Boeing Starliner Stuck on Space Station as More Leaks Discovered

reused Soviet gear

That's selling things a little short.

I thought it was fakenews because I had no idea Boeing built something that actually travels into space

The dirty little secret of the US space program is that absolutely everything that's flown to orbit under NASA ownership has been manufactured by a for-profit company. NASA does not, and never has, built orbital rockets in-house. Not a single one. The US senate keeps an iron grip on NASA's pursestrings, and they've used NASA as a glorified slush fund to top up defence contractor coffers.

Over the decades there's been a lot of consolidation of the aerospace industry. Boeing now owns what's left of the companies that built every single spacecraft that's launched humans to space from US soil, except for SpaceX's Crew Dragon. The X-15 rocket plane (which is amazing piece of engineering that deserves its own effortpost), Mercury, Gemini, the Apollo CSM, the Space Shuttle, and now Starliner. They also own what's left of a whole lot of orbital rocket manufacturers. Of course there's little-to-no engineering DNA in Starliner from those prior programs - I was just using them as examples of prior commercialization of space.

All that's really changed in the "new commercial space race" is that private companies are now doing design work in addition to construction, and NASA can now do fixed-price contracts instead of the expense-bloating "cost-plus" contracts. Most of the loudest voices in US politics whining about the "commercialization of space" are quietly getting a lot of campaign funding from the old defence contractors who are pissed that fixed-price contracts are becoming the norm. Boeing has lost literally billions of dollars on the Starliner program because of their own constant screwups that they can't just send NASA an invoice for like they used to be able to do. It's one of those new style of fixed-price contracts that's now saving NASA's financial bacon. All these delays and re-tests are entirely at Boeing's expense.

Boeing makes the minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, they just dont care about their civilian airliners

laissez-faire space travel is working about as well as expected

Would be an interesting experiment. I think the dominant forces would likely be caused by turbulent air blown into the whistle, with gravity being irrelevant. The ball would get knocked against the walls chaotically as it moves between pressure zones.

That may have been true once but Boeing has cracked it: if you let compressed helium leak from a little hole, you get a whistle blown.

Isn't the ball just to let the tone waver? I've definitely seen whistles without them

ok so yeah i just did some more reading and the Dragon capsule has spare passenger capacity. the soyuz didn't.

so they can bring the Starliner crew back on the dragon if needed.

at first i was like "i can't believe they didn't plan for emergencies"

yeah i edited my comment much earlier