Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought
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This article is worth the read. Starliner was in an extremely precarious situation that we didn’t previously know about.
Boeing: “Uhh. Not sure why those thrusters failed, but let’s ship some astronauts.” 🧐 Seems like further mission testing with a planned vehicle recovery mission was necessary before sending up astronauts. I imagine the cost would’ve been great, but that’s aerospace. Every skipped check is likely to be paid for in lives lost.
And this is why, all those years ago, the Mercury and Apollo astronauts fought against a fully automatic ride without manual controls (which was NASA’s original design)