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Boeing's Starliner Now Has 5 Leaks While Parked Outside the ISS

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Re: Boeing's Starliner Now Has 5 Leaks While Parked Outside the ISS

#51

Post by ls612 »

hedora wrote: post #44
xeornet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those incidents have a total of zero percent relation to the aircraft being Boeing or its design. The CNN article is wrong, it was since found the seat move switch was pushed and interfered with flight controls. The 777 was severe turbulence. The death was a heart attack. Lol…

Regarding the turbulence, from Wikipedia: > The autopilot, being engaged, pitched the plane downwards to return to 37,000 feet (11,278 m). That was the strong negative G maneuver that broke the ceiling by crashing people into it. There was a second strong acceleration when it returned to the desired altitude. My reading of this is that most of the injuries were due to the autopilot’s reaction to the turbulence. Other…

The seat switch was accidentally jammed into the “seat forward” position which led to the pilot (who was strapped in) being physically forced into the controls, leading to a significant pitch down.

Re: Boeing's Starliner Now Has 5 Leaks While Parked Outside the ISS

#52

Post by nomel »

protocolture wrote: post #23
nomel wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. > While Starliner is docked, all the manifolds are closed per normal mission operations preventing helium loss from the tanks, > “We can handle this particular leak if that leak rate were to grow even up to 100 times,”

Its terrifying that the build quality is so poor due to the issues we have seen. The helium leak is obviously acceptable, but this thing is meant to return humans to the surface, can we trust that it wont have issues in other areas?

> can we trust that it wont have issues in other areas

We can trust it's not perfect. For this problem, operating at 1/100 the failure point probably shouldn't stir too many emotions. There's very little in your daily life operating at those types of margins, except maybe the ground you walk on.

Re: Boeing's Starliner Now Has 5 Leaks While Parked Outside the ISS

#53

Post by southernplaces7 »

WheatMillington wrote: post #13
OutOfHere wrote: post #11

What would one expect from a company that indirectly allegedly has its own employee murdered for speaking up in favor of basic safety. If they don't care about their own employees, and they don't care about hundreds of passengers, they sure as hell don't care about a few astronauts.

That's a big old "citation needed". As far as I'm aware that's a crackpot conspiracy theory - just because some fringe lunatic alleges something is enough to honestly decribe that something as "alleged".

After getting to know sequential incidents like the Marconi murders of the 1980's, which even today are often dismissed as being anything more than coincidence despite a lot of very weird details, I wouldn't entirely dismiss at least the possibility of Boeing being involved in his death.

Large companies are in certain ways like governments, by which different parts of them can be doing entirely different, even divergent things that aren't quite congruent with the benefit of the wider whole. In other words, often one hand doesn't know what the other is doing, even if the activity is batshit crazy and a bad idea, and this is sometimes by design.

Re: Boeing's Starliner Now Has 5 Leaks While Parked Outside the ISS

#54

Post by craftkiller »

tim333 wrote: post #39
craftkiller wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree its unlikely, but none of that makes murder less likely / more difficult. Two easy ways to do that: either shoot him and then lock him in the car, or coerce him into suicide via blackmail (threaten to kill his family, threaten to plant child pornography on his property)

The first one isn't easy - drag the body to the car in daylight in the hotel car park? How are you going to lock it with the fob inside? If I was a hitman I'd do something else. The second - if you assume it's on behalf of Boeing could easily backfire if he went to the press with the threats.

You don't drag the body, you shoot him while he is in his car. Then you lock the doors, shut them, and leave.

Re: Boeing's Starliner Now Has 5 Leaks While Parked Outside the ISS

#55

Post by CableNinja »

ethbr1 wrote: post #48
everforward wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a "leak" would cause decompression sickness. Decompression sickness is caused by bubbles forming when pressure decreases too quickly for the body to expel now-excess nitrogen. A slow, gradual decrease would provide plenty of time to expel excess nitrogen. A leak in a pressure vessel is basically how deep saturation divers re-acclimate to standard pressure, and they're making a much, much larger change i…

Also, this is helium from the propulsion system. >> Helium is used in the spacecraft’s thruster systems to allow the thrusters to fire without being combustible or toxic. I'm assuming it's used to backfill tanks as they're emptied?

Theres 2 use cases:

1) To keep the fuel/oxidizer pressurized and liquid (by pressure) as the tanks content empties.

2) for RCS thrust, as a cold gas thruster.

Re: Boeing's Starliner Now Has 5 Leaks While Parked Outside the ISS

#56

Post by fransje26 »

nomel wrote: post #50
fransje26 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your propulsion system is developing leaks as you go, and, for good measure, you are also loosing thrusters in critical flight phases, than yes, this is terrifying. What you have is a known failing system, with a very high probability of additional failure as soon as it is repressurised and it enters its next stress cycle. Which is normally when these things like to fail.

> What you have is a known failing system Absolutely not. Engineering in the real world doesn't work like this. You don't design for perfection. You have intentionally defined specs set to what can be intentionally accommodated in your design . In this case you literally have is a system operating at 1% of the value that can be accommodated. That is not a problem . Something undesirable happening does not necessarily…

Mmm.... No.

That's absolutely how it works in engineering. You build fail-safe systems when you can, if safe-life systems where you must.

There is no redundancy in the structural integrity of an aircraft wing. Once it falls off, everybody dies.

Similarly, there are little redundancy margins in a spacecraft propulsion system. You will plan for a thruster malfunction, but if you loose your entire control system in flight, or if you develop 5 different leaks in flight, than it's safe to say you have a failing system. At no point in the design phase were any of those failure modes deemed "acceptable".

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