Boeing’s on a streak...

We can keep it in the space realm, Orion isn't going that stellar, either.
But still better than Starliner.
 
finance.yahoo.com

US FAA requires inspections of Boeing 787 planes following mid-air dive

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday it would require inspections of Boeing 787 Dreamliners following an incident in March when a LATAM Airlines plane went into a sudden mid-air dive that injured more than 50 passengers. The FAA's airworthiness directive...
finance.yahoo.com finance.yahoo.com
 
AKiss20 said:
How is it possible that NASA didn’t mandate a single spacesuit design and common interface for the capsule? This seems like systems engineering 101
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Nothing about these craft is compatible with each other. And that's kind of the point. Should NASA have made SpaceX copy Boeing? Then all the astronauts would be screwed. I find it hard to believe that SpaceX won't come up with some less-custom suit solution. Elon will save them. I just hope Boeing has to pay his asking price.
 
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Lindberg said:
Nothing about these craft is compatible with each other. And that's kind of the point. Should NASA have made SpaceX copy Boeing? Then all the astronauts would be screwed. I find it hard to believe that SpaceX won't come up with some less-custom suit solution. Elon will save them. I just hope Boeing has to pay his asking price.
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kind of like a CCS to NACS adapter

lets hope he doesn't fire the team like he did with tesla.
 
How do you not design a compatible spacesuit? NASA, Boeing, they’re all incompetent.
 
I wonder if anyone should have maybe thought about some pros/cons of compatibility/commonality ... a la Apollo 13 (reality) and "The Martian" (a book).
 
We’re still in the VHS vs Betamax phase…the suit issue has been known at least around here forever…JSC community where I live…but yes this is a NASA failure in reality.
 
So I guess Elon will have to send up a couple of suits, too. And bill Boeing.
 
Lindberg said:
Nothing about these craft is compatible with each other. And that's kind of the point. Should NASA have made SpaceX copy Boeing? Then all the astronauts would be screwed. I find it hard to believe that SpaceX won't come up with some less-custom suit solution. Elon will save them. I just hope Boeing has to pay his asking price.
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I'm not a be EM fan, but I agree.

This whole thing reminds me of the Nevil Shute story "Slide Rule", where he describes the competing construction of a private sector and public sector airships, R100 and R101. With the caveat that it seems to me that if a company has been around too long, and worked on too many blank-check government projects, they become less efficient than even a wholly public sector project.

I see that in IT all the time. If you want to do something drastically less efficient than using civil service programmers, hire a bunch of fortune 100 contractors.

Soapbox down and sorry for the rant...
 
Has anyone seen or heard anything from a real NASA spokesperson confirming "incompatibility" and that this incompatibility absolutely rules out a ride home from SpaceX? I see and hear a lot of people making noise about it, but no one who actually knows.

Nauga,
and his personality cult
 
nauga said:
Has anyone seen or heard anything from a real NASA spokesperson confirming "incompatibility" and that this incompatibility absolutely rules out a ride home from SpaceX? I see and hear a lot of people making noise about it, but no one who actually knows.

Nauga,
and his personality cult
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I heard people who know taking about this a week ago. The connections aren't in the same place or of the same type.
 
Lindberg said:
I heard people who know taking about this a week ago. The connections aren't in the same place or of the same type.
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Which means that on the next SpaceX launch, which was going to send 2 astronauts instead of 4 to allow for the return of our castaways, they need to ship 2 compatible SpaceX suits. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that will delay the launch.
 
If SpaceX rescues the 2 stuck people, especially if they have to do some quick mods to get the suits linked up, they're going to look like heroes for a long, long time. I think they can do it - purely based on speculation and guess.
 
Prior to this article raising the alarm and causing much panic, I had read in several places that SpaceX will toss a couple of extra suits in the backseat of the Dragon for the Starliner crew.

Tragedy averted.
 
Half Fast said:
Which means that on the next SpaceX launch, which was going to send 2 astronauts instead of 4 to allow for the return of our castaways, they need to ship 2 compatible SpaceX suits. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that will delay the launch.
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or perhaps adapters?
 
Totally disgusting. Company needs dismantling. Start over.
Helium leak--->failed to understand it. Dispatch anyway. YHGBFSM
Crack in 787 fuselage tubes
Spar had to be beefed up
No SDR issued on the fuse plugs for the 737-800 -9 even theough they had examined the plugs on the -k and knew about it.

One of the weaknesses of our "too big to allow to fail" system is JUST THIS.
 
