As far as the last paragraph goes, I think the people you should be least concerned about are Williams and Wilmore, although I’m sure they’re very frustrated about not being able to complete their mission. They had additional maneuvers they were going to perform post-undocking, and now they will never get to do those.…

Oh, it would be so nice if they could do that. And if they could, Boeing would go for it in a heartbeat, actually. NASA would be ordering them to right now. Unfortunately, it’s not an option, for several reasons.

The lower pressure does indeed make it safer. What your lungs require (and what affects fire risk) is not the absolute pressure of the air but the partial pressure of the oxygen. At sea level, that’s roughly 5 PSI.  What you need to live, and what causes fire risk, really doesn’t change much depending on how much…

OK, that makes a lot more sense. Thank you! They’re just going closer to an Apollo capsule environment prior to the EVA.

45 hours???? At first, I didn’t think this was so crazy. I mean, this is how the Gemini and Apollo spacewalks were done. (Including the batshit crazy spacewalk during the transearth cruise to retrieve film canisters from the Apollo service module. I mean, intellectually, I know it was really no more deadly than any of…

Well, it’s not exactly SOP, since SOP is to avoid this situation if at all possible. NASA has tried very hard to avoid a shirtsleeves return for a long time. But I do agree that’s probably what they’ll have to resort to, since I believe the Dragon suits are custom fit.

That’s not the problem. The suits most definitely can fit through the hatch. The problem is they’re essentially useless on board Dragon, so there’s really no point bringing them out of Starliner at all. You might as well just go down in shirtsleeves, which is likely what they’ll have to do if they abandon Starliner. Th…

BTW, just a random factoid you might be interested: back when the Commercial Crew contracts were being competed, one of the long-shot contenders was United Space Alliance. They actually did submit a proposal to continue operating the Space Shuttles. The killer (other than the huge operating cost - the program cost…

Cynically, I do think you’re often right. DEI initiatives frequently exist primarily to be the equivalent of a company’s black friend. They’re great for reports, for marketing, for statements on websites, and so forth because they neatly lump all of the nice friendly “we care about people” stuff in one convenient…

WOW. I just wish I could say I was surprised that happened.

That might be a worthwhile thing to explore, although I’m not sure how feasible it is. I don’t have any detailed insight into either suit beyond what we can see in the pictures, but they do appears to be shaped a little differently — enough that there could possibly be couch fit issues, which could possibly lead to…

FYI: in this case, “they” is Futurism, not NASA or Boeing. And they do have a point. You get what you pay for.

They’re custom fit, apparently, just like the Sokol suits used on Soyuz.

You can’t just rebuild the Space Shuttles from blue prints. At this point, you wouldn’t even be able to pull them out of the museums and refly them. There are too many items in the supply chain that can no longer be manufactured. The effort would be gargantuan, and essentially equivalent to designing a new spacecraft.…

Correct. Neither Boeing nor SpaceX could have designed their spacecraft to use the other’s suits, given the way this is structured. That would have been true no matter who had won. (Note: the same circumstance exists with Soyuz, and existed with the Space Shuttle, so it’s a little puzzling that this is surprising any…

Given that fire departments are still addressing EV fires by putting huge amounts of water on them, I’d say the answer is clearly “not”.

His blog is awesome. It’s where I learned about the really wonderful book “Ignition!” that is a fantastic read. (Quoted in that piece, actually, and available both in print and as a free PDF on the Web.)

Well, you never know what can cause an inexhaustible fire....

We definitely are in need of new solutions for fighting these kinds of fires. Although this is not quite so nasty as chlorine trifluoride, this reminds me of the title of Derek Lowe’s fantastic piece on that chemical, “Sand Won’t Save You This Time”:

“Traditionally, Europe isn’t an ideal location for a rocket launch because of its distance from the equator.”