Could White Supremacy Have Kept Two Astronauts From Being Marooned in Space for Eight Months?

In a Saturday announcement calculated to fly below the media radar and the attention of the public, NASA announced that astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore would have their eight-day stay aboard the International Space Station extended to eight months. When they do return, it will be aboard Elon Musk’s SpaceX Dragon rather than the Boeing Starliner “autonomous” capsule that had been their way home.

“It was just too much risk for the crew,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager.

The highly anticipated decision, one of the most consequential by the space agency in years, is a devastating blow to Boeing, which had argued vehemently that Starliner was safe even though it suffered a series of thruster problems and helium leaks as it brought NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore to the International Space Station in early June.

The decision means that the autonomous Starliner spacecraft will return to Earth, likely in early September, without anyone on board and that Williams and Wilmore will have their stay on the space station, originally intended to last eight days, extended to about eight months — the next Dragon return flight is scheduled for February.

To say Starliner is troubled is to do disservice to the word. It seems to be an unstoppable Doomsday machine in search of victims.

NASA awarded Boeing the contract for Starliner in September 2014. By December 20, 2019, Starliner was ready for its first failure. An unmanned capsule was supposed to rendezvous with the ISS but failed due to a series of software malfunctions that forced the mission to be truncated.

However, for reasons Boeing engineers do not yet understand, Starliner’s Mission Event Timer clock malfunctioned, causing the vehicle to think it was at a different point in the mission and at a different time in its mission that it actually was.

Huh? […]

— Read More: redstate.com