Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week Boeing's troubled Starliner spacecraft is set to return to Earth just over a week from now with managers setting a date of no earlier than September 6 for undocking from the International Space Station (ISS) and September 7 to land at White Sands in New Mexico. For the Starliner's crew, however, the stay in space will be far …
NASA is wasting no money on this contract. Commercial Crew is a fixed price contract. Every delay, extra test flight and cost for rework comes out of Boeing's pocket, not NASAs.
Boeing has lost over a billion dollars on Starliner and they are set to lose more.
The reason why NASA is pursuing multiple contracted launch suppliers is to be able to carry on operations if one of them runs into an issue, such as this.
If the world had just one make and model of car on the road, and that turned out to have a major design flaw and suddenly it could not be driven, we'd be in the shitter. This is the situation NASA is seeking to avoid for space launch. They're not there yet because 1) Boeing's capsule isn't ready yet (though it's probably close than many are giving it credit for), and 2) SpaceX is currently grounded too. But they have got fixed price contracts.
"If the world had just one make and model of car on the road, and that turned out to have a major design flaw and suddenly it could not be driven, we'd be in the shitter."
Nah, because cars aren't subject to anything like rigorous safety testing and standards.
When was the last time even a single model of car was banned from taking the road until an investigation and remediation happened?
When was the last time anyone was required to update their driving certification?
No - it's a car, so it's carte blanche on anything, including killing people.
OK, swap it to say, imagine a large airline whose livelihood depended on completing a certain number of flights per week, decided to rely on a single model of passenger aircraft? What would happen if that aircraft had a flight safety issue?
I am aware some airlines have taken that risk, to reduce their training and operational costs (Ryanair with the Boeing 737 for example) so it's not as clear cut but if you had to buy off the screen and not something already in series production, what would you do?
Spirit Airlines is already having that problem with their planes... Pratt & Whitney ucked fup its geared turbofans and literally dozens of airplanes are grounded, and the cost advantages of model uniformity have comke round to bite them in the arse. OTOH, incompatible suits, crew assignment decisions, and so on are (comparatively) First World problems... For the 1st time in history, NASA has a choice that doesn't involve Soyuz (suits for Soyuz weren't compatible with Shuttle back then either) and they can pick and choose between vehicles, which was the whole point of the exercise. If I was in charge (of NASA, imagine that!) I'd pay Elon to keep some Falcon 9s and the 2 Dragon capsules around even when Starship is in production; it's not gonna cost more than building launch towers for the Senate Launch System
Starship will have the same problem that the Shuttle had, namely no crew abort system. At least, that's the way it looks now, given the various renders and early design documents that are available.
Without that, it's unlikely that NASA will give it a human flight rating, despite having been gung-ho with the Shuttle, so Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 will be with us for a long time.
That's one of the reasons that Starship is only handling the moon landing and return to orbit, and the astronauts have to travel all the way there on Orion. No crew abort, no launch authorisation.
"Without that, it's unlikely that NASA will give it a human flight rating, despite having been gung-ho with the Shuttle, so Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 will be with us for a long time."
Right now, the only manned variant of Starship being contemplated by NASA is the lunar lander where a crew escape system isn't viable anyway. SpaceX's talk about point to point rocket travel is just talk and a rehash of bad ideas already previously batted around since Tsiolkovsky. The latest generation of military thinkers (another one of those major oxymorons) has decided they need a deep hole to hide some more black ops money so they'll commission a study, once again, to look into delivering materiel and troops via rocket. It's also a way for government to funnel money to SpaceX so they don't go under.
"Nah, because cars aren't subject to anything like rigorous safety testing and standards."
Not on an ongoing basis in all places. In places like Japan, the cost to re-certify a car past a certain age can be prohibitive so they will often be scrapped. That works well for me in the US since I can buy a used engine with ~50,000 miles that was salvaged from one to put in my own car that is pushing a quarter million miles.
With a car, the vast majority of problems might result in the car non-functional on the side of the road. Even a fault with the brakes in an older car with a manual emergency/parking brake isn't going to be fatal. On the other hand, many problems on a manned spacecraft can result in corpses, quick or slow.
