Boeing's Starliner has 5 'small' helium leaks as astronauts' ISS mission is extended: NASA

abcnews.go.com

21 comments

well lets hope its still viable. they sure as fuck cant wait for another boeing ship.
- In the event it was deemed too compromised, how long would it take to get an emergency Dragon capsule up there?
  
  After this, the FAA should require Boeing to pay spacex to maintain a crew dragon rescue ready to launch at all times the starliner is on orbit.
  
  Honestly SpaceX probably has one on standby right now.
boy, those voice transmissions back to base informing of these leaks would be worth listening to.
Boeing and redundancy are like oil and water
- To be fair, regarding redundancy:
  The astronauts only need seven hours of "free-flight time" to perform the end-of-mission maneuvers and Starliner currently has enough helium for 70 hours of free-flight time, Boeing said.
  
  Boeing said
  Do we really trust them at this point? I mean, if true that's great, but they've lied before.
  
  Man I love nasa!
I mean, to be fair, I'd like to know more about the volume lost here.
For example people often struggle to imagine that the sun is losing 4.7 million tons every second. Or that ships constantly take on water they have to pump out. This is part of normal operation, and while the helium leaks here clearly are not, if built with a degree of redundancy in mind, certain loss rates are entirely acceptable.
Or not.
Depends on the volume involved. 😅
- Dosage makes the poison for sure.
I wanted to come in here and say something about helium being so small that a small leak would be very easy to miss but 5?
- Not to mention that they make helium leak detectors. I'm not an expert but I built a helium tight 60000psi system a couple weeks ago first try. Granted it didn't have to survive a trip on a rocket.
lol, I worked on a project at my company that sent a box with various instruments up to space sometime in February… but it’s waiting on something that’s on the Starliner before it can be unboxed and used, so now it’s just been sitting for 4 months and will continue to do so for god-knows-how-long

21 comments