would think it’s not. I’ve also never once seen dang claim that the moderation team do their job without bias. Indeed, I suspect he’d even go as far as to say that the primary purpose of moderation is to promote a certain bias.
That said, it’s also very easy to see what HN’s intended bias is since the publish it; it’s explained in the “on-topic” and “off-topic” paragraphs at the top of the guidelines page.
I don’t think they’ve ever claimed to be unbiased. They want shorter headlines with less sensationalism. That’s a bias.
It was definitely changed.
To everyone saying "oh, the astronauts like having to be up there. It is an opportunity."
You get that they have no choice, right? And that for multiple reasons they are going to put the best spin on the event. For one, for their own sanity, they are going to be as positive and optimistic as possible. For two, there is likely a huge PR pressure to be as positive and optimistic as possible.
Being in space is a pretty big deal. It comes with lots of health risks, and they are isolated from their loved ones. For example, they might be missing funerals for friends or family members, they might be missing milestones of their children, etc... etc...
> It comes with lots of health risks
It also means their forward flight time is curtailed. The near future holds manned missions more exciting than the ISS. There is a real possibility someone who might have gone to the Moon or even Mars doesn’t, now, because of Boeing.
Neither Sunita, nor Butch are candidates for Artemis missions. They are both very experienced senior astronauts in their early 60s (kind of why they were chosen to be test pilots). This was likely to be one of their last trips to space as NASA astronauts regardless.
Fair enough. Didn’t look at their profiles. Was generally pushing back on the notion that the ISS is an orbiting beach.
Mars??? That’s more than a bit of a stretch. The astronauts in the ISS right now weren’t up there for a significantly longer period of time compared to their peers. Absolutely no way it would disqualify them from a mission happening a decade from now which is an absolute best case scenario for mars and frankly even the moon the way the current political climate is in the US.
> Absolutely no way it would disqualify them from a mission happening a decade from now
Astronauts have lifetime radiation limits. Crewed Mars missions already push the envelope; the margins are especially meaningful.
Ignoring the fact that, again, the astronauts in question weren’t in space for any appreciably longer time than anyone else on the ISS.
They’ll be too old to participate in the mars mission a minimum of a decade from now.
You have literally no idea what the radiation exposure allowances will be for a manned mission to mars when it happens, or what advancements we’ll make to radiation shielding should we ever actually send a manned mission to mars.
> You have literally no idea what the radiation exposure allowances will be for a manned mission to mars when it happens
These are well known and documented, to the degree we know things about human deep spaceflight.
> what advancements we’ll make to radiation shielding should we ever actually send a manned mission to mars
These are unknown. But they will, barring new technology, require mass. Which means more shielding comes at a cost. Which incentivises low-rad experienced astronauts.
It’s still an opportunity. You can have more kids, but most people probably only get maximum one chance in their life to spend half a year in space, even if they are extremely lucky.
It’s also not like they didn’t know that death or delay or anomalous/inconvenient conditions weren’t possibly on the table. They’re test pilots, after all. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one, even if it takes a year.
Sunita Williams (one of the two stranded) is up there for her fifth(!) trip to the ISS. I can’t speak for her but if I had to guess I don’t think she minds being in space, even if it’s unplanned.
> You can have more kids, but most people probably only get maximum one chance in their life to spend half a year in space
That's not generally how having kids works haha. As you mentioned Sunita Williams has been to space five times. She's also 59 and the only information I found on kids is that she was looking to adopt a kid in 2012. It doesn't sound like she'll be having any more kids.
> Sunita Williams (one of the two stranded) is up there for her fifth(!) trip to the ISS [...] I don’t think she minds being in space, even if it’s unplanned.
Personally, I've been many times to New York. It's a very fun city. But if I booked a weeklong trip that against my will it became a yearlong one, I'd mind it.
I also can't speak for Sunita Williams, just for me in this hypothetical NYC stranding. It could be a very fun year, for sure. I'd certainly try to make the most of it. But I'd mind it.
[1] https://archive.ph/20130126165056/http://articles.timesofind...
> Personally, I've been many times to New York. It's a very fun city. But if I booked a weeklong trip that against my will it became a yearlong one, I'd mind it.
