A lot of the criticism Boeing and Starliner gets just makes my blood boil. Are you forgetting all the stuff that SpaceX has blown up over the years? Sheesh.
.
And the valve issue wasn't a test article, it was a bone fide launch attempt. And the Spacecraft had to be scrapped afterwards.
Apparently you forgot that OFT stands for Orbital Flight TEST.
The type and number of things breaking down are completely out of place for this stage of the program.
The "we expect failures" tests were supposed to be behind them by now. There flights are more demonstration missions to show that everything is ok.
I mean Starliner already flew once, and now thrusters are failing on flight #2 (flight attempt #3) that didn't fail on flight #1. What happened to repeatability?
And there were other problems that should also not be popping up after the first flight.
This vehicle did not spend extra time on the pad. It was treated with kids gloves. If they can't make successive vehicles behave the same, that's a problem, since it means you can't trust the next vehicle as much.
To those concerned that this line of criticism on Boeing is unfair, it's worth remembering that when SpaceX blew up their Crew Dragon capsule on a test stand after Demo-1, they
did, rightly, take a lot of heat for that. That was likewise a failure that absolutely should
not have happened at that stage in the program, and of loss-of-mission/crew severity to boot. It was, frankly, shocking and deeply concerning, even to those of us who were inclined to be bullish on the company. At the time, it reflected
very poorly on their credibility for being able to build a safe, trustworthy crew vehicle.
To SpaceX's credit, they proceeded to investigate the root cause of the issue thoroughly and diligently, delaying the subsequent crew demo by about a year. The root cause turned out to be an exotic N2O4/titanium failure mode that surprised both SpaceX and NASA, as heritage spacecraft (both U.S. and Russian) had been successfully mixing N2O4 and titanium for years with no problems. They redesigned Dragon to eliminate titanium from the relevant oxidizer paths and categorically preclude that failure mode. In the end, the way they handled the issue (and subsequent ones of lesser severity) reflected positively on the company's credibility for crew and mission safety. But that wouldn't have been the case if the failure mode had turned out to be something more expectable/preventable. If it had, for instance, traced back to sloppy engineering or coding, it would have called into serious question the suitability of SpaceX's "agile" engineering methods for crew-rated applications. It might've even been the end of their participation in Commercial Crew.
Boeing's stumbles on OFT-1 reflected poorly on them because the root causes of several mission-critical issues traced back directly to both engineering and operational sloppiness. They were issues that could and should have been anticipated and prevented, especially by a company that claims so much heritage in the business of flying crewed and uncrewed spacecraft. The Mission Elapsed Timer issue was a clear systems integration and testing failure that stunned many experienced software developers here on this forum, including myself. Likewise, the thruster mapping failure that nearly caused a command module/service module collision after separation was caused by clear operational sloppiness (last-minute substitution of a Boeing 702 comsat's ground test rig instead of the one customized for Starliner to avoid shipping it cross-country). Ditto for the drop-test parachute failure, which traced to operational carelessness and a failure to "test as you fly".
Boeing
can earn back its lost credibility, just as SpaceX did. But it's fair, and indeed necessary (particularly from NASA's oversight perspective) to take a highly critical "trust but verify" perspective as they do so.
So far, a lot of things have gone right on OFT-2, and that redounds positively to Boeing's credibility. Some things have also gone wrong, e.g. with (evidently temporary/resettable) thruster failures and some minor cooling and docking port glitches. But so far, I have yet to see direct evidence of the rank sloppiness that reflected so poorly on them in the past. As others have pointed out, none of these issues thusfar have been out of the realm of what Dragon, and indeed most every new spacecraft, goes through on its first few flights. How much credibility Boeing regains from this mission will depend on how it works through those issues and what their root causes turn out to be - much of which will only be learned post-mission when they have the chance to do deeper analyses (e.g., to reproduce the thruster issues on a test stand and narrow down the fault trees).
As someone who has been pretty hard on Boeing in the past and is still broadly skeptical (and bearish on the company's long-term cultural issues and political corruption), I have to say, I was pretty excited to see Starliner approach the ISS and come into full view for the first time on its docking cameras. Starliner finally feels "real", and I'm feeling a lot more optimistic about its future than I did a few days ago. They've made a good, solid step in the right direction so far with OFT-2, despite some missteps. But I don't think it would be fair to be more than cautiously optimistic at present. They can earn their way back to credibility, but they still have substantial ground to cover.
Personally, the next steps I want to see Boeing deliver on are:
1. Make it to the end of this mission (safe touchdown and recovery of capsule and contents) without further crises or evidence of sloppiness.
2. Establish the root cause(s) of the thruster failures and either eliminate them systemically, or demonstrate with confidence that they will happen within probabilities that can be accommodated by the system's existing redundancy.
3. After addressing all outstanding issues to NASA and ASAP's satisfaction (which both seem to be duly hawkish nowadays, whatever passes they gave to Boeing in the past), fly a successful CFT without repeating the previously-observed issues and without demonstrating new problems of equal or greater severity.
If they can deliver on that, they'll have rebuilt enough credibility in my eyes to have earned their spot in the Commercial Crew rotation.