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This is the shocking part of the Boeing Starliner scandals that hasn't gotten any media attention: When docking at the ISS, NASA greenlit both approach and docking to the space station even though the Starliner's thrusters had failed—and there was insufficient redundancy to guarantee a safe docking...
This is the biggest scandal of the group. It's the kind of management that destroyed the Challenger in 1986. I think this really illustrates that bureaucracies can't learn from "institutional memory". After a while, all those memories walk out the door and end up in a retirement village...
To my mind, there are 4 major scandals involving the Starliner project:
- Boeing's mismanagement of the project and NASA funding, doing far less with far more than SpaceX... Embarrassingly so.
- Docking the Starliner to the ISS when safety standards dictated that they must abort and return to Earth. I understand that would put them between a rock and a hard place... But if they'd crashed into the ISS, they could have killed everyone and destroyed a $300 billion asset. NASA's luck eventually runs out.
- NASA was only paying the astronauts $5 a day per diem for the extra 9 months in space... No overtime.
- Political interference on NASA prevented a rescue flight before the election.
Discussion (54)
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#1 and #4 are not news. I heard about them ad nauseum. (Perhaps because I mostly get my news from Ricochet, and some folks I just have a tendency to pass over. Not you.)
#2 is almost unheard of. The consequences I really hadn't thought of.
#3 is news. Embarrassing news.
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Honestly, I thought of a better one for #4, but as I was typing it out, I lost that train of thought...
Its not so much of these scandals being recent news, if someone hasn't been following technology or aerospace news, they may have missed these news items...
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NASA likely wasn’t the source of the political interference, just the conduit. It would be instructive to know who had that kind of pull.
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Trump has said that they'll get more "overtime" pay, even if he has to pay it himself. Not that it will be a huge amount of money, but "it's the thought that counts."
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Some west wing interns no doubt. I suspect that NASA would have brought them down much sooner had it not put a feather in Elons cap once it was clear he shifted to becoming a Trump supporter.
As for the whole Starliner debacle I think you need to understand how NASA whole manned program has essential become a job support program (with Congress well in the thick of the choosing process, just like large DoD procurement, for what few contractors left that can be expected to at least deliver something for the outrageous billing.
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