I think some of the issue can be due to too much precision and testing. I don't think I've ever needed to return a home stereo component nor ever had an issue with a used component that was working when I got it. The manufacturers honed the design to be manufacturable with very high production yields. I'd want to see space qualified electronics built better than that, but not at the expense of reliability. I know of a few things that were an issue with the Mars Exploration Rovers due to an esoteric design approach that were way too twitchy for a tiny smidge of improved S/N that was too many decimal places to the right to matter. This is even worse in hindsight as the discoveries were not way down the weeds of the data. They were front and center and way above the noise floor.
You can’t help think that the incompatible pressure suits is a huge miss, or Dave Calhoun’s bean-counter intervention.
Not even an adapter from Harbor Freight ?
Even Ryan Stone/Sandra Bullock managed to frig a fucked Chinese Spacestation and escape craft and that was 10 years ago.
"1) Boeing's capsule isn't ready yet (though it's probably close than many are giving it credit for)"
Scott Manley did an episode where he stated that the risk of the astronauts wasn't demonstrably greater due to the faults than it would have been with no faults. Scott is pretty up to date on space stuff and does his homework, so I'm prepared to go with his analysis. NASA decided that the added risk wasn't worth it over leaving the astronauts in space for a bunch more months and let their health decay for it to come back on a different craft.
It was poor contingency planning all around. With Starliner having it's first crewed flight, there should have been some back up planning. SpaceX is doing a private manned mission and could have also had another Crew Dragon capsule on standby. Even at SpaceX's own expense, the PR would have been worth it at this point and it's not like that hardware wouldn't ever be used.
The issue with incompatible space suits is a problem with NASA who are supposed to be the coordinating agency, not coordinating. There should have been a reference design for suits that applies to everything to do with ISS. If that came down to using the Russian design, so be it, it works and better is the enemy of good enough. For SpaceX to have yet another incompatible design of their own, for government contracted missions, is inexcusable.
Destin at Smarter Everyday has pointed out that NASA is losing it's authority by allowing contractors to work in private and not provide detailed information and progress reports. When he presented at a NASA conference, he found that many of the people involved with the Artemis moon missions didn't realize what SpaceX's architecture was for getting a lander to lunar orbit, down to the surface and back again. It was an eye opener for them to see that it could be between 10 and 24 launches to fuel one rocket in space to do the mission, maybe. With Apollo, one rocket was used for all of the elements. The orbital mechanics were also much simpler. Right now, the lunar orbits are highly elliptical so if the lander doesn't hook up with the other craft when leaving the moon, bad things will happen.
It's notable how SpaceX started to function properly, stopped having stupid failures and started having good relationships with regulators and NASA when Musk got manipulated sideways and Shotwell started running the show.
I do worry though that even she cannot make SpaceX ultimately into a success. They're spending a fortune putting StarLink up, and the rumours are that it's not got anything like the hoped-for subscriber base. Sure, there's a lot of people using it, but the numbers reportedly are well below expectations.
If StarLink does turn into a commercial flop, the big risk is that it'll drag down the whole of SpaceX. Musk could very well lose control of everything at that point. We've seen this before with large constellations. Motorola bet the house on Iridium, and that didn't work...
Starlink will never compete with fibre in cities and towns but it does not have to. Its economics work best outside high population density, where the locals have money and the existing providers are greedy. Most of the USA (by area, not population) scores high on all three. The US customer base got it started and effectively subsidised the rest of the world. It is priced beyond the reach of most individuals in poor countries but is within the range of small communities. It also does well in the ocean and sky were the competitors in geostationary orbits have such limited bandwidth that demand drives the price well above Starlink. Although Starlink will always be a toy for the rich everywhere it has already gathered plenty of market beyond that niche. It passed break even at the end of last year (plenty of links quote a source world famous for exaggeration but a few quote Gwynne Shotwell.)
The most obvious reason why Starlink could fail is some Twit who said free speech absolutism means obeying local law just got Starlink's accounts frozen in Brazil because he would appoint a legal representative for X. (Perhaps all the potential candidates wanted payment in advance.)
" where the locals have money and the existing providers are greedy."
That's not really where it wins... or rather it only wins there for a short time.
At the moment when terrestrial providers decide to stop being so greedy then spaceX suddenly have no more customers in that area.
And it could be that a community decides to build something themselves.
There are a couple of places StarLink makes uncontested sense:
One, perversely, is for HFT links between stock exchanges on opposite sides of oceans/continents - where the longer flight path of a signal going to LEO and back is offset by the much reduced speed of light in a fibre.