You didn’t spend years of your life and beat out 1,000 other candidates just to earn the opportunity to visit New York. Your full time job does not primarily consist of preparing and training to go to New York. You don’t get up every day and go to a job that earns a federal government salary when you could earn twice as much in the private sector because that’s the only way you can achieve your childhood dream of occasionally visiting New York. You certainly didn’t volunteer to take a test flight on a vehicle that could very plausibly catastrophically fail and kill you because that was the only way you’d ever be able to go to New York again. And if you did get stuck in New York, you probably wouldn’t become mayor.
Millions of people have “become an astronaut” as their childhood dream. Less than one in a thousand people who apply to astronaut selection actually become astronauts. And then they have to wait years to actually go to space. I don’t know why anybody would go through all of that if they didn’t really want to go to space. And while everyone else is either getting full ISS rotations or planned to fly to the moon, Butch and Suni have been assigned to an eight day test flight that’s been repeatedly delayed for years. It’s arguably the worst assignment you can get these days other than no assignment at all (and to be fair, it’s also not the first assignment for either of them). I’m sure they would have preferred if their six month stay on the ISS was planned as such ahead of time, but spending six months on the ISS is the normal mission that everyone else gets anyway—and it’s not like a normal ISS flight is scheduled for the personal convenience of the astronauts assigned to it, either.
Yeah, they don’t have a choice now that they’re in space, but if you’re an astronaut you can also just retire and make a lot more money in the private sector if you don’t really want to go to space again, and I think that it’s a pretty slim chance that a veteran astronaut would stick around and devote years of their career to an eight day flight test but would be really unhappy about being “stuck” on ISS for an otherwise normal rotation period.
Thank you Elon!
SpaceX is pretty much America’s space program at this point - absolutely incredible!
Weird way of looking at it. Was Roscosmos “America’s space program” when they were selling the rides?
Currently SpaceX makes up 90% of global launch mass in the past year. It may as well be the western world’s space program pretty soon, with China and Russia only launching their own military payloads.
What I was really driving at was that some are using the wrong definition of "space program." It's a good thing that space transportation is becoming a reliable service or utility, but that's something quite different than being the space program. If we came to think of launch as a very large part of what constitutes a space program, that's only because we allowed the costs of launch to become entirely too high, such that it dominated budgets.
No. They were just the rescue (to stay on theme) for America's space program.
Kinda is, and it’s all Elon’s fault.
Or perhaps blame Boeing and NASA, rather than the single competent organisation that's managing to hold the whole damned thing together.
I meant to give Elon credit for being able to deliver a viable program where nobody else can.
Why not both?
I think it's both the incompetence of the incumbents, and the impressive work of SpaceX that got us to where we are. With the vast majority of companies, especially tech companies, I think the leadership gets far too much credit. In most organizations I have been a part of, they succeed in spite of the leadership, not because of it.
In the case of SpaceX though, I am less sure. Reading the Walter Isaacson biography on Elon Musk was quite fascinating and illuminating about his leadership style. I would never work for him myself, but he does have some really fascinating philosophies.
I actually don't know what we're arguing, since I already misinterpreted the dude that I responded to, but there's no one else that could have done this.
No-one would've believed it possible, no-one even conceived of the notion that it was worth while to try.
And there's not another billionaire around who'd've been willing to bet the house on it.
I don't know how much of a roll he had in the designs (other than "make it pointy") but the fact remains that he's the man who built the team that somehow managed to achieve the hitherto impossible.
My biggest concern with him is that he's pushing a pace that in some cases will go beyond the point of diminishing returns, and even beyond that into the territory that invites burnout.
When you're building teams of the best minds on earth, you probably don't want to be burning through them like candles.
> Kinda is, and it’s all Elon’s fault.
Not sure what you mean by that. Are you suggesting that Elon/SpaceX sabotaged Boeing Starliner program? Because it seems pretty obvious that Boeing did that all on their own.
I mean to give Elon credit for being able to deliver a viable program where nobody else can.
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How much of SpaceX’s boring day to day stuff (including ~all of the F9 stuff) do you think he has a hand in anymore?
