Stranded in space: Starliner crew to remain in orbit even longer as SpaceX faces delays Two astronauts who traveled to the International Space Station aboard Boeing's problem-plagued Starliner are facing another extended delay. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who flew to the ISS on board the calamity capsule last June, scheduled to stay for around a week, are looking at another month of delays, NASA said …
There actual pay isn't that great. Who is paying is complicated. They are employed by Boeing but they are currently part of the NASA crew rotation so officially I guess sub-contracted to NASA who will be paying Boeing though NASA did charge Boeing prior to them being part of crew rotation.
All it needs is a millionaire and his wife, a movie star, the professor, and Mary Ann.
In other words, most of the rest of the show's plotline, such as it had one. . .
Though we do get the odd billionaire on a joyride on one of the Muskmissiles or Bezosbusses1, so we're getting close.
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1 Yes, I'm leaving out Branson's contraptions since (a) they're only flying suborbital and (b) I can't think of a nickname. Bransonbroom? Nah.
If you're only going to be gone for a week you might not make any arrangements for bills to be paid or mail to be picked up where if you know you're going to be gone for several months you would make arrangements for things like that. Hopefully someones at home to make sure that when they do land the phone still works, the house hasn't been sold for non payment of taxes, the dog has been walked, and someone is coming by to feed the cat. The unexpected can be hard on people.
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Elongated Muskrat was not so busy buying the US Government and trying to get a foothold in the UK, he might have been at SpaceX making sure that the schedules didn't slip (like he did with the Model 3)
but no. President Musk will decimate the US government and VP Trump will tank the Economy with the tariffs.
come on Elon give Trump the elbow. Do you want your legacy to go down in flames?
If...Boeing had not messed up Starliner, these astronauts wouldn't have been stranded in the first place!!
And why isn't Boeing rescuing them with another Starliner, instead leaving it up to a competitor? What, only one Starliner built so far with that massive budget?
NASA are culpable in this too, they shouldn't be sending up astronauts without a backup plan. More to the point, there is a backup plan and it's called Soyuz, and which is more or less permanently attached to the ISS, but for political reasons the US would probably only use that in an emergency.
It's called Crew Dragon and it's working perfectly as intended. They could, in a real emergency, bring all the US astronauts home on the current Crew Dragon on station, but it's not an emergency so there's no need. If they ONLY had Starliner, they would, indeed, be f**ked.
Jellied Eel, is that you?
Yes. No. Maybe. But the comment came from a registered account rather than an AC, so puzzled why you would think this.
But the politics are probably amusing The Putin, and probably also being used to poke fun at NASA, Boing, SpacX etc. The US could probably ask Russia to launch a Soyuz and Soyuz MS-26 already transferred crew to the ISS whilst the Boing crew remained stranded. One passenger on that flight being Don Pettit, who's added yet another mission patch and is someone I'd love to share a beer or 3 with.
But the optics of having Russia 'rescue' the Boing crew obviously wouldn't look good, and would undoubtedly be exploited by Russia. The geopolitics are kinda fun, eg if Russia, China, India all offered a lift home, whilst sitting back and laughing at the fiasco around the current US manned spaceflight program.
Russia couldn't easily rescue the Boeing crew. They're on a launch cadence of 2 Soyuz a year. You need fitted seat liners and another different kind of suit to fly on Soyuz. Both they and NASA (Dragon) launched in September - so I suppose it could have been them that went up with a crew of one, instead of NASA. However I suspect it's easier to make a suit, knowing someone's measurements, than it is to make a seat liner - which is probably done the same way racing seats are built. They're built using the driver as a mould. Smaller errors will make a suit uncomfortable, but you could end up with an awful lot of bruising from using a badly moulded seat-liner at high g forces.
SpaceX have spare Dragon capsules. They did a commercial flight in September, if it had been urgent I'm sure NASA could have bought that flight - I don't imagine a billionaire would grudge having his joyride delayed if there was a reason to have needed to bring them back. SpaceX are also doing another commercial launch in March - around the same time the new capsule comes on stream. It wouldn't surprise me if that flight couldn't be brought forward if NASA wanted to pay for it, and the commercial flight bumped until the new capsule is ready. Lots of things can be done with enough cash...
I wonder what the astronauts will get as a reward? Does an extra 8 months in space you weren't expecting count as reward enough? Or is your reward for being forced to do an unscheduled 8 months to be given priority for the next mission - given mission numnbers are limited and they have more astronauts wanting missions than they can easily use? I suspect there's quite a lot of astronauts thinking, "you lucky bastards!" Particularly as they got 8 months in space without having to ask permission from their families.
