NASA has officially reclassified the Starliner CFT mission a Class A misshap (on the level of Challenger and Columbia Shuttle disasters) and says it will not fly until the the technical causes are corrected and investigation recces are implemented....
I give this update about a 95% chance that Boeing just straight up kills Starliner. I think its dead.
Quick summary kind of:
Anomalies:
- Loss of 6DOF control. Four recovered via in-situ troubleshooting. Likely cause = Two-phase oxidizer flow (vaporization/cavitation from thermal soakback, pulse demand, OMAC heating) + Teflon poppet extrusion restricting oxidizer flow.
- One thruster failed during descent, dropping the system to zero fault tolerance (a loss-of-crew scenario if the redundant path had failed). Likely Cause = Corrosion from carbazic acid formed by residual propellant + CO₂.
- 7 of 8 SM helium manifolds leaked. Likely cause = Seal material incompatibility with oxidizer (NTO degradation) + inadequate O-ring sizing/gland fill/squeeze tolerances.
- Propulsion system lacked required two-fault tolerance for deorbit burns (undetected for years).
Boeing demonstrated systemic qualification and testing shortfalls. RCS thrusters, valves, and seals were never properly qualified for actual flight environments. And prior anolmolies on previous test flights (10 thrusters failed on OFT1 and 3 failed on OFT2) were never fixed.
The funny thing is when the Commercial Crew awards were announced nobody thought SpaceX would be successful, and they all assumed Boeing would due to their history. And it's probably this exact thinking that allowed NASA and Boeing to not be as critical and get away with so much of their failures. And it led to NASA being FAR more critical and holding SpaceX to a higher standard, and basically letting Boeing get away with countless mistakes. So in a way this may have been good for SpaceX to have had NASA basically riding their asses, but they very clearly were getting treated much worse than Boeing who also received like $2B MORE than SpaceX... Also the fact is SpaceX had already had the Cargo contract so had years of experience already and just iterated on all that to go from a cargo capsule to crew capsule, while Boeing basically had to start from scratch. Secondly SpaceX is vertically integrated while Boeing relies on so many subcontractors. Full control and testing with rapid iteration and direct accountability and lower integration risks vs subcontractors and a complete lack of rigorous testing. It is actually crazy the methodology Boeing used for their testing tbh. NASAs report says SpaceX agressively root-caused and fixed any issues while Boeing didn't do flight-like duty cycles, and full integration effects and had " acceptance of unexplained anomalies without root cause resolution"!
futurism.com
