could somebody ELI5 what is happening to this program? delays after delays, and now they might need to send another spacecraft to bring people back. It will be hilarious if that turns out to be a SpaceX Dragon.
Everybody involved with the NASA manned space program seems to only care about their slice of The Budget nowadays, with actual mission requirements being a distant second priority. This results in a patchwork of bad design decisions and a weird mix of obsolete and yet-to-be developed technologies. This further results in endless delays and extremely low launch volume, which means you basically learn operations anew for every launch, and achieving anything resembling reliability becomes essentially impossible. Which brings us to this situation, where the Starliner was given the go-ahead out of budgetary desperation, despite having many known reliability problems. For a longer and more colorful version of this argument with sources, see [1].
Given both recent-ish issues at Roscosmos, and the relatively-famous Columbia rescue plan - https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue... - I wonder if SpaceX has a quiet "we will always be capable of launching an extra Crew Dragon within X days" operating rule. That'd cost money...but have enormous appeal to both the spacefans in the trenches and the Chief Ego Officer.
I'm not an expert in this field but I feel like the key is to make Dragon as a platform cheap, and once that happens more rides can be carried (to ISS) hence making the system battle-tested. Being cheap and reliable are the two major reasons NASA rode with Soyouz in the past few decades and, for better or for worse, still riding with them even after the Ukraine war started.
I think they might fill it with garbage and let Boeing attempt an unmanned landing. All the issues are in the service module - the capsule itself is OK.
this is all overly dramatic. a new vehicle has a few non-critical leaks in the pressure system for its engines and a handful of engines that were being finicky. The leaks cut a tiny fraction of their massive margin on helium pressurant leaving them still with far more than they could possibly use on a return flight and 4 of the 5 misbehaving (of 28) rcs engines are working fine now. everyone wants to get their ducks in a row because this is the first time NASA and Boeing have worked this vehicles with crew at ISS and ISS also has a schedule they can and should work around as well so we're bumping along with a few delays and some poor PR but this isn't anything special and SpaceX's Dragon was not free from issues across its earliest flights either. there's nothing here except a few news outlets chasing clicks. it should have been a three sentence matter of fact update in the sidebar of the paper, not the front page headline, but editorial judgement died in the previous century so what are you gonna do.
