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Astronauts Won't Be Flying To Space In Boeing's Starliner Until 2018 (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Boeing Starliner, one of two new spacecraft meant to break the Russian stranglehold on sending people to orbit, has hit a snag. Originally scheduled to start flying next year, the Starliner won't carry a crewed mission to the International Space Station until 2018 at the earliest. Six years is long enough. Ever since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle NASA has been pushing for privately built craft capable of ferrying astronauts to orbit, which would let the agency buy American-made ships and end its dependency on renting seats aboard Russian spacecraft. The Starliner and SpaceX's Dragon were chosen, and 2017 was to be the year. But while SpaceX has sent its ship to the ISS on multiple uncrewed cargo resupply missions, the Starliner won't make such trips until 2017 and won't carry people until 2018 at the earliest. SpaceX maintains that it will be able to send crews to orbit in 2017.GeekWire explains: "For Boeing to shift its crewed test flight from 2017 to 2018 isn't as much of a slip as it might sound: The company's earlier schedule had called for the visit to the space station to take place in mid-December."
The problem is, to keep even a single shuttle flying, you have to maintain most of the infrastructure that was required to keep an entire fleet running. Low flight rate was one of the reasons that the shuttle never met cost projections in the first place, because you're paying for these huge facilities and workforces that are perpetually running at 25% capacity because of low launch rates. So keeping a single shuttle in play would have exacerbated this problem and ended up making our per-flight cost go through the roof, and so it probably came down to an "all-or-nothing" sort of calculation. And nobody wanted to risk killing another crew because of trying to stretch an orbiter beyond its useful life.
Note: many of these same problems are set up to plague SLS, the follow-on program to the space shuttle, which is hugely expensive, over budget, and behind schedule. If you're a fan of low-cost American space access, you should root for more funding of Commercial Crew and the other COTS efforts, and cancellation of this giant congressional effort to repeat shuttle's mistakes.
I'm OK with aggressive deadlines that get pushed out. Aggressive time lines presses a team to be as productive as possible. On the other hand, the courage to delay when its not ready regardless of the financial consequences is in my mind to be admired.
This is what differentiates a quality organization from those stock market driven pointy haired managed fiascoes all to common in business today.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Actually, SpaceX has 2 more tests for it, and they are ready:
1), the in-flight abort test.
2) sending the dragon to space on its own.
IOW, not much is left for the first manned spaceX flight.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.