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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, that’s what we’ve been told.

    We were also told this wasn’t an issue to begin with, and issue after issue has happened. So, sorry if at this point I don’t take what Boeing says about their vehicles at face value.

    NASA is reliant on manufacturer info for a lot of things, and that is coming from Boeing. We now know for a fact that Boeing has falsified manufacturing and safety information for over a decade with nearly a dozen whistleblowers coming forwards on the airliner side of the business now, and more every day. If you honestly think that the spacecraft side was 100% insulated from that company culture, I’ve got some great stuff to sell you.

    They assume it can maneuver. They assumed it would dock correctly the first time, before there were multiple failures as well. The last time it moved was to dock with the station and multiple thrusters were inoperative and took quite a bit of time to get working again to dock in the first place. We don’t know that those will work without issue again. Those thrusters have already failed once while up there, failing again isn’t exactly unlikely.


  • Of course they’re not stranded. There are other capsules we can send up to bring them back down, regardless of Starliner’s status. I’d bet SpaceX is preparing a Crew Dragon in the background, regardless whether NASA has asked them to or not. A rescue Dragon ready to go to save Boeing astronauts would be a massive PR win.

    This helium leak that wasn’t an issue on the ground is becoming more and more hilarious to me (because no lives are at risk, just Boeing’s already shit reputation now). A small leak on the ground, no big deal. Even with the leak, it will last like 40+ days. Oh, now there’s 2 leaks… oh now it is 5 “small” leaks. As the days count down and it sits up there attached to the ISS.

    No one is saying it, but I honestly think they’re worried about whether they can even undock and maneuver the capsule away from the ISS safely and reliably. NASA for sure has teams working on all sorts of contingency plans. if it can’t maneuver on its own, either dealing with that airlock being useless for the rest of the Station’s life, and a dead capsule that cannot serve as a lifeboat being stuck there; or if there is a way to get the Canadarm to grab the capsule and chuck it back towards the planet out of the ISS sphere of influence. As hilarious as that would be to see, this super slow motion robotic arm grabbing the capsule and yeeting it back towards Earth. Unlikely scenario, but that’s the type of thing NASA does all the time, plan for as many scenarios as possible so there’s always another option available even if they seem ridiculous.






  • Oh yeah it’s on there 3 times. I’ve even tried to retrain them again several times since I got it. Just doesn’t like that finger for whatever reason. Can’t see any reason why looking at it, but it’s extremely annoying since it’s the most convenient finger.

    The screen sensor is also noticeably slower than the rear sensor from older models, and I do have more issues with other fingers occasionally. I much prefer the placement of the rear sensor as well. I rarely use the phone while it is sitting on the table, and was able to unlock the phone while still pulling it out of my pocket with the rear sensor since there was an actual physical spot for it you could feel, not just a specific spot on the glass.

    Easily the biggest step down for usability with the Pixels in my opinion.



  • While this article does a decent job explaining the differences, it again avoids pointing out the real apples to oranges here. The two programs are nothing alike.

    Starliner is akin to Crew Dragon. These were part of the same batch of contracts from NASA for a crew capsule that could reach the ISS and deliver payloads. Boeing was given nearly double the budget to make it happen compared to SpaceX ($4.2B vs $2.6B). Starliner is 8 years behind schedule and barely making their first crewed rendezvous now, while being over budget, meanwhile Crew Dragon has already made 13 crewed launches since 2020. It’s been past the testing and development phase and into regular operation for a while now.

    That’s the comparison that these articles should be making. Starship is an entirely different beast, with completely different goals. Starship is designed to go to Mars, not just Low Earth Orbit. The only reason they are being talked about together is because they are both being tested around the same time. SpaceX fulfilled their similar contract and has moved onto the next big thing after making it Crew Dragon a stable launch design, while Boeing is still working on replicating the capabilities of the Apollo capsule, just modern.









  • Stop trying to mimic meat products, it’s a losing battle and will always be inferior. Stop trying to fit foods into a meat “alternative” product that just sucks in comparison to the original, but you try to justify as being “almost the same”, it’s never even close. It’s easily the main reason so many people won’t even consider vegan options, they’re constantly being lied to and resent that.

    Embrace the ingredients and use them in ways that actually make sense. You don’t need to replace meat products for people to try an alternative diet, you just need to have other good options. Many vegan restaurants have absolutely delicious and filling food, it’s never the options that try to replace a burger though. It’s the foods designed from the ground up to be vegan and embracing what the ingredients actually are.

    Edit: What a surprise, down voted by the vegan brigade refusing to accept any sort of criticism that their replacements usually suck. Coming to defend poor imitations instead of just acknowledging that some foods don’t need to be replaced, and that attempting to do so just steers people away from alternatives entirely.

    I never said that alternatives weren’t good. In fact I said the exact opposite. That the alternatives need to be treated as their own thing, not a replacement for a meat product. But the knee jerk reaction to downvote anything perceives as anti-vegan is just too strong apparently. And you all wonder why people make fun of the vegan culture. It’s almost as bad as Linux fanboys or League of Legends players.


  • I don’t look at it as flack so much as just more justification that Starliner, and by extension Boeing, is a failed system and a direct indication of legacy space’s inability to compete with the new ideas and ways of development that companies like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Firefly, etc. are using now.

    Boeing talked a lot about how their design and testing processes were inherently better and safer than companies that work through iterative design (like SpaceX). They were given nearly twice the budget ($4.2B) of SpaceX ($2.6B) to develop a similar crewed capsule system. They were expected to have a system up the fastest since their delivery vehicles were already using tested processes and would be essentially coming from previous known effective designs with modern updates.

    Yet Starliner’s un-crewed test launches so far have had fundamental issues, including a launch that failed to dock to the ISS entirely, and the crewed launch attempts have all run into issues causing scrubs that realistically should have been caught before launch day. They are 6+ years behind schedule on getting a crew into orbit. Meanwhile, the SpaceX Crew Dragon has made 13 crewed flights already. It’s taken so long that at least one Starliner trained astronaut was taken from their program, cross-trained on Crew Dragon, and has visited the ISS already before Starliner has even launched their first crew.

    The flack isn’t about the scrub itself, everyone wants safety, it’s about really everything else in the program. This program just shouldn’t be having flight scrubs at this point for things other than weather. Especially not something ridiculous like this latest scrub, especially since the rocket it’s on is a well-tested mature design. It just makes them look incompetent at this point:

    The space agency said the launch was scrubbed “due to the computer ground launch sequencer not loading into the correct operational configuration after proceeding into terminal count.”
    United Launch Alliance, which manufactures and operates the rockets that launch the spacecraft into orbit, “is working to understand the cause,” NASA added.