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

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

#131

Post by justin66 »

ls612 wrote: post #63
justin66 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird way of looking at it. Was Roscosmos “America’s space program” when they were selling the rides?

Currently SpaceX makes up 90% of global launch mass in the past year. It may as well be the western world’s space program pretty soon, with China and Russia only launching their own military payloads.

What I was really driving at was that some are using the wrong definition of "space program." It's a good thing that space transportation is becoming a reliable service or utility, but that's something quite different than being the space program. If we came to think of launch as a very large part of what constitutes a space program, that's only because we allowed the costs of launch to become entirely too high, such that it dominated budgets.

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

#132

Post by ethbr1 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #74
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…

> 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…

> Starliner stranded two astronauts in space.

It didn't, because it wasn't simply broken -- it had unexpected behavior. It ended up landing fine.

I'm uncomfortable heaping pejoratives on what we should expect NASA to do: make engineering decisions to minimize risk and maximize chance of mission success.

Increasing the reputational or financial penalties to suppliers incentivizes exactly the sort of decisions that blew up Challenger and Columbia.

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

#133

Post by nick3443 »

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 stay until 5am at the endup, you'll probably have to get rescued anyway.

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

#134

Post by ethbr1 »

charles_f wrote: post #111
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 fa…

>> "If we'd have had a crew on board the spacecraft, we would have followed the same back away sequence from the space station, the same deorbit burn and executed the same entry. And so it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/astronauts-would-h...

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

#135

Post by nick3443 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #129
gwbas1c wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that a rescue? Well, was there an accident? It seems like the astronauts staying extra long is to avoid an accident. Does their need to be an accident to call it a rescue?

There was not, considering Starliner landed safely about a month ago. NASA was uncomfortable with the amount of risk in a new vehicle exhibiting anomalous behavior, for its first crewed re-entry. The headline here should be: "US glad to have two separate suppliers for crewed transport"

Three, if you are willing to count Soyuz. Are we still using Soyuz?

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

#136

Post by ascorbic »

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 a rescue may or may not be accurate, but the replies to your comment show that it is at least open to discussion by people who presumably don't have a vested interest in the number of clicks on the article. That would mean that it's not really clickbait to call it this.

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

#137

Post by nick3443 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #134
charles_f wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

>> "If we'd have had a crew on board the spacecraft, we would have followed the same back away sequence from the space station, the same deorbit burn and executed the same entry. And so it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/astronauts-would-h...

Russian roulette is safe! I played once and didn't die!

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

#138

Post by rig666 »

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…

Let's be honest. The mental gymnastics to avoid calling it a rescue is just a political knee jerk reaction to Elon Musk's ownership in SpaceX.

If you lose your ability to become objective based on your view no amount of philosophical discourse is going to be meaningful. It's comments like this why "cope & seeth" has flourished in the modern lexicon

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

#139

Post by skissane »

dotnet00 wrote: post #125
lupusreal wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

NASA still gives Roscosmos money, in exchange for Roscosmos doing ISS-related stuff for NASA. NASA has a contract with Roscosmos for "joint spaceflight activities" which does not expire until the end of this year. I don't know if it can be extended past this year or not, but since the contract dates to 1993, I suspect they will continue to extend it year-by-year until the ISS program is terminated.

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_NAS1510110_8000_-...

So far this year NASA has executed 7 contract modifications (from February through September), under which it has paid Roscosmos an additional US$2.6 million. While that's not a huge amount of money, it doesn't look like there is a hard prohibition on NASA paying Roscosmos for services.

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

#140

Post by aylmao »

chasd00 wrote: post #22
Seattle3503 wrote: post #12

> By the time they return, the pair will have logged more than eight months in space. They expected to be gone just a week when they signed up for Boeing’s first astronaut flight that launched in June. What kind of overtime do you think they are clocking?

Heh I’d hate to be their families too. Sometimes I travel for work, if a week turned into 8 months it would be mayhem.

The return flight will be in February too— they'll be missing thanksgiving, and all the winter holidays oof
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