Chris Hadfield had to pay for all his fun in space with his wife getting to go off on a walking tour of the Himalayas? She wanted to do it while she was in space, but was disuaded by one of NASA's "death sims". A death sim is a meeting where they decide Chris has died on the ISS. And there's his crew, his wife a bunch of mission control people and a bunch of NASA management and PR people. And they game out what they'd do - what to do with the corpse in space? Do you fly home early? How do you tell the family? Anyway she decided that there would be too much chance of her familiy learning it from the news if she wasn't there to organise telling them - so as he was having fun time in space - she got to have fun time in the mountains after her got back. Seems fair enough...
Russia couldn't easily rescue the Boeing crew.
I wonder if NASA dared to ask?
Smaller errors will make a suit uncomfortable, but you could end up with an awful lot of bruising from using a badly moulded seat-liner at high g forces.
Ah! It's slava-man! So.. first I guess you'd have to define 'high g' given most of that would be experienced entering atmosphere, and then it's not exactly an express elevator to hell, baby. So 1g until the stop at the bottom. From a quick google, I found it to be around 3-4g, so roller coaster ride territory.
I'm also a bit dubious about any need to match seats to crew given the crew that goes up in any given capsule isn't the same as the crew that returns in it. Presumably there's compatibility/interoperability between suits & capsules for contingency or emergency situations. Then again, trying to make a seat liner using spray foam whilst onboard the ISS could be entertaining, and possibly rather messy.
Thank you for demonstrating your complete lack of knowledge on this subject too.
Soyuz re-entries have experienced up to a sustained 8G on several occasions, and a momentary 12G if the retro pack fails on ground contact. That requires a seat liner to prevent serious and potentially permanent life changing injuries. And no you cannot make it orbit with spray foam.
Russian capsules have no commonality or interoperability with western ones, for either docking adaptors or spacesuits. Spacesuits are not even compatible between SpaceX and Boeing capsules.
and a momentary 12G if the retro pack fails on ground contact. That requires a seat liner to prevent serious and potentially permanent life changing injuries.
So like I said, not the express elevator to hell. Not sure what you mean by 'sustained 8G' either. Sustained for how long? And yes, lithobraking will hurt. But there's a difference between seat cushioning and some kind of custom fitted cushion for every astronaut or cosmonaut.
Russian capsules have no commonality or interoperability with western ones, for either docking adaptors or spacesuits. Spacesuits are not even compatible between SpaceX and Boeing capsules.
Like I said.. Presumably there's compatibility/interoperability between suits & capsules for contingency or emergency situations
Which implied I didn't know, and I find a lack of compatibility rather suprising given NASA's normal resiliency and redundancy requirements. Seems strange that this would imply having to carry a lot of additional spares rather than standardising or having more commonality.
"using spray foam whilst onboard the ISS could be entertaining, and possibly rather messy."
You mix it in a bag so it doesn't go all over the place. "Insta-Pak". It's like putting packing peanuts in a bag and sealing that so they don't migrate or breakdown into every crevice of the thing you are shipping.
"SpaceX have spare Dragon capsules."
Yes and no. They might have spare cargo capsules, but would those have the hardware to build them out as crew capsules without having to make major modifications?
When I played hockey, I got a pair of CCM "vacutacks" (sp?) skates where a two part foam was used to fit the skates to my feet. If a custom fit seat liner is needed in a Soyuz craft, that could be a way to do it. It would be surprising if there hasn't been any thought to this sort of scenario.
Long duration stays are very taxing on the body so it might be too much toll on an astronaut and prevent them from being selected for further missions. They are also likely getting stuck with "George" jobs since they won't have trained to operate more complex experiments or have been scheduled in for them. Yes, things can be learned and schedules moved about, but.. .. .. how long will they be stuck and does it make sense?
"But the optics of having Russia 'rescue' the Boing crew obviously wouldn't look good, and would undoubtedly be exploited by Russia."
There's that, but I'm not seeing why SpaceX hasn't put a few more people on to build another crew Dragon capsule more quickly for a big PR push by bringing Butch and Sunny back in good time. Honestly, they should have had one well along in production when Boeing flew, just in case. If SpaceX has the time, money and people to play musical signs in Texas........
We apologize for the fault in the crew capsule. Those responsible have been sacked.
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We apologize again for the fault in the crew capsule. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
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The directors of the firm hired to continue the crew capsule after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.
The crew capsules have been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.
dump the lateral orbital velocity
The ISS is 450t and hurtling along at 7.67 km/sec so a lot of 1/2mv2 to casually dump. About 13 TJ :)
"What speed would you be doing once you hit the upper atmosphere?" at roughly 400 km above the earth's surface the value g isn't much smaller than than on the surface (9.8m/s2) so if you cannot integrate x-2 the speed can be approximately calculated from 1/2mv2 = mgh ie 1/2v2 = gh where h is the drop from 400 km to the start of the atmosphere (say 80km.)
