I remember that episode. What stood out in my mind the most was how much Clarkson raved about the car’s acceleration. The impression he left us with was “this’ll be super awesome once the charging infrastructure is in place, also you probably shouldn’t floor it everywhere you go, but that’s true anyway, and damn, it…

FYI: my gen 1 Prius had the same warning. I’m an enthusiastic Cybertruck hater, but this is not a problem unique to Cybertrucks. It’s a well-known problem widespread across electric and hybrid vehicles.

Somewhat of an update if anyone else is curious — it seems they did test out their mitigation solution at least to some extent. It may have been successful, since although temperatures did rise in the doghouses, none of the bipropellant thrusters shut down unexpectedly. They did have a single monopropellant thruster…

Undocking was completed successfully; I’m watching the return now. They’ve already jettisoned the service module, so the thrusters are no longer an issue — they are literally no longer a problem for the spacecraft, and it’s committed to its return. I’m also watching the aircraft tracking the return on ADS-B Exchange.…

The helium leaks are indeed a separate problem, but sort of related since it’s also to do with the propulsion system. And yeah, space travel is complicated. Just wait’ll you try to grok orbital mechanics. Makes my head spin. ;-)

No. Helium is only used to pressurize the propulsion system; AFAIK, they don’t use cold gas thrusters at all, and in any case, helium puffs would be way too wimpy for a deorbit - they need something with a lot more oomph. The burns are done using a bipropellant system that uses the ever popular mixture of hydrazine…

The capsule, Calypso, is indeed intended to be reused. This is in fact its second trip to space; it flew the OFT-1 mission. If it’s any consolation, however, the parts that are having problems are on the service module. That part isn’t going to be reused; in fact, that part won’t even survive reentry.

Yikes!  Now that’s a terrifying thought.  Very good thing no one was swimming below when his truck took a dive.

They used to have a division that built hydrofoil ferries and boats, but I don’t think they’ve built any since about the ‘80s. More recently, they’ve been building undersea drones, but as far as I know, that’s the closest they’ve gotten to shipbuilding in the 21st Century.

That was very kind of you to say. ;-) Well, I’ll add something else, then. If you’re interested to see what happens when Starliner leaves (and I’m sure a lot of us are VERY curious to see what happens, with curious perhaps being an understatement), the livestream on NASA TV will start at 5:45 EDT tonight.

You can’t have a character in a life-altering theme-setting car ride, it just doesn’t work.

That looks absolutely nuts, but I kind of want to see it go for real. :-)

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: