Not so much Starship as Progress M-34 which ended up thumping Mir damaging both. Tough to protect the home turf if your incoming is out of control. Cheers –

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_M-34

If I recall Starliner had thruster issues in EFT-1 yet NASA took the word of Boeing they were corrected and put astronauts on EFT-2. And what problem did EFT-2 have? Thruster issues.

Nope. The X-37 was designed and built in Seal Beach by the guys that built the Space Shuttle. The F-47 is being designed and built in St. Louis by the guys that built the F-15 Eagle, F/A-18 Super Hornet, EA-18G Growler, X-45A Stingray, and X-45C Phantom Ray. There’s heritage from the X-36 Tailless Agility Fighter and the Bird of Prey in there as well.

Good thing, too. The X-37 Future-X had a troubled beginning. After contract award years and years went by without much progress. So little progress, in fact, that NASA dropped the contract. It wasn’t until the Air Force picked up the contract and turned it into the X-37B that the thing even flew.

Starliner has manual controls–so pilots would likely prefer that to full automation.

Titan/Gemini combos were hot rods…it has been said that Saturn IB/Apollo rides were like your Dad’s car.

But that’s what you want. Apollo could dock nose first and transfer through the nose.

I just hope this new F-47 NGAD deal has the same guys behind it as behind X-37… Phantom Works.

I would imagine so…

They first have to be able to be disconnected from the capsule and keep someone alive for at least an hour or so.
Second off they have to have, as mentioned, a way to tether from one ship to another. A simple rope could be used.
Does the suit have a ring to hook onto or will a harness have to be applied to attach the suit to the tether?

Does the capsule have an attachment point for the arm? Some way to keep the capsule close to and facing the station if it can not dock?

Could the ship have even made it close enough to the station?

This incident was far worse than they wanted anyone to know. It could have ended with two lost astronauts.

All because of an administration who wanted a win.

My thinking has been that the US Space Program rolled the big risk dice during the Apollo program, where it departed earth orbit and ranged significantly farther into space. I recommend the book: Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon by Mike Gray in this regard. Chapter 11 discusses the entire early safety factor and reliability discussion which set the mark for how the program was run.

Our discussion made me curious, so I used a modern tool, X’s Grok AI and asked the question: Which was the more risky US manned space program Gemini or Apollo?

I used the DeepSearch button and after 1,545 seconds it gave me about a 600 word relatively fact-based analysis for the answer of the above question. I will leave it to you to repeat if you are interested.

Thanks for the reply

I don’t thing NASA has any other EVA suits other that the near 50 year old suits from the shuttle era. I doubt they would even fit in Starliner. Other than SpaceX, the US, China, and Russia have any operational EVA suits?

Yes, the Enhanced EMU suits that NASA uses on ISS are so bulky that anyone wearing one could not fit through the docking hatch of a Dragon or a Starliner. When NASA brings one back for repair, or sends it back up again, they disassemble it and put it in a cargo ship. The only portal big enough to allow an astronaut to pass through wearing one is the Quest Joint Airlock on the US segment; or before it, the airlock that was typically installed on Shuttle orbiters.

Please do not misunderstand me as criticizing Gemini! It *was* well executed, and it accomplished *exactly* what NASA intended it to accomplish. And what it was intended to accomplish was absolutely necessary as a prerequisite of attempting Apollo. It is too undeservedly forgotten as a part of space history!

But there is no getting around the fact that those missions were *hugely* risky. And NASA knew they were. The technology was so immature, the rush of time was so great, and the urgency of the task compelled levels of risk acceptance that no space agency today would dream of taking. Gemini was trying to do so many things that had never been done before.

Something I feel the film did better than the book was illustrate NASA’s absolute desire to control the narrative. It is actually something they have done since the beginning.

I thought the fact that Andy Weir made NASA’s chief PR flack a major character, and that Ridley Scott kept that, too, might have been the the most forceful contact with actual lived reality for both works!

I don’t thing NASA has any other EVA suits other that the near 50 year old suits from the shuttle era. I doubt they would even fit in Starliner. Other than SpaceX, the US, China, and Russia have any operational EVA suits?

Why?

Gus Grissom in his book Gemini: A Personal Account of Man’s Venture into Space published in 1968 praised the Gemini system and said that he thought there were many uses that the two person capsule could be used for even after the initial program was over.

Interested in more info and details on your statement.

Something I feel the film did better than the book was illustrate NASA’s absolute desire to control the narrative. It is actually something they have done since the beginning.

I want to know the conversation regarding the decision to bring Star liner down empty. What were the arguments. Who said what. I doubt we will ever get that transparency.

In this case, I foolishly took NASA at its word last summer when it claimed Starliner was a safe lifeboat. They were lying however.

Interestingly, this question actually came up in the NSF forums at the time that happened (August 8). No one in the public really knew how bad the situation was at that point yet, of course, but perceptive peeps were already picking up on tensions in NASA’s claim.

