In the few years, they’ll be so many other alternatives that it’s just gonna be a matter of booking a flight to your destination…. We will be reminiscing about this in the future, how at one time we had astronauts seemingly “stranded” in space… just like the last episode of planet of the apes? there will be space operas performed on this scenario.

It’s worth remembering that Starliner CFT was not the first time that a crew faced a serious scenario of requiring a possible rescue on a space station. Setting aside rumors of various Soviet incidents, the mission I am thinking of was Skylab 3 in 1973. To quote Wikipedia:

“A rescue mission was considered when the Skylab 3 Command/Service Module (CSM) developed problems in its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters while docked to the station. On the ground, space vehicles were assembled to fly rescue missions in support of both Skylab 3 and Skylab 4. ”

One advantage of the early cancellation of the Apollo program was that NASA had a lot of completed, unused Apollo hardware sitting around, still available. They quickly modified one of the spare Apollo command modules, CSM 119, to have five seats, with the plan to fly two astronauts. Vance Brand and Don Lind, up on it to dock with Skylab and bring back the “stranded” Skylab 3 crew. In fact, a complete stack of a Saturn IB rocket, AS 208, with CSM 119 atop it, was assembled on LC-39B, ready to launch.

But it proved to be unnecessary: “While many within NASA believed that the rescue mission would occur, within hours of the failure of the second quad the agency canceled the rescue mission. Beyond NASA’s conclusion that the failed quads would not disable the Skylab 3 CSM and the SPS fuel was uncontaminated, Brand and Lind had already shown during their training as backup Skylab crewmen that a reentry with failed quads was safe. They also devised a method to deorbit with the command module’s attitude control system. Later joking that they were “very efficient but perfectly stupid, because we have literally worked ourselves out of the mission”, Brand and Lind continued to train for a rescue mission, as well as for their backup roles, but the Skylab 3 crew was able to complete its full 59-day mission on the station and safely return to Earth using the two functional RCS thruster quads,  using the SPS engine once instead of twice as precaution.”

As a postscript, there were also plans for a short 20-day “Skylab 5” flight, flying in April 1974, that would have used this backup CSM, with a likely crew consisting of Brand, Lind, and Skylab backup Science Pilot William B. Lenoir. But NASA ended up being able to do most of the research that Skylab 5 would have done by extending Skylab 4, and anyway, budgets were very tight and every spare dollar was being poured into Shuttle development, so CSM 119 and AS 209 ended up as museum and rocket garden exhibits instead.

Of course, in 1973, NASA had only one architecture for transporting crew to and from orbit; there wasn’t a second, more reliable crew vehicle to fall back on. In 2024, however, NASA actually did have such an option — and as we know, it used it.

Even though I use a different search engine each time I log on to get a fresh updated webpage, sometimes current comments are either missing, or it shows more comments posted than there are actually there when you click on it. A new form of shadow banning? or AI interference? I have friends telling me they’re having problems on other unrelated websites. I must shut off my phone, after deleting all the cookies/history to get things back to normal more frequently. Then I delete the cookies again just to make sure the forever cookies don’t reload? I don’t think it works either but I do it anyway.

Elon should have got an older one ready as fast as possible along with finishing the new one.

Having enough capsules to always have one ready in as short as possible time is always a good idea.

I don’t know. It may have been a mutual decision that unfolded in conversations between Steve Stick and SpaceX. But I am just speculating.

But…yes, it seems like it would have been safer to just go with Endurance from the outset.

““The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it,””

Let’s not forget the Boeing failure that put them in this position. (The decision not to trust the capsule was the correct one as evidence by the holes burned into the capsule on reentry.) it was fortunate that an alternative means of transportation became available at all.

Had the shoe bin on the other foot, and no dragon capsule available… How many years would it take to get a Boeing one ready to go? It wasn’t that long ago that we would be asking (begging) for a ride from the Russians!

In the few years, they’ll be so many other alternatives that it’s just gonna be a matter of booking a flight to your destination…. We will be reminiscing about this in the future, how at one time we had astronauts seemingly “stranded” in space… just like the last episode of planet of the apes? there will be space operas performed on this scenario.

Richard M: I had not known SpaceX’s original plans, which leaves one question: Who made the decision to push that new capsule’s debut up six months? Was it SpaceX? Or was it NASA?

It seems to me they could have done the Endurance swap months ago instead of now. That would have allowed the crew that includes the Starliner astronauts to have come home in February, as originally planned.

Everything in your post is true, of course, but it is worth reiterating (in defense of SpaceX!) that SpaceX was not originally planning to launch its new Dragon, C213, until Crew-11 in August 2025. Starliner’s problems caused Spacex to pick up the Crew-10 mission with C213, and they lost 6 months of preparation time.

From what I’ve heard, the C213 staff burned the midnight oil to speed things up, but they could only do so much, it seems. But Axiom-4 is not as urgent, time-wise, as Crew-10.