Another is in mobile operations, RVs/caravans, cruise ships, planes, even rockets themselves. Probably not trains, because their constrained motion likely allows for other solutions to be deployed.
Another is in disaster recovery, where local infrastructure is temporarily unavailable.
But if other providers start eating into those spaces... then even that becomes contested, which isn't likely to end well for anyone - and spaceX have a huge competitive advantage in terms of launch costs.
Even here in rural Kent, UK, Starlink has its uses. We need(*) fast broadband at my cricket club to livestream matches - BT/Openreach literally just gave up on the idea of quoting us to run any kind of connection. Starlink on the roof works great.
A farming friend of mine has to have good internet connection for monitoring the food he's producing. BT/Openreach not interested, Starlink works just fine thank you very much.
(*) Ok, maybe want more than need but livestreaming league matches is increasingly expected, and it's great for engagement
"They're spending a fortune putting StarLink up, and the rumours are that it's not got anything like the hoped-for subscriber base. Sure, there's a lot of people using it, but the numbers reportedly are well below expectations."
The early interviews with Gwen showed they didn't have a good grasp on the numbers. They were touting a $30TN overall pie in internet services in some number of years with Starlink getting a pretty good slice of that with lots of whipped cream on top and ice cream on the side. The pyramind really crumbles when one looks at the number of people in the world that can afford a couple of thousand a year for internet. ($120/month and rising for Starlink, initial capital outlay, computer, etc) The people that can are also concentrated in first world regions so that complicates how a space-fi system will be used and how much of the time the satellites will be over parts of the world where there won't be any or much utilization. Those out of the way places also don't need the only benefit of a system in LEO, low ping times. A satellite in GEO can be more than adequate to have internet in the far reaches.
"you can't help but be impressed by SpaceX."
I can not be impressed by them. They've done nothing new. All they've done is charge less for the service and replace the money with lots and lots of private investment to keep the doors open. ULA keeps their doors open by charging what's needed to customers.
then there shall be a lot of questions.. Boeing reliably only issues press releases.
if Calamity Capsule has a thruster issue.. and burns up in the atmosphere.. Boeing should refund the 4.5B USD and NASA should look for a reliable partner that is run by engineers, not accountants...
There's a sort of sine-wave thing that goes on in some classes of company, it's very notable in the German car companies. For a while, the engineers run the place, and the cars produced are brilliant but expensive to build. Then the owners notice that they aren't making any money, and put accountants in charge. The cars get really rubbish, but cheap to build, and profits rise. Then people stop buying the cars, so the owners put engineers in charge. The cars get good but expensive to build, and profits go down again. Rinse and repeat.
GJC
A simple start would be to delay C suite bonuses by at least 2 years and have them contingent on any gains being permanent.
At the moment the bonus structure encourages short term thinking, this attitude needs to be deterred.
On a separate but related issue, if a company performs well enough for a bonus to be paid, every single employee and contractor should get the same proportionate bonus, limiting them to just the board seems like pure selfish greed. Bonuses all round boosts morale and staff retention all of which are good for the company, just giving the board bonuses breeds resentment and is very bad for morale and will increase staff churn which is always a bad thing.
If only there were some way of training (accountant) managers to take the long view, not just the next three-month results.
The problem is that US markets only care about the next quarterly figures. Miss them(*) and your stock price can tank, which hits both credit worthiness and customer faith in the company. Persuading the market to take the long term view is the real problem.
(*) In either direction. I have personal experience of producing significantly better figures than predicted because of an out of the blue sale and seeing the stock price drop ~20%. Markets prefer predictability to profit, which is insane.
"The problem is that US markets only care about the next quarterly figures. Miss them(*) and your stock price can tank, which hits both credit worthiness and customer faith in the company. Persuading the market to take the long term view is the real problem."
The bigger the company, the bigger the issue with stock performance being more important than the long term prospects of the company. The question is how long it will take to pump the stock in conjunction with how long the current CEO has to wait for their stock options to vest. I expect there are graduate courses in managing that timing.
"I fear you are right. If only there were some way of training (accountant) managers to take the long view, not just the next three-month results."
At NASA, the term is 4 years or less based on Presidential elections and that of Congress depending on which way the vote is likely to swing. NASA gets whipsawed with budget allocations and mandates for pet projects some batch of Senators might want that create jobs in their districts.
