I am curious to see if Boeing puts Starliner through any extra maneuvers after leaving the ISS’s safety zone in order to better validate what they believed was a mitigation process, or whether they’ll play it safe and just head for a straightforward return. In any case, tomorrow’s sure going to be an interesting day…

The writers here aren’t journalists. This is a blog.

Except it’s nothing like that, because people’s lives are actually at risk here.

It’s newsworthy because 1) Boeing has been fucking up constantly lately and 2) because there are astronauts who are literally stranded up there as a direct result of Boeing’s fuckups.

Where would you like your “missing the point” award delivered? ;-)

“My proposal is to remove the center display and replace it with a passenger display.”

Oh, that’s absolutely why, it’s just it’s like some of the celebrity news about {enter celebrity name here} doing something otherwise boring, like getting their tires rotated or whatever, only when it’s celebrity gossip, we all know enough to understand that’s basic everyday boring normal stuff. With spacecraft stuff,…

There is an old engineering dictum:

NASA already released the explanation: it was feedback on the inter-spacecraft communications channel connecting all the spacecraft up there. Noises like that do crop up from time to time on various spacecraft connected into the audio loop, because there are a lot of different spacecraft and other equipment up there.…

If a smartphone screen isn’t optimal for a passenger to choose a song to listen to, or read the next direction on a navigator (your own examples of things a passenger would use their screen for), then they probably need to visit an optometrist — and if you’re suggesting that automakers are intending to provide…

He’s got Gwynne Shotwell keeping SpaceX in order. At Twitter, of course, he’s the sole head honcho, so we get to see the absolute unvarnished pinnacle of his business acumen at work there.

Of all of those things, about the only one that isn’t entirely duplicated by the smartphone the passenger almost certainly already has and is using, is the passenger side environmental controls. And those have existed in many cars for about twenty years, even without touchscreens. I don’t see those even needing the…

If any of those kid’s phones had GPS tracker apps, there will even be easily reviewed data for a subsequent lawsuit.....

I am jealous. We do not have A/C on our school buses here. But this is Minnesota, and for most of the school year it’s not a big deal. Heaters, on the other hand, those are mandatory.

On a slightly related note, Randall Munroe brings us his take on the situation today, and his XKCD perspective is, of course, a little different....

EVAs without detailed rehearsals in the NBL are actually pretty common nowadays. That’s mostly down to the nature of Station operations. They’re no longer assembling it, carrying out complex, highly orchestrated operations on a tight timetable. Instead, they’re in a maintenance mode, so while some EVAs are expected…

Yeah, that chestnut gets trotted out a lot. It’s risky, to be sure, but not as risky as people think. It’s not “instant DEATH!!!!” It’s mostly an elevated cancer risk.

Two Starliner missions (OFT-1 and OFT-2) have already survived reentry; I don’t see any new reason to worry about that part.

Extra bonus!

It’s broadly like removing the transmission from a Waymo, putting the parts into the Waymo’s passenger seat, and then asking it to drive to the nearest service station to find out what’s wrong. While Starliner has a lot of redundancy in the thrusters, the system is all interconnected. I doubt you could remove the…