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Boeing acknowledges "gaps" in its Starliner software testing:
On Friday, during a detailed, 75-minute briefing with reporters, a key Boeing spaceflight official sought to be as clear as possible about the company's troubles with its Starliner spacecraft.
After an uncrewed test flight in December of the spacecraft, Boeing "learned some hard lessons," said John Mulholland, a vice president who manages the company's commercial crew program. The December mission landed safely but suffered two serious software problems. Now, Mulholland said, Boeing will work hard to rebuild trust between the company and the vehicle's customer, NASA. During the last decade, NASA has paid Boeing a total of $4.8 billion to develop a safe capsule to fly US astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
At the outset of the briefing, Mulholland sought to provide information about the vehicle's performance, including its life support systems, heat shield, guidance, and navigation. He noted that there were relatively few issues discovered. However, when he invited questions from reporters, the focus quickly turned to software. In particular, Mulholland was asked several times how the company made decisions on procedures for testing flight software before the mission—which led to the two mistakes.
He struggled to answer those questions, but the Boeing VP said the reason was not financial. "It was definitely not a matter of cost," Mulholland said. "Cost has never been in any way a key factor in how we need to test and verify our systems."
The first software error occurred when the spacecraft captured the wrong "mission elapsed time" from its Atlas V launch vehicle—it was supposed to pick up this time during the terminal phase of the countdown, but instead it grabbed data 11 hours off of the correct time. This led to a delayed push to reach orbit and caused the vehicle's thrusters to expend too much fuel. As a result, Starliner did not dock with the International Space Station.
The second error, caught and fixed just a few hours before the vehicle returned to Earth through the atmosphere, was due to a software mapping error that would have caused thrusters on Starliner's service module to fire in the wrong manner. Specifically, after the service module separated from the capsule, it would not have performed a burn to put the vehicle into a disposal burn. Instead, Starliner's thrusters would have fired such that the service module and crew capsule could have collided.
NASA and Boeing have been conducting a joint assessment of these software problems, and they're expected to report their findings in a week, on March 6. But on Friday, Mulholland was prepared to discuss two issues with Boeing's software verification that the company intends to fix.
First of all, he acknowledged the company did not run integrated, end-to-end tests for the whole mission. For example, instead of running a software test that encompassed the roughly 48-hour period from launch through docking to the station, Boeing broke the test into chunks. The first chunk ran from launch through the point at which Starliner separated from the second stage of the Atlas V booster. Unfortunately for Boeing engineers, the mission elapsed timing error occurred just after this point in time. "If we would have run the integrated test through the first orbital insertion burn time frame, we would have seen that we missed the burn," Mulholland said.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Sunday March 01 2020, @06:33PM (9 children)
Yeah yeah pull the other one...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by knarf on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:37PM (7 children)
Well, if it isn't cost then it has to be competence, or rather the lack of it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:59PM (5 children)
...and competence as we all know, is not related to cost at all particularly in software.
This is why you can hire perfectly competent software developers in, say, India, at $peanuts per hour and they are clearly competent as they have ISO 11001, CMM level 11, minimum of 3 degrees and a PhD each and all have ten years proven experience in (for example) Rust and Go.
Just be sure that when writing the spec you can specify exactly how "the software must not crash the plane or spacecraft", otherwise it will, and it will be argued that it is written to spec because you didn't specify that it shouldn't do what it did.
As you can tell, I've never ever had to work with cheap offshore developers at all...
(Score: 5, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 02 2020, @02:33AM (4 children)
So, uhhh, Ford mechanics?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday March 02 2020, @03:14AM (3 children)
No, they only know how to plug in the diagnostic computer and print off the error codes.
You're thinking of the people who write the system that runs the car, and gps, and radio, and ignition, and cruise control....etc..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 02 2020, @03:29AM (2 children)
Oh, please, tell me that you weren't just "WHOOOSHED". Rust and Go. Somewhat synonymous with "Found On Road Dead". LMAO
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday March 02 2020, @03:57AM
Alas, yes. "Too close to home" territory..
Current project supplier arguing about printing being in scope or not, and about how hard it is to change tab order on forms..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Monday March 02 2020, @04:54AM
And Fix Or Repair Daily. Or Fscked On Race Day.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Sunday March 01 2020, @11:22PM
I wonder if this was one of the dumping ground projects.
Boeing used to make sacrifice projects, usually sold to customers who didn't know the aerospace game, where they dumped the least competent employees.
Not that the other projects were necessarily full of competent people. Some highlights from my time there were the engineer who told me that friction decreases with increasing speed and the person who looked at a drawing of a hydrazine thruster and told me it was a nitrogen thruster.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Sunday March 01 2020, @11:25PM
It's actually true, cost has never been an issue for Boeing's spaceflight program because they know that their sweet sugar daddy, Uncle Washington, will keep feeding them money no matter what happens.
That's one massive thing the up-and-coming spaceflight players have that Boeing doesn't: accountability. They have to show a return on investment and value for money, while Boeing just have to show an ability to bat their eyelashes at their sugar daddy.