this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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It's actually a lot worse than just thrusters not working any more. At least according to the unofficial "word on the street" about what's going on, the details haven't been officially released yet.
It appears that the cause of the failures was because the thrusters are housed inside compartments that are containing their waste heat. The thrusters were tested individually, but apparently were never tested once installed inside the capsule. The heat is causing teflon valves to fail, which clogs the thruster plumbing and disables them. But the scary thing is that the heat necessary to do that to teflon would also potentially be enough to boil the hypergolic fuel itself inside the fuel lines.
When you heat hypergolic fuel up enough it will spontaneously ignite. It's got its own oxidizer in it, essentially. Which means those thrusters could well be bombs that could go off if they're fired too long.
The way they're talking about moving the unmanned capsule away from ISS, slowly and gently, it sounds like they're concerned Starliner could literally explode next to the station. That would be, to put it mildly, very very bad.
If any of this is true then this is going to be a colossal scandal. This is Starliner's third test flight, it's absolutely incredible that Boeing wouldn't have figured this out by now and that NASA let them get away with such a shoddy program.