Just announced their sending Starliner home empty and Elon gets the save…
 
I forgot to mention no one ever noticed the Soyuz suits weren't compatible with the American version. Boeing and SpaceX are competitors (not equal by any means), and expecting them to collaborate on such a critical item is silly.
 
bbchien said:
Totally disgusting. Company needs dismantling. Start over.
Helium leak--->failed to understand it. Dispatch anyway. YHGBFSM
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The word I'm getting is that Boeing specified the helium valves be made from titanium, and the subcontractor substituted aluminum. This is a HUGE failure in the Systems Engineering process, which Boeing pioneered. Either the subcontractor swapped the material and no one caught it on a delivery inspection, or the subcontractor got the go-ahead from someone at Boeing who didn't understand the difference. Likely the latter, with the goal of cost savings.

As a retired Boeing Space Systems Engineer, I am offended by this past the point of articulation. Jesu Christe, why are these people NOT doing their jobs?

We had a successful small spacecraft program in the '90s, where we used commercially-available NiCd batteries from a certain manufacturer. The batteries were mostly used in radio-control toys. We beat the crap out of the batteries during testing to ensure they'd handle the mission. Quite successful; program had a design life of 18 months, and the vehicles were still operating ten years later. Most of the charge-management circuitry had fried, but the batteries just kept taking full-charge voltage and working normally through eclipse.

Got a contract for a follow-on, and ordered more batteries. Our lead power system guy, with 30+ years experience and well acquainted the ways of technological sin, repeated the original testing. The batteries were crap. They failed the PIND test.

What's the PIND test? Parts Impact Noise Detection. You shake them and try to hear if they rattle. The old batteries didn't rattle. The new ones did. Probably didn't make any difference to the owner of an RC car, but sure made a difference in LEO.

Researched them, and found that the company had farmed out production to a factory in a, ummm, "less technologically astute" country. We demanded product from the original factory, and things worked out.

Ron Wanttaja
 
3393RP said:
I forgot to mention no one ever noticed the Soyuz suits weren't compatible with the American version. Boeing and SpaceX are competitors (not equal by any means), and expecting them to collaborate on such a critical item is silly.
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It is absolutely not silly. NASA is basically the sole customer of this product, they absolutely can put interoperability requirements on the suit interface if they wanted.

It’s really no different from Boeing having a common interface for engine electrical systems on the 787. Both the GEnx and the RR Trent are required use that common interface despite being competing products and entirely different designs for the sake of interoperability and flexibility in changing engine types. NASA absolutely could mandate that the suit connection and associated suit vital systems interface be common across the two capsule and suit designs if they wanted.

The thing that is silly is comparing this situation to Soyuz, which was first designed in the 1960s and whose design has nothing to do with NASA. NASA paid Russia to shuttle their astronauts on pre-existing spacecraft. The Boeing and SpaceX crewed capsules were built from the ground up for the NASA CCP with no other real customers.
 
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Half Fast said:
Which means that on the next SpaceX launch, which was going to send 2 astronauts instead of 4 to allow for the return of our castaways, they need to ship 2 compatible SpaceX suits. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that will delay the launch.
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Supposedly the issue with that is that SpaceX suits are super custom fitted based on 3D models. I'm sure that can be overcome.
AKiss20 said:
It is absolutely not silly. NASA is the sole customer of this product, they absolutely can put interoperability requirements on the suit interface if they wanted.

It’s really no different from Boeing having a common interface for engine electrical systems on the 787. Both the GEnx and the RR Trent are required use that common interface despite being competing products and entirely different designs for the sake of interoperability and flexibility in changing engine types. NASA absolutely could mandate that the suit connection and vital systems be common across the two capsule and suit designs if they wanted.
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NASA is not remotely the sole customer.
 
Lindberg said:
NASA is not remotely the sole customer.
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I should have said they are a primary customer. They are a huge fraction of SpaceX’s launch revenue and just like Southwest can place demands on Boeing designing the 737 as the launch (no pun intended) customer despite not being the sole customer, NASA has enormous power if it chose to use it.
 
The REALLY concerning thing is that the board did not Fire CALHOUN immediately. Just the usual "we are committed to quality...."....er, yeah. So the problem is with the B.O.D. Once the cancer gets up that high, a company is not resurrectable. The only reason they took any sort of notice is 4 Airline CEOs went the to BOD and declared, "we will not purchase airplanes from that man."

