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This time, can Boeing's Starliner finally shine?:
Boeing and NASA say the Starliner spacecraft is ready for a do-over flight, with a second uncrewed test mission of the spacecraft now scheduled for May 19.
Nine months have passed since a standard pre-flight check of the spacecraft, then sitting atop a rocket on a launch pad in Florida, found that 13 of 24 oxidizer valves within Starliner's propulsion system were stuck. The discovery was made within hours of liftoff.
Since then, engineers and technicians at Boeing and NASA have worked to fully understand why the valves were stuck and to fix the problem. They found that the dinitrogen tetroxide oxidizer that had been loaded onto the spacecraft 46 days prior to launch had combined with ambient humidity to create nitric acid, which had started the process of corrosion inside the valve's aluminum housing.
On Tuesday, during a teleconference with reporters, officials from Boeing and NASA discussed the steps they have taken to ameliorate the problem for Starliner's upcoming test flight. Michelle Parker, vice president and deputy general manager of Boeing Space and Launch, said the valves remain the same on the vehicle but that technicians have sealed up pathways by which moisture might get inside the propulsion system. They are also purging moisture from the valves using nitrogen gas and loading propellants onto Starliner closer to launch.
With those mitigations undertaken, Starliner will soon be stacked on top of an Atlas V rocket built by United Launch Alliance. Starliner was in fact due to roll out to the Atlas V launch complex in Florida on Wednesday, but Boeing said the rollout was "paused" due to a hydraulic leak on United Launch Alliance's transport vehicle.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @07:54PM
As a shining example of why Boeing and NASA should leave rocket development to the experts like Elon Musk.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 06 2022, @07:56PM (10 children)
Somebody captured video of a part falling off the capsule while it was being moved.
Shit happens, NASA knows, Musk knows, anybody who does anything this complex knows: people aren't perfect.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @09:36PM (8 children)
And yet, some people here and on other sites keep pushing for more nuclear energy.
What could possibly go wrong ?
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 07 2022, @12:25AM (6 children)
That's what procedures and practice are for. Ask France about how many similar nuke plants they have and how many serious accidents they have had.
At the moment, lunar expedition capsules are first articles undergoing initial qualifications. This is the time when failing early, often, and safely will accelerate the overall progress of the program.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @11:34AM (5 children)
As much as I like nuclear, it does have a problem I find quite vexing...what do we do with all that stuff that absorbed radiation and now, a lot of stuff that wasn't radioactive now is. For thousands of years.
I am not much concerned anymore with nuclear accidents. Every accident we have, we learn a lot from.
I am going to feel a helluva lot better when we learn how to extract nuclear energy without leaving a helluva lot of highly dangerous waste behind that lasts for thousands of years and can't be simply gotten rid of by thermal decomposition.
Cold fusion seemed like a dream come true. Like Rossi's E-Cat. Unfortunately, turns out he is far more of a businessman/politician than engineer. The stuff he published was so full of businesstalk that I could find no truth in it.
Businesstalk... Business men talk this way when they are trying to pull a fast one on a trusting customer. It's commonly used in what's known as "snow jobs". It is usually expresses as pages of legalese combined with technical papers devoid of any useful information.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Saturday May 07 2022, @01:26PM (1 child)
A great deal can be reprocessed. In the US, Nuke power became political so political obstacles were put in place to prevent reprocessing. The authors of the obstacles then pointed to say 'See? Look at all this waste! We can't go forward with Nuke power!'.
Given that divisive politics aren't going anywhere, I'd say 'reprocessing plants have to be authorized, funded and built along with plant construction' or something like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @09:54PM
And there's gold in seawater too.
The problem is in separating the atom that was hit by that high energy particle from the ones that weren't.
Kinda like separating U-235 from U-238.
How does one remove the injured elements from our environment?
This is even more vexing than how does one get an engineer to trust an MBA after its been exposed to the MBA business skills of things like planned obsolence. The engineer has already seen the landfill, and considers his contributing to it to be the ultimate insult.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday May 07 2022, @03:54PM
> a lot of stuff that wasn't radioactive now is. For thousands of years.
The total inventory in the UK comes to a few warehouses. Just bury it. I know this sounds like a cop out, but there is a strong "balance of risk" argument.
Global warming is highlighted by pretty much all climate scientists (I know, exceptions exist) as being a very high risk event that will result in the migration of millions and a high death toll. I don't want to get bogged down in details about how many and how high risk. No one can deny that there is significant risk that climate scientists are right.
If one buries nuclear waste, even trying really hard to be super careful and burying it way underneath any aquifers, there is a risk that, in a few hundred thousand years, radioactive material may leak out into the environment. Even if we bury it in an isolated location, in a few thousand years who knows where people will choose to live. So it could cause harm for a significant number of people if lots of people were to live on top of the disposed radioactive material and the waste were to leak.
It's a reasonable question to ask where the balance of risk lies. Radioactive material is not terribly bad, and it is highly likely that any leakage would be detected and managed (if not, then civilisation is ended and radioactive contamination is a small problem compared to, say, access to food). Impact of global warming is still not clear. I leave it to reader to decide.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday May 07 2022, @07:12PM
Thousands of years is FUD. We know very well how to extract the longer lasting parts and use it as fuel in some existing reactor designs, leaving stuff that will last from 250-500 years.
So all of that brainstorming about how to convey the danger thousands of years into the future? Never mind! High school students can read 500 year old English well enough to get the gist of it, and that's assuming nobody ever bothers to update the warning signs.
Induced radioactivity tends to be very short lived, so much of that carefully guarded low level waste is currently indistinguishable from things found in the local landfill.
