After weeks of troubleshooting, NASA and Boeing officials say they better understand the issues plaguing the Starliner spacecraft, but still aren’t ready to name a return date.
tl;dr
Heat building up inside the thrusters may be causing Teflon seals to bulge, restricting the flow of propellant.
Problem was Boeing was involved in its creation, clearly. Maybe if companies invested in retaining talent and not lining shareholder and ceo pockets they’d be able to create viable products.
Do you remember the Boeing CEO boasting about how the dragon was never going to get to the ISS first? Starliner had a head start in development, and they thought they were nearly ready. So he makes a post on Twitter saying they'd get there first. Musk replies "great, do it".
I miss the terse and sane Elon Musk. Somehow this crazy Musk is less fun.
Ding ding ding! When the investment is not in the best and brightest, and instead every corner is cut and every CEO validated with wealth, they get bottom barrel scraping and keep spiraling down. I knew as soon as I saw the company that it would be something incredibly stupid.
They forgot to check how tolerant the hypergolic thrusters were to heat…? The primary waste byproduct of chemical thrusters?
Jesus fuck. That is pants-on-head stupid. Boeing’s processes have clearly gone to seed. That is absolutely insane, and in this context, kind of indefensible.
"Hey, I'm paid to update quality assurance TPM reports. I'm not paid to wiggle metal bits. I don't tighten things." -me, if I lived in a hell dimension, i.e., in an office for Boeing.
48 days and counting, three days longer than Starliner’s initial 45 day limit set by NASA and 40 days longer than the initially planned mission return.
Thank you for the TLDR. Was there no time on the schedule, in the many, many, ~~~~many years of lead up and cashing NASA checks, when Boeing could have stress tested those seals to failure?
Depends on a lot of things. Most orgs will use published data for what they're choosing to use. More or less standard hardware is less likely to be sent to MR&D for testing