Comment by ApolloFortyNine

I believe NASA is targeting something like 99.5% reliability with Starliner. I agree that ability to accept risk has decreased, but my guess is that Starliner in reality has more like one nine of reliability.

If you look at the first flight test of Starliner, everyone talks about the timing problem that caused them to fail to achieve the proper orbit. What is more rarely discussed is that after this happened, they did a top to bottom code review while the Starliner was in orbit, and found a bug in the crew/service module undocking procedure that would have caused the service module to strike the crew module after undocking, most likely damage the heat shield, and cause the capsule to burn up on reentry. They applied a hot fix in orbit for this.

Had the timer problem not happened, the code review wouldn't have happened and this wouldn't have been caught.

With the number of gremlins that have come up on every Starliner flight, there are certainly many more lower probability defects that will eventually lead to a loss of crew.

My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright. These days that talent generally doesn't go to those places. IMO the main reason SpaceX has been so successful is that a lot of those people really wanted to work on rockets but didn't want to work for NASA/Boeing.

The cost/benefit analysis was probably seen differently back then. At that point it was a space race against the Big Bad and winning was more important than a certain threshold of safety. Now? I can't see the benefit of risking the life of the Starliner crew. What would it prove now that NASA has had so many crewed launches and returns?

All the evidence you need is that even in the present day, advanced countries have repeatedly tried to send probes to the moon and failed, when we did it with humans in the 1960s. All the software in the world isn't as good as a trained pilot in a novel scenario (i.e. The first moon landing when Neil Armstrong changed the landing site at the last minute, or the events of Apollo 13).

> And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically.

Yes, recall that Apollo 1 incinerated the capsule crew, that would have canceled the entire program today, back then it was "press on..."

We did continue with the Space Shuttle after its accidents, but that was decades ago now, and I'm sure that played into any discussions there might have been about extending the program.