Note that 500 years from now when the waste has decayed to background level radiation, those piles of fly ash from coal plants will still be toxic.
If we start re-processing now, we'd probably have enough nuclear fuel for 50 years and at the end of that time we'd have less nuclear waste than we do now and a vastly shorter commitment to safe containment.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 09 2022, @12:46AM
Whatever problems we have with nuclear power waste, we have much bigger problems with nuclear weapons waste.
What do we do with it? Make a better plan than Yucca Mountain, then really store it. Anything would be better than the ad hoc handling we do now. Same goes for coal fly ash...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday May 07 2022, @12:20PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Saturday May 07 2022, @12:08AM
I submitted an article which is now in the Subs Queue about this.
Mmmm. Meatball subs.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @08:29PM
May as well, they damn near run the place
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @08:31PM (2 children)
No.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Friday May 06 2022, @09:15PM (1 child)
Depends, debris can sparkle really nicely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @05:40AM
Burning fuel shines brightly, my friend. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Friday May 06 2022, @09:35PM (6 children)
It's been said before and proven true many times. McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money, and Boeing is now failing just like McDonnell Douglas was 20 years ago.
Look at the Max, the big ass rocket that has valve problems (really? valves?), their big ass airplane with mechanics tools left in them upon delivery, and there is a 4th huge failure I can't think of at the moment.
Boeing has lost their way and, unless they fire anyone in upper management who came from McDonnell Dougless and put Boeing engineers in their place (if there are any left after 20 years), then, shit. Can't let Boeing die. Shit.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday May 06 2022, @10:14PM
4th item: military refueling uav that can't do refueling.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Friday May 06 2022, @10:19PM (4 children)
I worked there for five years well before the merger and there was plenty of incompetence then.
o the engineer who insisted to me that friction decreases with speed
o the person who stared straight at a well labeled diagram showing a hydrazine thruster pressurized with nitrogen and told me it was a nitrogen thruster.
o the manager who did not understand the difference between buying and leasing
o the job shopper who did not understand the idea of using the same code for multiple data types and insisted on (IIRC) making four copies of the code, exceeding the memory limits of the embedded system it was for
o the job shopper who didn't know that the system he'd been working on for months was open loop and who shouted at the person who tried to brief him.
o the job shopper who didn't know the difference between a bit and a byte.
o the manager who hired that job shopper and kept him on.
The old Boeing had some really sharp people I respected, and between them and established processes the incompetence was controlled. But it was lurking all along, waiting for a chance to take over.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @04:25AM
Drag increases with velocity, but the friction caused by solid objects (static and kinetic friction) usually decreases (although some materials result in increasing friction) as speed increases in real-world situations. I know they tell you in school that the friction of ideal systems is dependent on the normal force, the coefficients of friction, the accelerating force, and whether the motion threshold has been reached. However, the real world is messy and not ideal.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @05:56AM
It lurks in every organization and if it is allowed to take over then there comes a point where it is better to let the building finish burning down and rebuild from scratch rather than try to save it. Boeing is well past that point.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 07 2022, @09:34AM (1 child)
People are not perfect, this is why big organizations are procedure and policy driven. There is a certain threshold of stupid that an organization can handle and still get things done (witness: military ops).
When you get stupid at the top throwing good procedures and policies under the bus, that's when the stupid starts shining through in operations.
Mechanics tools left on plane: happens a lot, should get caught with checks. Accelerate schedule by skipping checks? Stupid shines through.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @05:39PM
A number of years ago I was involved with some aircraft work. Every tool was logged going on and off the plane. At the end of the shift, one torque wrench wasn't accounted for and a dozen people had to go back onboard and they spent 90 minutes searching every inch. Turns out a guy left an hour early and had it in his back pocket and the crew couldn't leave shift until the guy brought the wrench back and logged it out.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Friday May 06 2022, @10:08PM (6 children)
It's nominally a "storable" oxidizer so keeping it in the pipes for 46 days was not the crazy part. But we've had a lot of experience with it and there should not have been surprises.
By "a lot of experience", I mean I found a reference to its use in an experimental rocket in 1927.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @10:39PM (4 children)
you are old
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Saturday May 07 2022, @12:12AM (3 children)
everyone gets old
--
scent from my iFone
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @12:29AM
Not Dorian Gray.
And vampires.
And that one dude from that Twilight Zone episode, Walter Jameson.
And my jokes. Just ask my kids, I'm sure they'll back me up.
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Saturday May 07 2022, @01:14AM
Everyone does. Sucks, but it beats the hell out of the alternative.
Best advice for your birthday? Keep having them.
- D
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Saturday May 07 2022, @02:47AM
I just modded it funny because my sentence really was misparseable. It could be read, perfectly grammatically, as meaning that I found the reference in 1927. AC's sense of humor is a lot like mine.
(Score: 3, Funny) by sjames on Saturday May 07 2022, @07:28AM
To be fair, the oxidizer was in fine condition. Just look how effective it was on those valves!
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday May 07 2022, @07:29PM (1 child)
The first launched and failed because Boeing still depends on a clock for sequencing and someone forgot to set the clock. The second never made it off the pad because it flunked in pre-flight testing. So the upcoming attempt is the THIRD try.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @02:30PM
Boeing didn't forget to set the clock, they set it to the wrong time. They also wired some of the thrusters backwards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 08 2022, @11:06PM
Good news: They figured out that mixing water and hypergolics is bad.
Bad news: This is space 101. Not something that experts are supposed to have to figure out.
The US space industry gets big bucks because they are supposed to be maintaining this store of knowledge.
This taxpayer wants a refund.