NASA Insider on Boeing Starliner: 'No One Considered This'

NASA Insider on Boeing Starliner: "No One Considered This"
I spoke to an inside source at NASA for more perspective on the Boeing Starliner situation.

Here is the article from Boeing's website that I drew context from:

Thanks to Jamie Clay for writing the lyrics and giving me permission to sing to the parody song at the end

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[algi]

Nobody at NASA thought that autonomous control would be needed? Really? Okay, scenario one: the astronauts are incapacitated.

[dennyliegerot]

Starliner is autonomous as long as someone On Board "throws the switch", presses the button, enters their 4 digit pin, turns the key, hits "Return" on the keyboard,
installs the autonomous floppy into drive C, turns Starliner off then back on, hits the "space bar", clicks on the help icon, says or enters the last 4 digits of their social security number followed by the pound sign, downloads the troubleshooting manual, push the transporter levers forward while saying "energize". Wishing the astronauts a safe return home...

[jamesnewman]

I left NASA because after being sent to Boeing to help this mess, Boeing didn’t want us there. They were just trying to cover up what they were doing. Temporary workers everywhere and that was 2018.

[mjlttown]

It was just problem with semantics...when NASA said it was a "crewed mission", Boeing heard it as a "crude mission." 🤣

[erintyres]

11:08 When a Youtube creator starts singing like that, you know that Boeing has a PR problem....

[bobcousins]

Unfortunately, the problem with Boeing is not the CEO, but the bulk of middle management who are MBA types, don't really understand the engineering, and are willing to cut corners in desperate attempts to meet time and cost budgets. I bet there were engineers saying "hey, shouldn't we retain the autonomous control capability?", while a bunch of managers saying "if it is not strictly required by the customer, we can save time and money by not qualifying it".
Putts Law dominates the organization : "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."

[jtfyodr]

You forgot to mention the steady stream of dead Boeing Whistle blowers.

[vitaligent]

LOVED the song. You have a nice voice and very accurate pitch. Thank you for having me guts to post it without auto tuning it. The unmodified human voice is a beautiful thing.

[Rational_thinker_]

I worked space launch and range for Air Force from 1986 to 1998 as active duty, civil service and contractor. In my retirement I still like to keep up with things. You have become my go to source for quick, to the point info. Keep up the good work.

[ddiver]

I’m a Project Manager consultant. If I failed a project or delivered a failed project to a customer I’d be fired. How is Boeing even still in business? They can’t even make good airplanes let alone a space capsule.🤷

[TomCushwa]

Imagine how much weight they saved by not retaining the unmanned Starliner capsule software! That software must have been very very heavy!

[gannicusii]

Starliner failing is the most predictable thing to ever happen. Literally everyone was nervous about the flight and for good reason. Boeing is showing that the old standards and practices that made the 747 into the work horse it is, has fallen into the garbage.

[EVMANVSGAS]

That Boeing article would make more sense if it was posted on April 1 and not the 4th.

[RolandGustafsson]

As a software engineer, I have to consider everything that could possibly happen and address it. The less careful an engineer is, the more problems are overlooked. You would think they have the best of the best coding for these critical missions. For instance, a single individual wrote the code to land SpaceX boosters—that’s the kind of coder you need to vet everything.

[kenmccarty]

I hope you get 20k plus extra subscribers because of that last song in the final few minutes of the clip. That was good! Thx

[algi]

New challenge: any newly built spacecraft is required to have at least the same features as the Gemini.

[garyreed]

"It's better to have something and not need it than to need something and not have it".

[gptiede]

This software situation is very bizarre. I worked at NASA back in the Shuttle days and we had to plan for every situation that we could imagine, even ones that were ridiculously unlikely. Thinking Starliner may have to fly autonomously isn't unlikely at all. What if in an emergency station evacuation the people who evacuated on Starliner were injured and not capable of full operation. Or, gasp, what if Starliner had a failure that made it unsafe for the crew to return in it?

[captainbirdseye]

Wait, no one considered that a demo flight might have issues returning the crew home? Insane!

[bumpty]

Formed Boeing here. I appreciate this coverage.

If you want to protect the identity of anonymous informants, it takes more than omitting their name. The email you showed on screen is plenty for a NASA IT worker to search the email system and quickly ID the culprit for “handling” by management and HR. If you haven’t worked in security-sensitive areas, this takes some careful attention to do properly. Always be thinking “hows can I use the info Ellie published to track down the whistleblower.” Remember that whistleblowers sometimes turn up mysteriously dead, and that when they merely lose their careers it doesn’t make the news.