Boeing and NASA are moving ahead with the upcoming Starliner demonstration launch despite an active helium leak. The launch is now on the books for Saturday, June 1, at 12:25 p.m. EDT. If all goes as planned, Starliner will rendezvous with the International Space Station the following day and return to Earth on June 10. If not, it will be another embarrassing setback for Boeing’s troubled spacecraft.
Technicians discovered helium escaping from the fuel system earlier this month after valve issues caused NASA to halt the last launch attempt. NASA said in a recent news conference that the extremely slow leak does not pose a danger to the spacecraft. This is based on an exhaustive inspection of Starliner, which was removed from the launchpad along with the Atlas V so the valve in ULA’s rocket could be swapped. It was then that the team noticed the helium leak in Starliner.
Even though the optics of launching with an active leak aren’t ideal for the troubled Boeing craft, NASA says engineers have done their due diligence during this multi-week pause. Every space launch has risk tolerances, and NASA has judged this one to be in bounds. Helium is a tiny atom that is difficult to fully contain—even the highly successful SpaceX Dragon has occasionally flown with small leaks. While helium is part of the propulsion system, this inert gas is not used as fuel. Helium is used to pressurize the system and ensure fuel is available to the spacecraft’s four “doghouse” thruster assemblies and the launch abort engines.
The philosophy still exists today at NASA proper.
Blue Origin and SpaceX don’t need to have that philosophy. Because their owners are having a dick measuring contest and have literal billions to literally burn.
The budget constraints on NASA during the Apollo missions made success a requirement. They couldn’t afford to waste money or even look like they are wasting money. Even early tests where NASA rockets were burning and exploding they had to justify to Congress that they were learning.
It helped that the “red scare” kept the public interested in space exploration because it was about beating the Soviet Union.
But when Blue Origin and SpaceX have to answer to just a billionaire, they can get away with failure after failure. It’s probably cheaper for them.
If it really did, then nasa would not have committed to this hare brained scheme of musk’s.
The fact that the SpaceX proposal was accepted by an interim director who then went to work at SpaceX 6 months later, and no one has investigated this or challenged the acceptance of this contract tells me that safety is clearly not the priority. If safety was the priority, the new director would have looked at the current proposal and demanded a renegotiation or reconsideration.