413 private links
The ground launch sequencer computer called a hold at T-minus 3 minutes, 50 seconds. //
Saturday's aborted countdown was the latest in a string of delays for Boeing's Starliner program. The spacecraft's first crew test flight is running seven years behind the schedule Boeing announced when NASA awarded the company a $4.2 billion contract for the crew capsule in 2014. Put another way, Boeing has arrived at this moment nine years after the company originally said the spacecraft could be operational, when the program was first announced in 2010. //
Crying Croc Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
8m
449
Matthew J. said:
The Boeing Curse...
The McDonnell Douglas Curse.
[Edit to correct]: Actually, it's just McDonnell. Douglas was once a proud airplane maker that sadly became an earlier victim of McD. Boeing is Victim 2.0. //
FabiusCunctator Ars Scholae Palatinae
4y
857
Subscriptor
OccasionallyLeftHanded said:
The term “kludge” comes to mind.
Or more like: “something that was originally designed back in the early days of the Delta program and kept going with bubble gum and baling wire for forty years.”
And I can understand this! The software’s been fully debugged and is well proven. Why change it if you don’t have to? //
Wandering Monk Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
4y
128
Subscriptor
There’s definitely something to be said for the general plan of, “get the system working while shipping cargo, and then add life support”. If these delays happened with a boring payload, it wouldn’t get nearly the attention. //
Lone Shepherd Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
24y
6,868
Subscriptor
All three computers must be fully functioning in the final phase of the countdown to ensure triple redundancy.
This sentence does not make sense. If all three must be functioning, then there is zero redundancy.
Triplex redundant systems are usually set up to enable majority (2 out of 3) voting to allow mission success while being robust to any single operational fault.
If this was actually a triple redundant system then fault of one computer would be detected by the other two and that unit would have been "voted out" and the launch would have proceeded. ///
But they have to be operational first. If all three aren't operational to begin with, then you don't have a triplex system, you've already lost one to a failure. //
The computers have to provide functionality in the event of a failure after launch commit. That is mission critical, and thats why they need fault tolerance.
Before that, a failure results in a hold/scrub, because it means the necessary failt tolerance wont be present after commit.
Holding/scrubbing isn't an option after commit. At that point the vehicle must go, and the GSE must work. //
ninjaneer Ars Praetorian
10y
540
Subscriptor
galahad05 said:
Wait, this is a joke right? Like a de-motivational poster or something?
He said it in 2004 and it resurfaced everywhere in 2020. The guy's still alive but likely has too much of a psychopathic ego to feel it bite him in the ass.
Ctrl-F "culture" in the Fortune article below and you'll spot it in action
https://fortune.com/longform/boeing-737-max-crisis-shareholder-first-culture/. //
Jharm Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
6y
125
ninjaneer said:
"When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm."
-- Harry Stonecipher
I couldn't believe he would have said so. But sure he did!
Hopefully other business will learn of these mistakes. Many articles (e.g.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/02/07/boeings-tragedy-the-fall-of-an-american-icon ) about what went wrong but so far those I have read have all in common that they slashed the R&D for short term gains and then they believed they could easily restart again. This happens when you have bean counters to run the company.
I am sitting in a company of 40.000 people, here we see the same going on. EBIT and cashflow before everything else. No training of new young talent, no visions, just reaction to the competition and not what the customer wants. //
Zylon Ars Scholae Palatinae
3y
838
Subscriptor
I haven't been to this particular facility, but I've crawled around under computer flooring and installed racks at several NASA facilities, and the idea that anything about them is jury-rigged is laughable. You don't truly understand the meaning of the word "nitpicky" until you've been through a NASA QC audit. I spent more time on documentation than I did installing the equipment!
These are stupendously complex systems, and shit happens. I had a timing system that had behaved perfectly during burn-in testing go nuts, and the automatic fail over, didn't. Even though we had tested fail over and fail back. It took the site down for an hour. So you learn from your mistakes, build in redundancy, and when only two of the three voting computers are online at T-4:00, you abort the launch.
Oh, and I wouldn't read too much into the phrase "boot up" when used by a manager, even one who used to be an engineer. Something wasn't ready when it was supposed to be. They'll figure it out. If it was a "network glitch", it will be in the Wireshark archiver. //
Is Boeing having an unusually high number of scrubbed launches? A normal amount? A low amount?
Compared to the Shuttle? Not so unusual. Compared to what we’ve become used to with SpaceX? A lot.