Butch & Suni may spend 7 MONTHS longer on station than intended due to issues with Boeing’s Starliner.

NASA’s contingency is to launch Crew-9 in September with only two crew members instead of four, with Butch & Suni replacing their spots. Crew-9 would return in February 2025. pic.twitter.com/1ZsUlhOXF8

— Owen Sparks (@OwenSparks_) August 7, 2024

This was the most predictable thing ever.

I predicted it, in fact.

CNN:

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — two veteran NASA astronauts piloting the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft — have now been in space for 63 days, roughly seven weeks longer than initially expected.

There is still no clear return date in sight, and NASA is now making clear that the astronauts may not come home on Starliner at all.

SpaceX, Boeing’s rival under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, may be tapped to bring Williams and Wilmore home instead. The move could potentially extend the astronauts’ stay on the International Space Station by another six months, pushing their return into 2025, agency officials said in a news conference Wednesday.

The comments from NASA leaders indicate a stunning change of tone for the space agency. Until now, officials have repeatedly indicated that Williams and Wilmore were likely to return home on Starliner, and a backup scenario involving Crew Dragon was mentioned as a mere possibility. Wednesday’s update, however, suggests the SpaceX vehicle is rapidly becoming a serious option.

Elon will probably get these people killed.

I’ve grown very tired of these astronauts, and I’m sure it sounds bad, but I would laugh if they died. Especially if Elon screwed everything up and there was video of their flesh being ripped from their bones as they tried to reenter the atmosphere.

Remember when Elon sent that toy sub to Thailand to try to get the kids out of the cave, and the British diver in charge of the operation said it was useless? Elon responded by calling him a pedophile, then getting sued over it and losing.

Wait, sorry – he actually won that lawsuit.

That’s even funnier.

But the funniest thing will be if these astronauts burn up on reentry and there is video of the flesh being ripped from their bones and then Elon goes on Twitter and is like “well, they were pedophiles anyway. No big loss.”

Then someone with a Pepe avatar replies “I’d like to see your tranny son have his flesh ripped from his bones like that, he’s already dead inside anyway” and Elon responds: “💯.”

The NASA guy, Steve Stich, still hopes Boeing can get those astronauts back. But “We don’t have a major announcement today relative to a return date,” said Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. (They’ve been up 50 days on an 8-day mission.) pic.twitter.com/zvTZXc8a2f

— Bev Harris (@BevHarrisWrites) July 25, 2024

It’s strange that “trapped astronauts” is not a bigger story, no?

I guess they’re fine. But they will not be fine indefinitely.

The Guardian:

Two Nasa astronauts on Boeing’s Starliner capsule will remain at the International Space Station with no official return date yet, Nasa and Boeing officials said on Thursday morning, as engineers continue to examine the technical problems with the spacecraft.

Test pilots Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams first departed for the station roughly seven weeks ago, in early June, on a test mission that was meant to last about a week. But the capsule’s undocking was delayed because of faulty thrusters and small helium leaks that raised safety concerns.

…

On Thursday, Nasa and Boeing officials said they were not ready to announce a return date, and that the pilots would remain at the space station until the engineers finish working on and examining the issues with the capsule.

“We’ll come home when we’re ready,” Steve Stich, Nasa’s commercial crew program manager said in the press conference, according to the Associated Press. He also acknowledged that backup options are under review, including using other capsules to get the astronauts home safely, which he said was a top priority.

So is part of the situation here that they don’t want to ask Russia to help?

Russia would help.

That would be the worst optics ever, to have the US unable to get their own people back because their technology is so shit that they’re forced to ask the Russians for help.

The optics are already terrible, however, and just ending the problem might be better than whatever is happening now.

What exactly is happening now?

This was the first use of this Boeing pod, the Starliner, which was announced in 2010 and ended up going $1.5 billion over-budget during delays. Apparently it was just… built badly.

It’s sort of ridiculous that it would not have been tested, unmanned. These are engineering failures. The thing was never going to work. “Faulty thrusters” is not a minor problem. Thrusters are a core component of the machine.

There are two things I’ve dreamed of in this world: a Europe completely populated by Africans, and a machine that lets me drink my own urine.

This is a big day for me.

Everything is coming up aces.