So v = √2gh ... √(2×9.8×(400,000-80,000)) ~ 2.5 km/sec pretty ludicrous and the kinetic energy in TJs.
"How quickly would you slow down before you could open your parachute?" While I would defer to the crew of the Columbia, I suspect the answer is "not quickly enough."
Turns out Wolfram Alpha will plot speed of sound /altitude if you ask it.
Once you get into detectable levels of atmosphere at 400km to 200km sound barrier is pretty constant as 700m/s, so well supersonic but not hypersonic shockwavey, then smoothly decreases to 300m/s.
That Austrian idiot daredevil managed to get supersonic jumping from 40km. So you would want to have a fairly robust set of overalls on when you start hitting molecules at Mach 5
Interesting result is that at terminal velocity in a fluid you are at the same temperature as the fluid (cos it's thermal transfer that is slowing you down). Since the upper stratosphere is at the sort of temperatures that would make a Geordie put on a jumper, you probably also want to some thermal long-johns.
There were plans for inflatable personal re-entry shields, which would protect a suited astronaut from the high temperatures when aero braking down to speeds low enough to survive the declaration from deploying a drogue parachute. Quite how the astronaut would initiate the de-orbit delta-v without a substantial retro rocket, I'm not sure.
"or did they send 24 cans of lager"
Has anyone tried opening a can in micro-gravity yet? Shirley someone must've tried it on the vomit comet at the very least!
Big Clive sometimes does "will it carbonate" on his YouTube channel. The effort with Baileys Irish Cream was...erm...interesting :-)
Yes, carbonated cans in space. Bubbles didn't rise to the surface causing the drink to be over carbonated and astronauts reported the gas didn't settle in their stomachs very well leading to discomfort.
Has anyone tried opening a can in micro-gravity yet? Shirley someone must've tried it on the vomit comet at the very least!
Yes! And it was the Dutch, because they know the important things in life. I can't find the paper, but they found the CO2 bubbles remained suspended in a beer blob.. Which would then need to be drunk quickly or get a bit messy.
"Big Clive sometimes does "will it carbonate" on his YouTube channel. "
I haven't seen him do one of those in a while. Jagermeister was also interesting. Hmmm, I wonder if chicken soup will carbonate.... time to drop Clive an email.
On another note, just found MenditMark. Electronic repairs where Clive, Louis and Dave Jones make appearances in the comments. I can't think of a better endorsement for a tech channel.
the Starliner capsule returned to Earth with absolutely no issues whatsoever.
That doesn't seem to be factually correct - "The agency admitted that a new thruster had failed during its descent. The capsule also experienced a temporary blackout of Starliner’s guidance system during reentry".
"If you were going to get on a plane that had a 25% chance of crashing, would you still get on? What? no? Even if it was more likely not to crash?"
If you were going to descend in a capsule that has a 3% chance of not making it safely and something happens that turns that into a 3.5% chance, would you balk at taking the ride considering that you might be left with a massively extended stay and have a long recovery time once back? I'm pulling the numbers from nether regions, BTW, but it wasn't an issue of going from a 99% chance of good landing to a 75% chance.
The Starliner capsule was a semi-tested deathtrap and a complete piece of shit. Boeing bought space-tested thrusters then used them in an housing which they didn't bother to test - because it was fine. This caused them to overheat and the fucking fuel valves to partially melt! Hydrazine and Nitrogen Tetroxide are such lovely, safe chemicals...
I got the impression they actually weren't so worried about the fuel leaking and causing the spacecraft to explode. But they were worried about the number of thruster failures they had while flying to the ISS - because they already had one thruster that couldn't be used and they'd have problems restarting some of the their thrusters - and them also giving inaccurate thrust. Thus there was a possibilty of them undocking, starting their retrofire maneuvre - then having several thrusters fail stranding them in a lower orbit - unable to return to the ISS or to land. Then scrambling to get a rescue mission to them.
There's a bloody good reason NASA scrubbed that mission.
> ...the poor Boeing test pilots ...planned week-long mission into ...nine months.....
Considering some other recent Boeing flights, nine months alive in a can beats some alternatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/Boeing%27s%20737%20MAX%208%20Disasters_0.pdf
I don't think anyone who gets to be an astronaut (showing that they dreamed of it since they were little human larvae) will complain about getting mire actual time in space.
Imagine being sent on-site to Tokyo, paid, expense account on tap... and finding out your poor soul has to stay in Tokyo, with a full expense account, no questions asked, for 8 months.
Hell, I want to be stranded in space, with regular supply flights, the best window view in the Universe, and water blobs to drink.
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