SpaceX Tapped to Bring Astronauts Home If Boeing Craft Unfit

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-07/nasa-taps-spacex-to-take-astronauts-home-if-boeing-craft-unfit

13 Comments

  1. The 8 day flight certification mission could potentially turn into an 8 month tour.

  2. Ah yes, as opposed to… tossing them out the airlock? Making them live there forever?

  3. There is more than enough doubt for weeks now that we left them up there and we continue to do so, then it’s time to cut the Boeing umbilical cord and send a dragon capsule to bring them home. We don’t need another Columbia.

  4. death_by_chocolate on

    I looked for a straight answer for this but came up short: Can they bring Starliner back remotely or with some kind of autopilot? I see that they’re keeping an option open but I’m not grasping why you would even think about using a re-entry vehicle that wasn’t 100% with a crew if you really didn’t need to?

  5. kungfoojesus on

    Space x is such an impressive company to me. The head sucks but they have revolutionized space and cut costs with ridiculous reliability. Somehow keeping so much of the typical bloat away from their costs and rockets. Annihilating Boeing and Amazon and even NaSA the way they did. I am such a fan of the my nerd bros there. It’s so impressive.

  6. leftoverinspiration on

    Do we have a root cause yet? If the helium thing turns out to be “aggressive competition”, maybe we are reinforcing the wrong behavior.

  7. While trivial compared to safety issues, I do wonder something. How does astronaut pay work? Are the two stranded astronauts being paid for all their extra time up there?

  8. Just have Boeing pay spacex for the mission! Not that I like giving money to Elon musk but this is the only way to do it in a timely matter.

  9. This is only contingency planning. Just because there’s a plan doesn’t mean they will use it. I kind of assumed they’d already have this kind of plan in place in case of issues anyway.