One observer resolved it this way: “There is the question of why it is ok to use Starliner now as a lifeboat, but may not be ok to return to Earth normally. That was answered in the press conference: in a lifeboat situation, where clearly something serious and dangerous is happening with the ISS, NASA’s tolerance for risk is different to a normal return.” Going back to the presser recording and listening to what Stich was saying….I think this *probably* is the way we are meant to interpret what he said.
(Link: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.1300)

But this raises a new kind of concern: It seems misleading, and its seems like it’s meant to be misleading, even if it is carefully worded in such a way that no legal liability attaches. Because the missing term in this equation is just what NASA thought the level of risk now was. And from what Butch is saying, it sounds like that could have been shockingly high. Like, Gemini-level high, or maybe even worse. (No one died on Gemini, but those 10 missions were pretty arguably little short of playing Russian Roulette.) Only, a *shockingly* high LOC risk is still better than *certain* death, i.e., in a situation like catastrophic decompression of ISS, or an alien monster let loose aboard.

So maybe what we really have here is a sin of omission. If so, I think it’s worth asking why NASA managers did so. I think the idea, which was mooted over on X yesterday in Abhi Tripathi’s exchange with Eric Berger, is that NASA was, and still is, at great pains to support and protect Boeing. “Words spoken by NASA officials could really hurt a company and endanger future commercial efforts.” Eric pointed out what he thought was another example of this, when Bill Gerstenmeier stood strongly behind SpaceX after the loss of CRS-7 in 2015.
(Link: https://x.com/SpaceAbhi/status/1907482431353188606)

Of course, you and I might say that Boeing had exhausted the right to such public support by last August in a way that has never been true of SpaceX. But I suspect they’re probably onto a real motivation here.

Maybe we need Butch to unpack what he really means by “robust.”

Or, maybe his assessment has, uh, changed since then?

It’s not customary to have EVA suits on board any Commercial Crew flights. They’re very big and bulky; when NASA sends one up or brings one down, they always use a cargo vehicle.

I assume there’s some sort of contingency plan NASA has for a situation like that, where a crew vehicle is sitting disabled a short distance from the station. The astronauts would get into their pressure suits, and someone from the station scrambles into their EVA suits and comes out to EVA them over to ISS, as is (?), maybe using the Canadarm to help in the process. Needless to say, it would be a very high risk sort of option, only undertaken if the only alternative is imminent death for the astronauts.

Or maybe they have something better they’ve explored. I don’t know. But I have to think any last ditch rescue plan would be high risk.

Not sure if that’s PR talk or what.

https://archive.is/edMmV#selection-1245.0-1245.63

I have absolutely no idea what Wilmore or Williams have planned for the future, or what NASA has planned for them (if indeed anything at all yet). But I do know they are 62 and 59 respectively, which makes them, from what I can make out, older than every active astronauts in the corps except for Don Petit. They’ve also spent more time in space than any of the active astronauts. So, I don’t think we should be surprised if they’re thinking this mission was their final one.

Which doesn’t mean that it’s not also possible that they feel politically protected by the administration, too.

Can’t help but wonder how far along that decision was in his mind after the docking experience. The final decision took some time to become public after all the testing. Testing that was, and still is, designed to show the thrusters can work under certain parameters and/or with minimal redesign.

If they were making political decisions, how much of a say did the astronauts get? They technically have veto power.

From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA’s webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters.

Well, that was a lot worse than they were telling us. The astronauts themselves were holding back when questioned about it all, at least during the flight.

Flight rules are created for safety, so why would NASA waive the flight rules about loss of thrusters? Because not only did Wilmore think that the risk was greater to abort the docking maneuver than to continue it, even the NASA controllers thought so. What were they thinking, letting us believe that returning the astronauts in Starliner was an option? NASA had been a fairly open and trustworthy organization, with the Columbia disaster being an exception in which NASA didn’t even investigate the extent of the danger that they suspected, but hiding this amount of danger to Starliner allowed many of us to believe that Boeing had been screwed by the decision to return Wilmore and Williams on the Crew 9 mission rather than on Starliner.

If Starliner lost control over its six degrees of freedom, the astronauts were at risk of suffering a fate similar to the Starship 7 and 8 test flights. It is now clear that the Starliner service module needs an unmanned test flight after its redesign.

Robert wrote: “The proper action at that point would have been to get a new manned Dragon docked to ISS as quickly as possible. Doing that however would have disturbed the complex planned schedule of dockings at ISS.”

Making us feel as though the astronauts were safe was more important to NASA and the (lame duck) Biden administration than letting us know how bad the situation was. Thus, Elon Musk is correct. The decision to not send a dedicated Dragon was political.

More evidence that it was political:
https://spacenews.com/nelson-concerned-about-nasa-layoffs-and-other-changes/

Nelson also said he was unaware of any proposal that Elon Musk made to bring Williams and Wilmore back earlier. The SpaceX chief executive, also a closer adviser to President Trump, has stated several times that he proposed to the Biden administration an earlier return for the two astronauts only to be rejected. Musk, though, has not provided any details about that proposal or who in the White House rejected it.

“The White House, if they had been contacted, they would have contacted me,” Nelson said. “None of that occurred.”

If Nelson was not contacted, then NASA’s technical opinion was not part of the Whitehouse’s rejection of the idea. It was not a technical, scientific, or engineering decision.