Isn’t he running Tesla, Twitter, Neuralink, The Boring Company, Starlink, and the Starship R&D, including its first-of-it’s-kind Raptor engine design which just hit major version 3? And also raising the remainder of his 12 kids (~8?) that are still speaking to him?
I’m fairly certain that most of the “boring” stuff at SpaceX happens despite Musk, not because of him. Ms. Shotwell’s (the SpaceX COO) name doesn’t come up nearly as often as his does, and I suspect she does at least an order of magnitude more work there.
Indeed, several SpaceX staff wrote an open letter complaining about him and his antics being a distraction that hinders them.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/spacex-illegally...
In literally every thread about SpaceX people who don't like Musk (and sometimes others), people bring up Shotwell. Of course her name doesn't come up as often as Musk, Musk is literally one of the most famous people on earth, a highly controversial public figure and one of the richest people on the plant, who also owns and leads the company.
For most other tech companies people done even know the Nr.2 person in the company, and that includes companies much bigger then SpaceX. So if anything Shotwell comes up more often then literally any other Nr.2 person in a major tech company. I couldn't tell you the relevant people at Nvidia, or Google, or Microsoft.
Also the letter was more about the external image, that Musk reflected on them. There was no actual argument in the later work inside SpaceX was slowed down because of it. And from the continued progress SpaceX has made before and after that, there is no evidence of that it actually did.
But of course its also self evident that the CEO isn't doing 'boring day to day stuff', but neither is Shotwell.
The numbers 2-4 at Apple come up quite often, but “how annoying it is to work with Tim Cook” isn’t a recurring thread, despite his also being one of the most famous, wealthy, and powerful people on Earth as well.
Joel Spoksky’s meeting with Bill Gates about Excel is famous lore in our circles as well, although I doubt Spolsky was ever even top 10 at Microsoft.
Werner Vogels comes up fairly often, too.
I don't know who 2-4 at Apple are, and I think most non Apple fans don't know them, and neither to most Apple fans.
And there is a big difference between people generally known and being a character in on famous 'lore' story.
I challenge you to compare all threads about SpaceX and Amazon and and see who gets more mentions, Shotwell or Vogels. I have never hared about Vogels despite reading many theads on Amazon, that said, I don't read many about AWS details.
I’ve never heard of those people
Musk is pretty clear about the fact that Shotwell handles the 'boring' operational stuff, so, F9, FH, and very likely includes Starlink now. These have customer-related constraints, which Gwynne is much better at handling.
Elon does decision making for the R&D programs, i.e. Starship, where his style works better.
Imagine being so petty and filled with Elon derangement syndrome that you have to not only comment on his family but cast dispersions on his relationship with his children. Pathetic and speaks volumes on the person making the statement.
I’ve nothing substantive to add, but I note that the logic gymnastics on display in comments from all perspectives is somehow telling. Of something. Not sure what.
It's just more evidence of the corrosive effect that injecting politics into everywhere has had, especially intersectional politics where unrelated domains are pushed to influence each other for political or ideological reasons in unrelated domains.
It's HN, arguing about semantics is what people do :)
If the half page of arguing by analogies to holidays about what is and isn't a rescue feels like an unwarranted response to a headline, the comments insisting the only reason people could consider labelling accommodating them on the next scheduled return flight a 'rescue mission' overly dramatic is deep love for Boeing or deep hatred for Elon's politics are wild.
HN is leftie programmer sock space but loves tech and there is no denying the SpaceX and Starlink tech is good, but Elon is a trumpie so there is a dissonance where certain people cannot admit this or their whole world-view crashes so it is easier to say "Elon bad!!" or downplay that this is an emergency rescue mission as seen.
Pretending politics is the only reason people turned on Elon is kinda hilarious. The dude has been behaving utterly unhinged.
All that aside, buying a social media platform for the express purpose of influencing elections is most likely not going to win you any favours.
> buying a social media platform for the express purpose of influencing elections is most likely not going to win you any favours.
The irony is that was going on before he bought Twitter. Stopping it may have been the reason he bought it.
We know Twitter at the behest of the US gov't censored the Hunter Biden laptop story but allowed speech that wrongly claimed it was "Russian disinformation". That could be considered election interference because it was a major scandal for the Democrats.
Twitter probably over censored the story. Considering all of the crazy demonstrably fake news surrounding this, I can see how handling this was probably difficult to get right.