Kinna like when secretary Snow shut the switch off at Lehman Bros (Sept 13, 2008). They had earlier that year, accepted loans from the treasury and they went out and leveraged it just the way they had b4 the loan.

"Pull the plug now, it'll hurt less...."
Don't bail out the banks....
 
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Specs were probably written during the time when NASA goal was Muslim Outreach…and nobody blinked an eye…NASA has been wandering for a while…
 
3393RP said:
Boeing and SpaceX are competitors (not equal by any means), and expecting them to collaborate on such a critical item is silly.
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But expecting NASA to insist on common interfaces for life-critical functions is NOT silly. The DOD often imposed requirements on us for open architectures and common standard interfaces. I don't blame either Boeing or SpaceX; this is NASA dumb-assery.

Look at it this way: both spacecraft have to have the same docking interface to work with the ISS. Why shouldn't both have to have the same spacesuit interface?
 
AKiss20 said:
It is absolutely not silly. NASA is basically the sole customer of this product, they absolutely can put interoperability requirements on the suit interface if they wanted.

It’s really no different from Boeing having a common interface for engine electrical systems on the 787. Both the GEnx and the RR Trent are required use that common interface despite being competing products and entirely different designs for the sake of interoperability and flexibility in changing engine types. NASA absolutely could mandate that the suit connection and associated suit vital systems interface be common across the two capsule and suit designs if they wanted.

The thing that is silly is comparing this situation to Soyuz, which was first designed in the 1960s and whose design has nothing to do with NASA. NASA paid Russia to shuttle their astronauts on pre-existing spacecraft. The Boeing and SpaceX crewed capsules were built from the ground up for the NASA CCP with no other real customers.
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But those interoperability requirements don't exist, do they? You're confusing a government standard with a free market competition. Expecting two different companies to corroborate on something when they're going head to head is what's silly.

My point about Soyuz was that dozens of American astronauts were ferried to the ISS in that craft in those suits, and commonality in the event of rescue operation was never raised as an issue AFAIK.
 
Warlock said:
Specs were probably written during the time when NASA goal was Muslim Outreach…and nobody blinked an eye…NASA has been wandering for a while…
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Doesn't sound like the specs were the problem. The problem was either the inability to monitor spec compliance by the subcontractor, or non-technical people rolling over and granting a variance without understanding the ramifications.

The subcontractor was not in a Muslim country.

We were partnered once with a startup that brought us in to provide technical expertise. The company did not award hardware subcontracts based on how well it met requirements, no even if they were the lowest cost. They were awarded based on politics; Company A in nation B got the contract because the startup needed nation B's support for international licensing. The startup bought solar arrays at 5X the price quoted by the lowest bidder, just to get the country's support. Few of the company's people had any aerospace background...they'd all come from the computer world.

I was lead systems engineer on the payload, with the bus provided by a third company. That third company was proven, and their people very professional.

Me and their lead systems engineer were at a meeting, hammering out the master Interface Control Document. Their guy was good, I enjoyed working with him, but we were both working hard to minimize the ICD's impact on our company's side.

The rep for the startup misunderstood this. He thought we were arguing out of personal animus. He called for a one hour break.

When we came back, the startup lead announced that HE had just written the ICD, and would we please sign it.

We ignored him and carried on.

Ron Wanttaja
 
3393RP said:
But those interoperability requirements don't exist, do they?
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That's the point, is that they should.
3393RP said:
My point about Soyuz was that dozens of American astronauts were ferried to the ISS in that craft in those suits, and commonality in the event of rescue operation was never raised as an issue AFAIK.
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Because only Soyuz and Crew Dragon have functioned as emergency rescue vehicles for the ISS. We were never going to leave a "spare" Shuttle up there.
 
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wanttaja said:
The word I'm getting is that Boeing specified the helium valves be made from titanium, and the subcontractor substituted aluminum. This is a HUGE failure in the Systems Engineering process, which Boeing pioneered...As a retired Boeing Space Systems Engineer, I am offended by this past the point of articulation. Jesu Christe, why are these people NOT doing their jobs?
Click to expand...

This ranks with the 737 MCAS disaster, where obviously nobody checked (or approved) the fundamental human and system requirements and likely pencil whipped the code sign-off on top of that. That cost more lives than I'd want to be responsible for.
 
Ron my post was about how NASA has lost its way…and focus…to worried about DEI and not on pure engineering and science…I am a child of the Apollo project and came to this country with my parents shortly after Kennedy’s Rice University speech as part of the brain drain. I grew up in the manned space flight community almost from the beginning.
 
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