Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 372 posts

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#111

Post by charles_f »

dotnet00 wrote: post #3

Man the reporting on this ordeal has been so awful and so representative of how media misleads the public into thinking things are worse than they actually are. It isn't a rescue mission, it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications to account for the extra crew left on the station, and those crew are 'stuck' only in the sense that they're expected to stay there as part of their duties and it would be unne…

Calling it rescue or not doesn't matter. The primary objective was test flight for Starliner. Mission is a success, in that it proved Starliner is not safe. Now they're coming down using Dragon, which is the very expensive backup plan, and which is absolutely not what was planned.

Whether you want to call it a rescue or not and play semantics or metaphors all night is your absolute right, but it doesn't change the failure of Starliner in this case.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#112

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dotnet00 wrote: post #106
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications Standard but modified is an oxymoron. This is an irregular mission. NASA plans with tonnes of redundancy. That’s paying off here. Being prepared doesn’t poof away a fuck-up, it just means you can take it in stride. Starliner stranded two astronauts in space. Dragon is fixing that. Being saved from being stranded sure as hell sounds like being rescued, even if…

>This is a threshold met by a torn parachute on a jet. Not when it was the preferred option over sticking seats in Crew-8, right up until Starliner's software changes for uncrewed return started.

> when it was the preferred option over sticking seats in Crew-8

It was the preferred option before it failed. Between first failure and return it was not the preferred option as it was. It was preferred assuming it worked. But the assumption couldn’t be proven, in part due to Boeing’s shoddy ground sims.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#113

Post by mensetmanusman »

dotnet00 wrote: post #3

Man the reporting on this ordeal has been so awful and so representative of how media misleads the public into thinking things are worse than they actually are. It isn't a rescue mission, it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications to account for the extra crew left on the station, and those crew are 'stuck' only in the sense that they're expected to stay there as part of their duties and it would be unne…

If your car dies at night in the middle of a desert. Is the tow truck rescuing you?

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#114

Post by lupusreal »

dotnet00 wrote: post #96
sneak wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could also pay Russia to bring them back to Kazakhstan on a Soyuz. Another American ISS astronaut, Tracy Dyson, came back in this manner last Monday.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#115

Post by JumpCrisscross »

gpm wrote: post #107
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> normal and expected crew rotation, they just kicked a few people off the mission so that there would be open seats That’s neither normal nor expected! Go back to the age of exploration. A crew’s ship strands them on an island. Another ship was due to come anyway in 6 weeks, and the crew have enough food to last them that interval. They use witches to tell the coming crew of their problems, and that ship agrees to l…

Is it a rescue? Maybe. Is it a rescue mission ? No. It's a normal crew rotation mission that has happened to (arguably) rescue a few people on the way. The mission itself is ordinary, expected, and planned prior to any crisis. Arguable because everyone has a way back already, the modification to the crew rotation mission just provides a somewhat safer way back. Edit: And the distinction here matters. A rescue mission…

> Is it a rescue mission? No. It's a normal crew rotation mission that has happened to (arguably) rescue a few people on the way

I like this.

Nit: it’s not a normal mission. Normal missions don’t leave two seats for folks trained on a different spacecraft. It’s a scheduled mission.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#116

Post by hindsightbias »

mannyv wrote: post #56
dotnet00 wrote: post #3

Man the reporting on this ordeal has been so awful and so representative of how media misleads the public into thinking things are worse than they actually are. It isn't a rescue mission, it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications to account for the extra crew left on the station, and those crew are 'stuck' only in the sense that they're expected to stay there as part of their duties and it would be unne…

Well hmm. NASA decided Starliner wasn't safe enough to use for the return journey, so the astronauts stayed on the ISS until the next ride became available. Originally the astronauts were supposed to go back on Starliner. Now they're taking another ride back. Is that considered a rescue? Well, it depends. If you get left behind on an island because your ride wasn't safe and another boat picks you up, is that a rescue…

What if NASAs decision was largely influenced by social media hysteria and not objective engineering?

Of course NASA would never give into outside pressures - cough, Challenger, cough. And what I read on the internets is so massively factual.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#117

Post by colordrops »

iterance wrote: post #73
mannyv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well hmm. NASA decided Starliner wasn't safe enough to use for the return journey, so the astronauts stayed on the ISS until the next ride became available. Originally the astronauts were supposed to go back on Starliner. Now they're taking another ride back. Is that considered a rescue? Well, it depends. If you get left behind on an island because your ride wasn't safe and another boat picks you up, is that a rescue…

Following the analogy... you're on an island. A ferry has showed up at the island every six months or so for the last 40 years. The last ferry that showed up broke before it could leave the harbor. No need to worry, though. Another ferry's coming in six months and there are plenty of supplies on the island. Is it rescue? Maybe in the sense that you can't leave when you wanted to and now you have to wait. But not in t…

It sounds like everyone in this thread is in complete agreement about the complex parameters and details and yet we are arguing on the scope of the label.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#118

Post by JumpCrisscross »

karlgkk wrote: post #108
Dylan16807 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you took a different boat separate from the normal ferry, intending to leave right away but now stuck unable to use it, I would say the next ferry is rescuing you.

No? Because if you’re not in danger, you’re not being rescued. You’re just being transported. If I miss the last train across the bay, my uber isn’t rescuing me. I can always stay up to 5am by making a shady deal at the endup. But yeah, this is a black eye on boeing and definitely something that nobody wants to have to deal with.

> if you’re not in danger, you’re not being rescued. You’re just being transported

The ISS isn’t Treasure Island. There is always an elevated degree of peril. Particularly in an emergency condition.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#119

Post by JumpCrisscross »

colordrops wrote: post #117
iterance wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following the analogy... you're on an island. A ferry has showed up at the island every six months or so for the last 40 years. The last ferry that showed up broke before it could leave the harbor. No need to worry, though. Another ferry's coming in six months and there are plenty of supplies on the island. Is it rescue? Maybe in the sense that you can't leave when you wanted to and now you have to wait. But not in t…

It sounds like everyone in this thread is in complete agreement about the complex parameters and details and yet we are arguing on the scope of the label.

> yet we are arguing on the scope of the label

It’s Saturday, can’t we have a semantic punt?

Post reply on HN