Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft landed in a New Mexico desert late on Friday, months after its original departure date and without the two astronauts it carried when it launched in early June.
Starliner returned to Earth seemingly without a hitch, a Nasa live stream showed, nailing the critical final phase of its mission.
The spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere around 11pm ET at orbital speeds of roughly 27,400km/h (17,025mph). About 45 minutes later, it deployed a series of parachutes to slow its descent and inflated a set of airbags moments before touching down at the White Sands Space Harbor, an arid desert in New Mexico.
People are (rightfully) raking Starliner and Boeing for the shitshow that has been this project so far. But the positive to take from this flight, even landing without the crew, is the fact that the capsule itself performed fine. It was the service module that was being screwy. The actual “capsule” part in “capsule” seems to have had it’s issues ironed out. Just fix the shitty service module.
Amazing. Given Boeings recent track record, I didn’t expect it to do that.
Alex baumgardner jumped from the balloon from basically space, why haven’t they figured out a way to do it from low orbit yet?
Felix?
Was that his name?
Because he wasn’t moving very fast… To be in orbit you need to be traveling around the earth extremely quickly. The problem is slowing down, not the altitude.
And the ionosphere is the dangerous part. Bellow that, drag slows you down before you burn.
Because he jumped while in the stratosphere (middle level of 3-level atmosphere surrounding the earth). Therefore he didn’t have to manage the friction and heat that space shuttles have to endure when they enter the uppermost mesosphere, then stratosphere, then troposphere.
I like the part where they waited until after markets closing to take a chance. Also note how NASA announced that astronauts were staying after markets closed.
But number go up?!?
Meet: The Interrobang. ‽ Combination of two types of punctuation that indicates both at once.
Boeing killed John Barnett
Fucking piece of shit Boeing. Cant believe they would land a god damn spacecraft safely back on Earth. We need to gut them and give all our money to Elon. /s
Dang. You got ‘em.
You know the Eloners were praying for it to explode.
Tons of them on r/space. They and the people who have become Boeing experts since February.
You do know that “let’s get private corporations out of spaceflight entirely” might be something some people would like, yes?
Private companies have always been a big part of space flight, except it used to be only large defense contractors (Aka, Boeing, Raytheon, lockheed, etc). Honestly the situation is better now than it has ever been. But we’ll never get all private companies out of space flight, NASA can’t do it all themselves.
How is the situation better than it ever has been…?
Well, we have multiple launch vehicles, we have multiple crew capsules, multiple cargo vehicles, and just about all of them are cheaper than our previous options. The crew capsules we’re using now are all several orders of magnitude safer than the space shuttle (even the Starliner in it’s current state is an order of magnitude safer than the shuttle). And now we have options that don’t require us to negotiate with Russia to use them.
China does it all themselves. Russia does it all themselves. India does it all themselves. etc.
And they’re doing a real bang up job of it… Dropping tanks of Nitrogen Tetroxide and hydrazine to explode near towns. Really killing it.
And you should know, China is not doing it themselves, there are about a dozen launch companies and aerospace manufacturers making rockets in China.
The Long March 2C that carelessly drops its booster all over the place (a poorly designed rocket) is government made, but they aren’t all that way.
I didn’t realize all of those countries were China. We can also add in Japan. Which I guess is also China?
I would be fine with “at least don’t let them self-regulate”, same with aerospace.
Right choice, play it safe. Glad it landed safely, competition in space is a good thing. Better than a monopoly.
Still was the right decision not to chance it.
But I bet the astronauts wish they’d been on it now.Someone who’s worked their entire life to not only become trained as an astronaut, but actually go on a space mission. What do you think they prefer? Going home today or staying another few months on an actual space station?
That makes me wonder. What happens if an astronaut just…refuses to come back? They’re up on the station and their mission is at its end. They broadcast to NASA. “Actually, I’ve decided not to come back. I live here now.” How would NASA handle that situation?
“Actually, I’ve decided not to come back. I live here now.”
Ed Baldwin, is that you?
I seem to recall reading somewhere they have sedatives and stuff because people have a real potential to freak out and try to walk out of air locks.
I’ll see if I can find the article.
Edit: I didn’t reread it… but I had this one book marked
Wow. Good find. It looks like they were concerned about a potentially suicidal person opening the hatch. So much so that they actually installed a padlock on it in future flights.
That’s right, I remember that now. A failed experiment or something made the astronaut suicidal…not the one I was thinking of, let me see if I can find the other one lol
0 gravity and living in an enclosed space take a huge toll on one physical and mental being, obviously they wanna go home today, but i bet they also wanna go home in one piece
I think they’d prefer going home. The mission they came up for is long done, they may have important events in their life or their family’s lives scheduled for after the planned return, and staying up for months increases the chances of long term damage to their bodies.
I imagine they’re pretty bored by now.
You would think that, but that’s probably not the case. This is what they train for, this is what they want to do. As a rule, astronauts don’t tend to get bored of space, that’s why they’re astronauts.
I keep saying the same thing and get a bunch of people replying things like, “how do you know they want to see their kids?”
Yeah there’s a thanksgiving and a Christmas coming up that they’ll miss.
To be fair, I’ve met some absent parents that genuinely don’t care if they see their kids again, and unfortnately it is possible for someone like that to be capable of being an astronaut.
Sure, but I think that’s a different argument from “they won’t take seeing their kids again over months in space when it was supposed to be an eight-day mission because they’re in space.”
They certainly won’t be bored. Astronauts time on the ISS is a precious resource, and work will have been found for them even if they weren’t expected to be there
I think I read somewhere, but I’d have to go track it down, that the ISS was catching up on a whole lot of back-logged experiments with their unexpected addition to the team.
and that could have potentially been what caused to crash and burn or burn and crash. choices choices.
anyhow… I’m thinking they want to be home right now, but maybe not riding on a boeing.
👽 Hi