I used to work in a company that produced websites, and they had a similar sine-wave issue going on. They'd focus on quality for a while - in depth QC checks, refine processes to get a site built right first time etc. Then they'd realise that they were producing sites too slowly, so would scale back QC and push for speed. They'd get more sites out the door, but customers would begin getting angry at the mistakes and the number of issues being raised would skyrocket, making more work for the amendments teams. Then they'd focus on QC again for a while. They went back and forth in that cycle for years, round and round several times. They never stopped to think on how they might break out of that cycle (e.g. continuing with the good QC checks and not pushing the site builders so hard, but hiring more builders). They just reacted to what was happening at the time, nothing more.
Competent management should be pushing to flatten that sine wave as much as possible, so that there is just enough QC to maintain the quality they desire.
Once they achieve that quality, if production is too slow at that quality level, they have to hire more people.
TAANSTAAFL.
Consider Sony.
(Engineers) Sony makes the niftiest little sub-notebook, a Vaio, which used a Transmeta CPU, had a widescreen-format display, and could play my favorite game of that time, Battlefield: 1942, via Linux+WINE, at a reasonable speed.
(Accountants) The infamous Sony rootkit distributed on their music CDs.
(Engineers) Sony authorises (makes?) an add-on kit for the Playstation 2, which lets it run Linux.
(Accountants) Yanks the PS/2 Linux kit off the market.
(Engineers) Creates the "OtherOS" feature of the Playstation 3, which lets you run Linux on it.
(Accountants) Removes the OtherOS feature from PS/3s people have already bought. Users must choose between keeping the OtherOS feature, and eventually effectively losing the ability to play Blu-ray discs, or losing the OtherOS feature and keeping the ability to play Blu-rays.
(Having been burned multiple times by them, I am firmly in the "Fuck Sony, and the horse they rode in on" camp. I would not buy a 1p facial tissue from Sony, even if it came with a free ticket to heaven.)
I am firmly in the "Fuck Sony, and the horse they rode in on" camp. I would not buy a 1p facial tissue from Sony, even if it came with a free ticket to heaven.
Oh but plenty of people do... see this classic from Onion News Network (somewhat NSFW)
This actually sounds like a sine + cosine thing, where the sine wave represents the quality, and the cosine wave represents profits. The cosine function is always 90 degrees out of phase with the sine function, because the cosine is the first derivative of the sine. And I'm sure you know about derivatives in business, specifically in finances.
The undock procedure has been changed to push it away from the ISS faster so that [1] if the thrusters fail completely it will drift away from the ISS fast enough to burn up in the atmosphere [2] if it explodes, it will be far enough away not to avoid shrapnel. If there are any heat problems during first maneuver, NASA can target a sea landing to avoid cities.
"They really don't have any faith in the poor little fella, do they? Seems to me that the faults logged are rather more severe than the publicity releases would have us believe."
A lot of contingency planning is predicated on possibilities and not probabilities. At some point the probability is so low and the mitigation so expense in one form or another that they aren't worth the effort to worry about. OTOH, if the cost is very low for a very low probability that you just do it or it comes for free as part of mitigating a potential problem with much higher probability (that can still be vanishingly small). It's a mistake to try and explain all of these to the press that will mangle it beyond recognition in their attempt to dumb it down for publication.
You do realize that's only 22:03 here, right?
They're landing it in literally the middle of nowhere at a secure facility. There's a lot of that here. The media don't normally care enough but they can usually get access to the Range Control on the main post to see the landing while it's being carried out. This isn't the first rodeo for something landing from space. Especially for this, since its been such a total goatfuck there will very likely be someone from the Las Cruces Sun News, Alamogordo Daily News, Albuquerque Journal, and Santa Fe New Mexican, as well as our two bigger NPR affiliates, KUNM and KRWG. Local media will be all over this.
I pointed out elsewhere that there are plenty of workable gas-tight quick-detach connectors available for about three bucks a pop. My garage is full of them.
Space flight will only really become commoditised when the engineering starts using that sort of off-the-shelf component.
GJC
That's what prompted my pondering. There's similar used on submarines in their emergency breathing systems, made of brass or bronze so they don't corrode. I've got some that won't disconnect if they are pressurised, it stops accidental disconnection and the possibility of a flailing hose.
There's also those used on SCUBA and other diving systems, and the military and aerospace will have some too.
I'm trying not to sound like an armchair expert here, just trying to end my puzzlement.
