Because it responded to ATC and belatedly began its turn, demonstrating it was just an idiot pilot who forgot he was supposed to follow the Potomac and not a terrorist. “Shoot first” is not actually the first choice, especially when this would result in a huge ball of flaming wreckage falling on our nation’s capitol…

Supposedly, any airline (including charter) filing plans to go into DCA has to provide evidence the pilots who’ll be operating the flight have done the official training for flying out of DCA. It’s apparently an online course. (I am not remotely a pilot, but this is what I’ve read in comment threads elsewhere from…

Well, it could be reassuring that the original problem didn’t happen again. It could be that this is a byproduct of whatver their workaround is. Seems more likely to me that it’s unrelated. Of course, failures can happen on any mission, and that’s why extra margin is always provided. If that was the only thing that…

Well, the ports aren’t proprietary; quite the opposite. It’s just that the IDAs are the only ones the crewed vehicles can use. Dragon originally used the CBMs. Today, only one visiting spacecraft can use the CBMs. (Well, two, if Japan ever flies another HTV.) The biggest drawback to the CBMs is that you cannot dock to…

Not exactly. Dragon 1.0 is a substantially different vehicle from the current Dragon vehicle. It has the same name and a similar shape, but SpaceX made huge changes for the Commercial Crew program. In the interest of saving cost, they decided to abandon the original cargo Dragon, and now are basically flying the cargo…

Excellent!  Make his behavior expensive enough that people think twice!

The DoD wouldn’t audit this, since it’s a civilian contract, but the GAO certainly could. That said, I would be surprised if they found anything reportable. Being expensive and doing a bad job aren’t the same as being fraudulent. Not that Boeing doesn’t have experience of the latter; the early 2000s were an . . .…

Starliner is ostensibly a candidate for crew access to the Orbital Reef station, but in all honesty, Orbital Reef is notional at best.  Given how expensive space stations are, I’ll believe it when it launches.

This doesn’t seem to be a problem of bad thruster design. It behaves just fine on test stands. It’s inside the doghouse that it overheats. So it’s a system-level issue, and that makes one question the quality of system-level testing.

FYI, “thrusters” is inaccurate. They only had one thruster fail to ignite, and none shut down prematurely this time.  Maybe this validates Boeing’s workaround to the overheating problem; maybe not. What’s interesting (and what your article failed to mention) is that this one is a different type of thruster than the…

They were awarded what they bid. That’s basically how it works in government contracting. It’s a lot like hiring a company to fix your roof or redo your kitchen; they put in a bid, and if you hire them, that’s how much they’re going to charge you for the work. If you get bids from two companies, you’ll get two…

Very early — that episode might even have been recorded before he was named CEO. (It was the same year, anyway.)

That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better.

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.