The Guardian:

A sci-fi-inspired spacesuit that recycles urine into drinking water could enable astronauts to perform lengthy spacewalks on upcoming lunar expeditions.

The prototype, modelled on the “stillsuits” in the sci-fi classic Dune, collects urine, purifies it and can return it to the astronaut through a drinking tube within five minutes.

Was it really modeled after Dune? Or is it just sort of obvious?

The suit’s creators hope it could be deployed before the end of the decade in Nasa’s Artemis programme, which is focused on learning how to live and work for prolonged periods on another world.

The proposed stillsuit system comprises a collection cup of moulded silicone to fit around the genitalia, with a different shape and size for women and men. This is contained within an undergarment made of multiple layers of flexible fabric.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Men and women have different genitalia?

This is horseshit.

That sounds like something the writer of Dune would say. (He hated faggots so much that they couldn’t even make the film without it being like “wow, this guy really hates faggots.”)

The silicon cup connects to a moisture-activated vacuum pump that automatically switches on as soon as the astronaut begins to urinate. Once collected, the urine is diverted to the filtration system where it gets recycled into water with an efficiency of 87%. The system uses an osmosis system to remove water from urine, plus a pump to separate water from salt.

Collecting and purifying 500ml of urine takes only five minutes. In deployment, the purified water could be enriched with electrolytes and returned to the astronaut as an energy drink.

If the goal is to make it taste like an energy drink, you might as well just drink the urine straight.

The system measures 38cm by 23cm by 23cm, with a weight of approximately 8kg, which was judged to be sufficiently compact and light to be carried on the back of a spacesuit. The team are planning to recruit 100 volunteers in New York in the autumn to test the system for comfort and functionality.

It looks like they are planning some serious space walking.

Let’s just hope these niggers we’re replacing everyone with turn out to be geniuses capable of conquering outer space.

I once watched a documentary theorizing that this will work.

It seemed legit.

“I have a real good feeling in my heart that the spacecraft will bring us home, no problem.”

Two NASA astronauts who have been aboard the ISS for more than a month say they’re certain their Boeing Starliner craft will safely return them to Earth https://t.co/AEAlO90pIh pic.twitter.com/GrEyufwhAl

— Bloomberg (@business) July 10, 2024

I don’t think anyone cares if that Indian woman dies in space.

Probably, some people are thinking that was the plan – get that bitch off the earth.

The Guardian:

Two Nasa astronauts from Boeing’s troubled Starliner capsule might have to remain in space until the middle of August as engineers continue to work through technical problems that prevented their return in June.

Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore have been aboard the international space station (ISS) since 6 June after the first crewed docking of the next-generation spacecraft. The test mission was scheduled to last about a week, but Starliner’s undocking was delayed several times as faulty thrusters and then a series of small helium leaks raised safety concerns.

On Wednesday, Nasa announced that it was still performing tests to ensure the capsule would perform as expected, and although the space agency was confident the craft would be safe for an emergency evacuation, mission managers were not yet ready to schedule its departure.

“Some of the data suggests optimistically, maybe it’s by the end of July, but we’ll just follow the data each step at a time,” Steve Stich, Nasa’s commercial crew program manager, said at a lunchtime press conference.

Mark Nappi, vice-president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program, told reporters that he was confident the Starliner program would emerge stronger because of the issues.

“All this information is going to go in a big bucket, and all the engineers are going to review it and try to see if it doesn’t point to root cause or point to some additional testing that we can do in the future to eliminate this problem once and for all,” he said.

Although Boeing’s space operations are separate from its aviation wing, the ongoing problems with Starliner have added to the company’s recent public relations crisis, sparked by the crash of two 737 Max airliners and a number of other safety related incidents.

Despite being years behind schedule and more than $1.5bn over budget when it launched from Florida on 5 June, Starliner was intended to restore some of the company’s lost luster and offer Nasa a second private commercial crew alternative for the transportation of astronauts in lower earth orbit to SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.

This isn’t that big of a disaster for Boeing.

No one knows about space ships and they don’t care about them.

I can’t think of anything I care about less than spaceships.

Boeing’s big trouble is going to come when one of their commercial jets crashes and hundreds of people die.

They never should have hired all those women and black people.

I don’t actually believe this.

RT:

The Moon’s atmosphere doesn’t contain enough oxygen for human life, but under the planet’s rocky top layer, there’s enough of the gas to sustain eight billion human lives for 100,000 years, according to a prominent scientist.