If the right wing wants to stop getting over censored, maybe they should hold themselves a little more accountable to the mass amounts of fake news they share.
But again. Hunter Biden was not running for president. The right is still pushing fake news (Ohio) as part of their campaigns.
And Elon and his companies were lauded here before his politics became well known. Brandon Eich is another example of the phenomenon.
Elon's politics changed after he snapped when confronted with some life changing stuff.
Is the "life changing stuff" the fact that the US gov't was moderating Twitter and suppressing speech that was unfavorable to their narrative?
Also, many people will always hate the richest man in the world.
Those people didn't seem to care before he bought Twitter.
Awkwardness could be a sign of conflicting values at play. And a desire to find an accepted homogeneous mindset.
In a mildly embarrassing note for Boeing, astronauts to return on spacex dragon.
Space man Elon bad.
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I don't see anything in the comment guidelines banning humor. I do however see that it asks us to be kind, not sneer at the rest of the community here, and to stop the tired comparisons to Reddit.
The voting and flagging systems, along with the work of the moderators, are perfectly capable at managing the comments. No need to try to police them yourself.
You've clearly read the guidelines attentively so I'm surprised that your take is that if shallow jokes are not explicitly banned then they are welcome?
> Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
I interpret that part as saying that generic jokes and boring puns should be avoided. (The trope being a long chain of commenters trying to one up the previous pun, with zero substance)
Personally I'm neutral when it comes to puns in child comments.
But I really don't like top comments that consist of only a pun. Make an insightful comment and conclude with your pun, if you really must.
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SpaceX is the first word of both the headline and article?
Personally I was glad they omitted the obligatory clickbait mention of his name, but yeah it is a little conspicuous how they only show this restraint on the good news...
Not in this article but I read an ABC News article where they vehemently avoided to mention SpaceX when they talked about the Starliner’s problem and the decision of NASA. Literally not even a single word. Hilarious :D
Hopefully everything will work fine. But if anything goes slightly wrong, those media companies will highlight Elon's name in every opportunity.
well if he wants the credit, he deserves all the credit.
Reminiscent of Biden gathering all car manufacturers except Tesla and praising GM for electrifying the industry.
GM.
Obama bailed out Tesla, and if that hadn’t happened Elon would have been cooked.
https://www.wired.com/2009/06/tesla-loan/
Biden is writing huge checks to SpaceX.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-...
Elon sucks at the teat of government and cozies up to the guy who thinks windmills cause cancer and is vehemently anti-EV.
Boeing is another issue, but Elon is nothing without Uncle Sam.
You’re missing a few factors:
1. The US would’ve been paying Russia about 10x the cost if SpaceX didn’t exist.
2. Boeing was awarded a ~$3B contract within the Artemis mission and, so far, the outcome is that they can’t safely bring back the astronauts they sent to space.
Those two factors alone indicate that it’s more a mutually beneficial relationship between SpaceX and the government with, arguably, SpaceX providing more benefit relative to the government.
You're pretty good at writing clickbait headlines yourself. Those huge checks are a DoD contract for unblockable internet coms not some handout and for $20 million a month it sounds like Elon is giving them a deal, at least compared to what Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman get every year. They don't just suck the teat, they eat half of it.
You make a good point (imo) but you end on such a grim mixed metaphor!
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I think "rescue" is a little dramatic.
Over 50 years ago we got people to the moon and back, now we can't even easily get 2 people out of orbit :/
Starbase, TX is rapidly overtaking Cape Canaveral, FL. This "extended work opportunity" of sorts is being milked for maximum instrumental utility.
This is facutally false. Starbase has no license to launch even 1/10 of the flights that are legal from the Cape. SpaceX just majorly invested into a second crew launch facility at the LC40. And SpaceX is building a Starship launch site at 39A. They have publicly stated that Starbase is for production and experimental development mostly. Please actually inform yourself before posting.
what do you mean? crew-9 launched from the cape, like all crewed missions. in fact, it was the first crewed mission to launch from SCL-40 instead of the usual 39a.
I thought Starbase was more for experimental launches. I don't follow every launch of SpaceX but the one's I saw where mostly of test vehicles.