They'll install AI-controlled sledgehammers on each valve, rebrand the capsule as StarlinerMAX - and ... LIFT-OFF!

Is Boeing's valve test facility located in the Atacama Desert perchance?

It's a probably a case along the lines "young Boeing engineers don't know where Florida is, and what kind of climate it has".

Or perhaps it just hung around in Florida way longer than was expected, due to all the other delays..?

There's a reason why Grumman was known to be able to build sturdy planes that could work on carriers at sea for a long time... maybe the fact that Boeing no longer had a plane on a carrier since the 1920s meant they forgot what happens when you choose the wrong materials in such situations?

Er... The Hornet is Boeing. That flies on carriers all the time.

OK it was originally a McDonnell-Douglas project but still, being anal about facts is important.

Space flight is hard.

Do remember, SpaceX had it's own repeated teething troubles before they became NASA's darling.

In computer terms:

SpaceX is Intel

Boeing is AMD (OK, maybe ARM?)

How is spacex intel? spacex at least tries to innovate and compete. intel looks a lot more like the old dominant players in the business happy to keep selling people more of the same until someone comes along and starts to eat their business (like AMD sometimes does). And intel has made plenty of flops in terms of design (pentium 4, iAPX 432, itanium, etc, not to mention failing to get new process nodes to work while their competitors catch up). intel reminds me of boeing these days. They think they know everything better than everyone else and then things go wrong, but they manage to fix it eventually and claw their way back.

So no spacex is not like intel.

Boeing being like IBM would be a better metaphor.

Been around forever, used to making very expensive products for governments and massive enterprises, and these days, well past their best.

Also, there's the now (very) out-of-date phrases: "None ever get fired for buying IBM", and "If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going!".

I've got a few 12AU7s in a box somewhere. It really is about time they started looking at TTL though. CMOS might be better in space though.

...but if they want to stick with valves with proven reliability and performance and some grunt I have 4 KT88's that I never got around to using if they want to give me a call? All that germanium stuff will never catch on.

>CMOS might be better in space though.

I think Boeing were going for that authentic Apollo era 60s sound

Nobody can hear your authentic 60s valve sound in spaaaaace.

> in spaaaaace.

Well that's where Boeing's secret plan comes in

Bong. "Boeing Starliner!"*

*May require lubrication before reuse. Fnar, fnar...

Presumably, trying to open sticky valves required some vibration to help loosen them up as they were self-lubricating, fnar, fnar...

Florida? Humid? Who would have known. An average dew point of about 17deg C.

Wasn't Boeing selected at least in part due to its long history of building launch vehicles? Many of which launched from Florida?

[1]Double facepalm - when one facepalm is just not enough .

[1] https://imgur.com/t/funny/8WsTL2t

I had a work mate who kept a shop dummy hand on his desk, because sometimes two won't do the job.

> the chemicals from the spacecraft’s oxidizer reacted with water condensation inside the valves to form nitric acid. The acidity corroded the valves, causing them to stick.

Yes, that happens when you don't bother too much about specifications and use the cheapest materials you can find...

One thing makes me wonder though: Florida's humid air is outside , and the spacecraft's oxidizer is (hopefully) inside the piping. So how do those two manage to interact? I'm no rocket scientist, but it seems to me those two should have pretty few occasions to meet, definitely not enough to block half of the engine's valves (which in itself is quite an achievement).

What's in the pipes *before* the tanks are filled with fuel?

I would hope they'd be purged with a non reactive gas before adding the fuel.

Boeing - relearning chemistry that Wernher knew about in 1944.

I wondered why Boeing might be interested in hypergolic propellants, then I realised some are zero carbon. So I guess this is just a learning curve en route to the "747-Green"!

Dammit, why can't I have the bomb icon and the hazmat icon and the joke icon all at once?

>hypergolic propellants, then I realised some are zero carbon

Hypergolic fuels - environmentally friendly is the first thing I think of

I don't think that's what Organic Chemistry means

You would hope so... dry nitrogen isn't that hard to aquire...

I'm no expert, but if it were me, I'd purge the tanks and all the lines with an excess of dry nitrogen. Not terribly reactive, cheap, and it would get all those pesky minor contaminants out of the way.

Leakage of the hypergolic propellants out of the valves is a known problem on all spacecraft using them. The solution is to put each valve in a box that is vented to the outside so the leakage can evaporate away in vacuum. On the ground before launch the vent is usually covered by a "remove before flight" tag or a tissue paper seal that ruptures. Why this was not done or didn't work in this case is an execise left for the investigators.

I imagine they do test firings also before shipping the capsules, so could be residues from that?

Nothing cheap materials wise with Boeing and so far not much to be cheery about.

Ever since Boeing and SpaceX were award contracts, Boeing has been receiving nearly double the money and wanted to up the cost per seat, something that in 2019 was assessed bu NASA to already be 60% higher than SpaceX.

When you consider what the Starliner has cost so far without delivering and comparing its performance with the new boy, one wonders why the contract is still going?

I suspect the army of Boeing lawyers waiting in the wings is the main reason.

As things are at the current rate of success, Bezos will be delivering before Boeing.

Unfortunately the nitrogen tetroxide was not completely inside the pipes.

The issue is that a tiny bit leaked past the valves and met the humidity in the outside air, and the resulting highly active acids made things a lot worse.

NASA has been launching out of Florida for years. The Europeans have been launching Arianes out of a tropical rain forest at Kourou for years. The weather issues have surely been known (apparently, to everyone except Boeing) for years.

Not even sure whether this is good or better.

" chemicals from the spacecraft’s oxidizer reacted with water condensation inside the valves to form nitric acid. The acidity corroded the valves "

This should have been anticipated at the very first design stage. Commercial chemical works address such issues (and worse) all the time successfully.

One has to wonder whether this was an outcome of outsourced component design/production. The Dreamliner had component design outsource problems, as did a notable (non-Boeing) aircraft carrier (to the extent in the latter case that some pipework had to be hammered into alignment).

Central design control is essential where technologies are this complex, as local interpretation of requirements can diverge from central expectations. But of course it's more expensive than fire and forget outsourcing.

Bears crapping in the wood ?

This problem was anticipated. Boeing came up with procedures to ensure the valve is dry before loading oxidizer and remains dry until launch. Clearly there is a hole in those procedures but so far no-one has found it.

...it ain't going.

*LOL*

I love to see a MIC contractor fall flat on their face. Good on 'em, especially after their abusive lawsuits against Canadian Bombardier in the past for beating them fair and square on pricing.

For the past few years, Boeing is batting 0/10. *LMAO*

the wrong kind of humidity.

That's actually worse than trains being cancelled due to the 'wrong kind of snow'. Boeing are looking like an outfit that have lost their way, or maybe found a different way, but whatever it is it sure doesn't encourage confidence when it comes to trusting lives to their care.

Controlled humidity in a spacecraft final assembly and storage facility? Whoever could have anticipated the need for that? Surely not as highly experienced an aerospace supplier as Boeing.

They seem less and less like the world's biggest aerospace company and more and more like the world's biggest landslide of yesterday's beancounters. The answer is blindingly obvious - employ more lawyers.

YES!

Onboard every test flight verifying it's working to the contracted* requirement.

*Not necessarily a flyable spec.

Reminds me of ISO 9001

It doesn’t have to work as long as you have followed the documented procedures.

Or

If you want to test a box of fragile electronics by kicking then off the roof of a building, make out an area which is cordoned off for the landing , design a standard test model (size 10 doc martins) and it will pass.

The fact it results in a pile of scrap and can’t function is irrelevant- you have followed the correct process.