You gotta be fuckin kidding me. How could they launch this thing?
Because Boeing has evidently become a “safety third” sort of company over the last several decades
Better question is, why did NASA let them
Probably because they were contractually obligated. Nasa and Boeing entered into their agreement in 2019 when SpaceX was making headlines for reusable rockets and the Starship announcement. Boeing had FOMO they might miss out on government money so they made their own rockets with blackjack and hookers. Sadly, now Boeing is working hard to keep up while also trying to not kill more people with their “flying” machines.
They said after the first leak that it wasn’t an issue since they calculated that it would take 4 leaks of that size to disable the thruster system. Now they have 3.
I hope we didn’t assume the odds of each leak was an independent event. Same failure mode and maybe we have uncovered something systemic! Kind of scary
Since the cause of the first leak was a defective rubber seal, it would have made sense to replace all of them. I’m pretty sure they didn’t use different types of seals on each thruster port. But for that, they would have had to disassemble the spacecraft and that would have taken too long for the available launch windows.
It’s a good thing rubber seals have never caused any problems in spaceflight
At least the front didn’t fall off.
It’s truly out of the environment now, though.
Particularly embarrassing considering the incredible progress SpaceX is making, including today’s launch and successful splashdown of both starship and the booster. The entry was wild, too - one of the fins burned halfway off, but the damn thing still worked fine lol
Maybe they’ll put a Starliner in the cargo bay of the next Starship launch.
Lmao that would be goddamn priceless. Even if it was just an external mockup with ballast to simulate full mission mass of the capsule… Jesus, that would be an absolutely hilarious amount of shade for them to throw.
