Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will have to wait for another day to fly to the International Space Station in an orbital capsule that has already faced years of costly technical delays.

NASA astronauts will have to wait until another day to launch to orbit in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. The planned launch was called off Monday night because of a problem in the Atlas V rocket that was to send them to space.

Engineers will work through the night to assess whether the two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, can get back on the launchpad on Tuesday, or if repairs will be needed that could delay the flight by at least several days.

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    7 months ago

    Making your engineers work overnight is a great idea. The mind is super good at problem solving when it’s overworked and sleep deprived. What could possibly go wrong?

    Space exploration when it’s nationalised: Scientific breakthroughs. Learning about the very fabric of the universe, exploring new frontiers of nature and using the research to help invent life saving machines like MRIs, artificial hearts and insulin pumps.

    Space exploration when it’s privatized: Space tourism on piss leaking shuttles that barely work, but only for rich people to gawk at space and do nothing of value. No significant breakthroughs in space exploration.

    Yes, they made a reuseable rocket or some shit. I don’t care. Humanity built spaceships from the ground up over 70 fucking years ago using 50s/60s technology, Tesla/Boeing/Virgin has 70 years of research to build from and they’ve done dick all considering what they have to work with.

    I’m so glad we’re wasting our limited space fuel resources on this rich pissbaby dick waving shit.

    • Hexamerous [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      7 months ago

      Humanity built spaceships from the ground up over 70 fucking years ago

      And Soviets engineers did that with slide rulers and none of this super computer AI desgne bullshit. Russians are still using the same rockets to ferry stuff into space. It’s amazing how fucking incompetent these people are.

      Yes, they made a reusable rocket or some shit.

      I don’t think they even manage to do that. Those things Melon Husk is shooting up needs so much refurbishing that it’s pointless to call them “reusable”. Assuming they even manage to land and not blow up first.

      It’s all cooked.

      • Rx_Hawk [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        16·
        7 months ago

        Since June 2010, rockets from the Falcon 9 family have been launched 339 times, with 337 full mission successes, two failures…

        Falcon family boosters have successfully landed 303 times in 314 attempts. A total of 42 boosters have flown multiple missions, with a record of 20 missions by a booster.

        Reusable rockets have been a massive advancement in space flight, should just be operated by governmental agencies, not private companies.

        • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          Absolutely agreed. I think it’s possible to both loathe the jackass who owns SpaceX, and also to appreciate the top-tier R&D being done by all those engineers and scientists and technicians who are doing the real work there. They’re the people who just launched the most powerful rocket ever built to put the biggest spaceship ever built into near-orbit. (And the only reason they didn’t put Starship in a real orbit was to make absolutely certain it would never be a debris hazard even if they lost control.)