Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/the-harrowing-story-of-what-flying-starliner-was-like-when-its-thrusters-failed/
Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/the-harrowing-story-of-what-flying-starliner-was-like-when-its-thrusters-failed/
4 Comments
Yikes. I think it’s pretty clear that NASA needs to require a complete replacement of the current thruster/doghouse design, as well as a new unmanned flight.
This sounds much worse than I had realized. What if those thrusters hadn’t come back after the computer reboot? Heads should roll at Boeing for allowing this thing to get off the ground with humans inside.
That’s actually terrifying. Excellent reporting to get all that information.
At the time of the decision to not return on Starliner:
>Mr. Bowersox and Mr. Stich conceded that Boeing engineers and officials had disagreed about the risk. Boeing thought it had demonstrated that Starliner was safe enough for Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore to return home on.
>“I would say that we’ve had a lot of tense discussions,” Mr. Bowersox said.
>No one from Boeing took part in the news conference, but Mark Nappi, the Boeing official in charge of the Starliner program at Boeing, told his team in an email, “I know this is not the decision we had hoped for, but we stand ready to carry out the actions necessary to support NASA’s decision. The focus remains first and foremost on ensuring the safety of the crew and spacecraft.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/24/science/nasa-boeing-starliner-astronauts.html
Someone did an analysis of the doghouses at some point and concluded there was too much stuff packed into too small a space and that without atmosphere to provide a means to carry away heat that heat buildup in the doghouses likely caused all the problems including the one thruster that was never recovered. I suspect that it will require a pretty significant redesign of the thruster packaging on the Service Module to prevent that heat buildup. I don’t think they’ll be able to do it through software to reduce the thruster firing rates because even if they did, a thruster malfunction would increase the firing rates of the other thrusters to compensate and the increased firing rates would just put the thruster right back into heat soak failure.