In a piece penned this week in The Conversation, John Grant, a lecturer in soil science at Australia’s Southern Cross University explained that the Moon was heavy in minerals that bind tightly with oxygen.

Grant claims that, even if one ignores the oxygen tied up in deep, hard rock, the Moon’s regolith – the rocky top layer – which is easily accessible, could hold enough oxygen for eight billion people to live for 100,000 years.

The scientist’s calculation is based on the notion that humans need 800g (28oz) of oxygen a day to survive, and the regolith is some 10m (33ft) deep. He states that the Moon’s regolith is made up of 45% oxygen, all of which is tightly bound to minerals such as silica, aluminium, and iron and magnesium oxides.

Unfortunately, though rocks are not breathable, the process of extracting the vast quantities of oxygen from them is a straightforward process. “But there is a catch: it’s very energy-hungry. To be sustainable, it would need to be supported by solar energy or other energy sources available on the Moon,” Grant notes.

Grant’s article comes after the Australian Space Agency and NASA signed a deal in October to send a rover to the Moon with the objective of collecting lunar rocks and attempting to extract breathable oxygen from them.

The funny part is, if this were true, then in order to maintain the oxygen, we would have to have a lot of plants, which would mean that man would have to make… carbon dioxide. Plants can’t live without carbon dioxide.

Not one of these filthy faggots talking about global heating is going to explain to you why, if the 3.2% of the earth’s atmosphere’s carbon dioxide is produced by humans is deadly, we can’t get just increase plant life by 3.2% as a counterbalance.

But there’s a lot of obvious questions they won’t explain regarding their theory – such as how, if such a small fraction of greenhouse gasses can drastically change the weather, that the weather isn’t shifting radically as a result of the changes in natural carbon in the atmosphere.

The point is: as long as “The Science” is talking about such obviously, blatantly ridiculous and farcical nonsense as global warming and the coronavirus, there is zero chance that it is going to do anything useful, like build a city on the Moon.

HA! You thought you were going to visit distant worlds, explore the secrets of the universe and colonize the galaxy?

Well, sucks to be you. No men allowed!

As for me… I’m switching my name to Pomidora and getting some eyeliner or something so I can join the all-female space conquerors.

Daily Mail:

Women could be sent in to space with a selection of sperm ready to populate other planets, researchers say, as they test the effects of zero-gravity on semen.

Frozen sperm could be transported in to space to ‘open the possibility of creating a human sperm bank outside of Earth’, say researchers at the Dexeus women’s health centre in Barcelona.

This could mean male astronauts are replaced by all-women teams in order to reproduce while in space.

But further work is needed in order to fully understand the effect of space conditions and different levels of gravity.

Frozen samples exposed to micro gravity conditions and those kept on the ground all seem to stay healthy, the researchers say.

The study has been presented at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting in Vienna, Austria.

It comes after NASA published a paper arguing single-sex crews are best for cohesion and women are more likely to be co-operative.

Okay, so first of all, all of this is against current year. Who says women have to have wombs? Weren’t single-sex schools some bigoted discriminatory thing? Isn’t stating that single-sex crews are “best for cohesion” an argument against women in the workforce? What if female space conquerors all choose to have an abortion, huh? What then?

Second, NASA is retarded and this research is double retarded.

They propose the idea that all-women crews are “more likely” to be cooperative and work best because of cohesion or whatever. To put that proposition to the test, you don’t need to send an all-women crew somewhere as a test or put them into a simulation-type of thing, you just have to look at real world examples of all-women teams working and compare that to all-male teams.

So where are the all-women crews, groups and teams?

Do you know of any all-women companies?

(nb4 HuffPo.)

Any example of women working together and achieving something without men being involved at some level?

“Oh but the patriarchy and the glass ceiling!” Yeah, I guess you just have to give women a chance and they’ll prove that they’re better than men at whatever the thing is. Because pussy power.

Now that the Down syndrome of NASA has been established, consider how funny it would be to actually send all-women space crews into some distant planet.

They’re either going to get gang-raped by aliens that look like octopuses or they’re all going to die arguing about whose turn it is to fix some valve that just broke only to realize that none of them know how to fix shit.

I mean…

It’s tragic.

But it’s also funny.