With the free advertising and no shame smug card I’d say it’s a good value for SpaceX as-is, but what really would ice the cake is if NASA contracted for a dedicated flight so they wouldn’t have to break up Crew 9 and scramble the schedule after them. It’s only another $225MM.

Which is it John, $200k or $225M?

is it ok to say "stuck" yet ?

LOL, I typo’s the first one and somehow managed to add a correction without deleting the original

As to “stuck”, no, a quarter of a billion will bring them home whenever NASA wants. Meanwhile they’re comfortable and busy.

What do you think will happen first, the two marooned Boeing astronauts get home or G100UL is for sale at an airport somewhere?

No one is marooned!!!

At least the astronauts will get home in 2030 when they de-orbit the station

Found an article which stated they found the problem during ground testing, some type of teflon seal is heating up and leaking. My thoughts are they have been building rockets for 60 years, this sounds like the type of engineering problem that should have long been solved.

Boeing has become such a complete incompetent mess....luckily they are moving HQ to Washington DC to solve their problems......

As I understand it, the RCS thrusters are having the problem. They are grouped in enclosures they refer to as "dog houses". The design of the individual thrusters has been around for a long time and are quite reliable. Apparently the problem is that they are being used more than they can handle (software issue?) and so the enclosure is heating up a lot more than expected. That causes the teflon seals to swell, which causes the thrusters to respond less quickly. The software detects this, marks it as a failure, and disables that thruster. Unfortunately the overheat condition affects many thrusters and so they end up with a cascade failure. If you just let them cool down, they start working again. That's why after five "failed" on the flight up to the station, they were able to get all but one of them back online.

This had never happened before, presumably because testing didn't put them through the intensive cycles and heating that they experienced in flight. The thrusters are manufactured by Aerojet Rocketdyne, not Boeing, so to some degree Boeing was relying on the expertise of their subcontractor to deliver a product to spec. That spec. was either inadequate or Aerojet Rocketdyne didn't know they had a problem until it happened. My suspicion is that Boeing just specified the standard part that they were used to and unintentionally put it into an environment that it had never experienced before.

happens all the time. I'm dealing with several issues at my job right now that are similar to this. Applying a standard, proven sub-system in a slightly different manner and not accounting for all the effects.

Various companies call it different things, the job of making all the bits play nice together: systems engineering, interface management, application engineering, platform engineering, etc. But whatever they call it, no one ever budgets enough time or money for it.

Especially if the new application came from the marketing department and not the design bureau. BTDT.

Like a car manufacturer that takes the hit for the failing of vendor parts on the car. GM had a big problem with Delphi failures resulting in law suits; maybe where this is going. GM got $2.7 billion from Delphi.

The way I see it, the stranded crew members are away from base, on duty, and should get overtime pay plus per diem.

NASA cuts 2 from next SpaceX flight to make room for astronauts stuck at space stationSo they dumped the women?