this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
92 points (97.9% liked)
Spaceflight
732 readers
78 users here now
Your one-stop shop for spaceflight news and discussion.
All serious posts related to spaceflight are welcome! JAXA, ISRO, CNSA, Roscosmos, ULA, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity, Blue Origin, etc. (Arca and Pythom, if you must).
Other related space communities:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Related meme community:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
After repeated firings of the thruster it started behaving similar to the ones in orbit. Disassembling the thruster they found a teflon seal in the poppet valve that feeds the nitrogen tetroxide into the thruster had deformed and actually bulged out, disrupting the flow of oxidizer.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/nasa-nears-decision-on-what-to-do-with-boeings-troubled-starliner-spacecraft/
I wonder how predictable the thrust reduction is. I would have thought they could account for this in software, but maybe there's too much uncertainty. Or perhaps ground tests showed the seal can fail in dangerous ways.
they didn't even test the thrusters on the ground wtf
Why would you need to test things when you’re Boeing? You know what you’re doing!