It's not just the oxygen - it's the electronics too. Each suit is paired to the craft.
It's similar to the situation at the beginning of the auto industry - some cars used 6v systems, some 8v, then came 12v. After a while everyone realized the 12v system was the best overall at the time and standardized on 12v systems (24v for heavy duty trucks). Part of the problem was the power source (batteries), then the standard 12v lead-acid battery became standard.
Until multiple vendors start actually designing ships/capsules with standardized parts (not just the suits), then we can start talking standardized interfaces for electronics. However, until multiple vendors start designing systems and seeing the different interactions that can occur, you don't want to prematurely optimize. We're seeing the same thing with BEV's and charging. And payment processing.
Spacesuits don't use all that much power. You can probably find the correct buck/boost converter on eBay. As for things like audio circuits, any someone competent amateur can probably click together a converter circuit in KiCAD and have it manufactured within a few days on a service like PCBWays.
Add the correct connectors and a bit of potting material and you're done.
It's not as if these things need to last for decades, you only need them for an emergency return from orbit, so if you can guarantee that they work for 10 hours before failing you're golden.
I read that the SpaceX suits are a fundamentally different design compared to the old NASA ones. The SpaceX are a lot lighter, but don't have their own life support and need to stay tethered to a capsule because of this. I guess that this makes the plumbing substantially different. I guess the Boeing ones are either the same or very similar to the NASA ones?
The suit is really part of the seat, it's shaped to fit the wearer to the capsule crash couch so they don't flail around too much during the spam-in-a-can phases of flight.
You absolutely don't want a seam in the wrong place, it could break your arm at splashdown/impact. And if the helmet doesn't support your neck properly...
It's probably too early to standardise the crash couch systems, as there's very little experience as to what's actually a good idea and what merely looked good on paper.
This is a lot more difficult than docking adapters as it involves squishy humans, who come in radically different sizes and aspect ratios.
Those 63 years include less than 400 flights. At the equivalent point in automotive transport we had a man walking in front with a red flag.
We're still toddlers when it comes to spaceflight.
So what, docking adapters were standardized well over 40 years ago to such a degree that USA and Soviet spacecraft could dock to each other.
They weren't standardized - it was a convenience at the time. The only time US and Russia docked were their capsules for a "Friendship Mission" - not a joint space station mission.
At that time, you could not dock a US capsule with the Russian capsule and vice-versa without an adapter ring.
It was only after the ISS had already been built with 2 dock types (Russian and US) and had been used for a while before the standard docking ring was designed.
"It's probably too early to standardise the crash couch systems, as there's very little experience as to what's actually a good idea and what merely looked good on paper."
OTOH, it may be way past time that these things DO have a standard. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz and others have had people in suits for better than sixty years now. There's also not a huge installed base to be backward compatible with nor an entrenched 'standard' that would be difficult to change to going forward should there be an important enough change that needed making.
They are not just emergency decompression suits - they are part of the spacecraft. They contain all the sensors that detect the wearers heart rate and other vital signs, together with compute systems and software that request coolant etc from the space capsule to keep the wearer "comfortable" and provide the necessary G-suit style constrictions to manage blood flow around the body (if required). They are much closer to the suits worn by fighter pilots (which are also unique to each aircraft type) than to pressure suits.
"If there are two separate designs, there is a higher chance of avoiding both being unusable at the same time."
The issue is connections, not internal details. There is a choice between air moderating climate control and liquid, but if there were a coordinating agency (hmmm, I wonder who), perhaps something could be worked out. There's no life and death decision with going with one comms spec over another. Some of the first jobs I had involved audio electronics many years ago. Without explicitly stating how long that might have been, I'll just say I was young when I built the press feed distribution system used at the first Shuttle landing at Edwards Air force Base. I hold an Amateur Extra license as well as a GROL with a RADAR endorsement. Standards for all of that have been around for ages. One could take the books I used to study for the exams off my shelves and pass a current test without much extra study. Obviously, there won't be as much material and questions on tube circuits included on exams now.
Better is the enemy of good enough. For everybody to insist on their own unique system is a recipe for disaster regardless of the dubious claims of superiority.
...about why the two systems are incompatible (not only wrt the hoses, but also the electronics), I would hope that one outcome of this fiasco is standardization in space suit fittings. And if we're lucky---I mean *really* lucky---standardization in other space technology too. With maybe in intermediate stage of adapters.
