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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50855395
The Boeing company is going to have to cut short the uncrewed demonstration flight of its new astronaut capsule.
The Starliner launched successfully on its Atlas rocket from Florida, but then suffered technical problems that prevented it from taking the correct path to the International Space Station.
It appears the capsule burnt too much fuel as it operated its engines, leaving an insufficient supply to complete its mission.
Starliner will now come back to Earth. A landing is planned in the New Mexico desert in about 48 hours.
See also:
https://spacenews.com/starliner-suffers-off-nominal-orbital-insertion-after-launch/
https://spacenews.com/starliner-anomaly-to-prevent-iss-docking/
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Starliner Fails to Make Journey to ISS
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Best of all is never to have been born. Second best is to die soon.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @08:13PM
I'd really like to imagine you're right. And it does indeed make sense. I mean he is the head of NASA at the advent of what is probably the single most exciting time in history in terms of spaceflight.
Yet I've found that in real life 'walking a fine line', 'playing a balancing act', 'making progress one small step at a time', and so on are often rationalizations we use to justify what, in hindsight, was just simple corruption. He was playing PR for this incident trying to spin a complete mission failure, as a success. And, as the press conference happening right now is emphasizing, this mission was a much bigger failure than was initially let alone. The craft failed to deploy its comms equipment appropriately, it entered into the wrong guidance mode, the engines burned themselves beyond safe margins, all navigation stuff completely flopped, and more. Even better one of the reporters asked why there were no redundancies or fail-safes. Boeing's response 'We're not really sure. We're looking into that.' Point of this being that Bridenstine presumably knew this when he was trying to frame the mission as being 'a complete success, except for that whole docking thing'.
At some point somebody needs to simply start speaking honestly about Boeing. Because right now pretty much of all of D.C. is role-playing the emperor's new clothes with them, and it's getting increasingly absurd. I mean we could imagine that the goal is to make it absurd but to what end? What's supposed to happen? Why can't that happen now when they are screwing up basically every single thing they're doing in ways that'd be borderline comical if not for the cost, both dollar and human, that they're inflicting on society?