"With maybe in intermediate stage of adapters."
That's not a great idea as it adds more stuff to go wrong. It's not a big deal to make the changes. It's not like going from leaded to unleaded petrol while having millions of car in service that can't take unleaded. What's the world supply of functioning space suits as of this day? Less than 100 I would expect. There's also no entrenched production that would be very expensive to change going forward.
Regardless of politics, just about any astronaut would want to come to the aid of another in case of emergency. Overcoming just about any fault in space or on another planetary body would be an emergency. To have to mime to somebody gasping for air that the fittings are incompatible while watching them die would be quite painful. Even more so if that person was a doctor or somebody else with skills in limited quantities. One wouldn't want to find themselves on the moon after a big incident with a cadre comprised of telephone sanitizers, tired advertising account mangers and SEO consultants. (I threw in the last one as I received a Linkedin connection request from a 20 something SEO consultant today).
Longer memories than that would recall the same thing afflicted Motorola / Freescale.
Freescale "died" because they fired their whole design team after the tape out of a new CPU product. Trouble was, there was a mistake in the design, and it required rework. But, they'd no longer got a design team to do the re-work! They tried to tempt personnel to return, but unsurprisingly none agreed to do it.
There is the possibility that this uncrewed return passes off, trouble free.
Whilst Boeing bashing is a popular past time, I think that if it did return successfully without further issues developing, we should all be pleased with that. With a new CEO at the helm who looks like being a good one, those engineers would be much cheered up by a successful flight.
There's no way of telling though if a successful return was down to luck with a damaged component or due to the systems not being as badly damaged as they though, thanks to the fact that the systems in question will be destroyed as part of re-entry so can't be examined later on.
Boeing suits are not compatible with the SpaceX spacecraft and vice versa - hopefully everything will pass off without a hitch but this seems very much like the CO2 scrubber issue on Apollo 11, competing designs do have a lot to commend them, but I wonder if we will see a common interface in the future...
"competing designs do have a lot to commend them"
Not always in all situations.
Cars come equipped with CANbus and that can be great for diagnosing problems. What if every brand had their own "competing" buss instead? They do have different designs for the circuitry on the other side of the buss as they see fit. The electronics are made to work from a 12vdc power source and even though some people still advocate for a higher voltage, there's much less of a need for it with more efficient headlights and starter motors. The entrenched manufacturing basis and installed equipment makes it even harder to support 36-48 volts. Quite the opposite for spacesuit hardware.
"There also aren't enough pressure suits to go around in the event of a contingency. Boeing suits are not compatible with the SpaceX spacecraft and vice versa."
This sounds like a comic opera gone wrong. What an effing shambles. There are certain things in space tech that have to be universal... Space Suits is right at the top of the list IMHO.
FAIL for NASA and Boeing AND SPACEX
When the contracts were awarded, the "standard" suit was 50 years old and so it was seen as time for a new one.
Boeing and SpaceX won the commercial crew contracts - Boeing were the old guard of space flight and SpaceX was the risky startup there as token "competition". SpaceX weren't expected to actually build anything that would work, they were just there to satisfy the government competitive tender rules.
Therefore, the new suit design task would logically have been given to Boeing, but as things turned out SpaceX were ready to fly astronauts (new suit and all) before Boeing had finished deciding what colour crayon to use to design the thing.
"Therefore, the new suit design task would logically have been given to Boeing, but as things turned out SpaceX were ready to fly astronauts (new suit and all) before Boeing had finished deciding what colour crayon to use to design the thing."
As it was a government contract and NASA is supposed to lead the design for that sort of thing, NASA should have been the coordinating agency for the spacesuit interfaces. SpaceX and Boeing could still choose their colors, patches and wide vs. skinny lapels.
The suits seem like they are only going to save an astronaut in the case of a minor pressure leak. Major hull breaches are probably going to let high energy plasma tear the ship apart on reentry. There are many more things that could go wrong where the suit would not make any difference at all. I'm not saying there's no point having them, just that the risk of returning without one isn't massively higher than the risk of returning in a suit.
"I've got a question about Starliner"
"There's a strange noise coming through the speaker"
"I don't know what's making it."
"Alright Butch, that one came through"
"It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping."
Is it going full HAL 9000 or what?
Likely just some glitch in the audio system, but oh my, don't the jokes about Starliner keep writing themselves...
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