What's he going to do, punch me?Just don't ask Neil Armstrong that question if you see him in person
NASA became a pure jobs program post Apollo. Accomplishing anything other than employing people in key districts/states was like winning the lottery.
www.adastraspace.com
Wouldn't compatibility fall under 'broad requirement'? I'll answer my own question, apparently not. Wonder if the administrator of the directive had blue hair?tldr; money
"This basically has to do with the nature of Commercial Crew and NASA’s evaluation of risk and redundancy.
For every era of spaceflight before this current one, NASA used a different model of procuring spaceships. They laid out their exact needs, identified the contractor, and managed every stage of the spacecraft, from design to development to construction to the flights to the refits. They were deeply involved in every single thing.
They decided to try a different approach with Commercial Crew. Because it was going somewhere we were relatively comfortable with at that point — the ISS — NASA decided to basically partially fund the development of these spacecraft, but allow private companies to design and innovate, as long as the companies met NASA’s broad requirements and safety standards, as well as reach specific milestones (one of which is a successful crewed flight test.)
This also meant that NASA isn’t bearing the brunt of the cost — they paid a set fee for the development, test flight, and subsequent operational flights, and if the contractor went over budget, that was their problem not NASA’s. (Compare this to the ballooning costs of SLS, which is the Artemis rocket which will end up costing NASA an estimated $4.1 billion per launch)."
Why aren't Boeing and SpaceX spacesuits compatible?
Let's talk about that "unsuited return" scenario.
That's what they're doing. Suits are going up with the SpaceX Crew 9 mission. The issue is that the ISS docking ports are limited. Crew 9 and Crew 8 can't both attach at the same time (required to transfer suits) unless Starliner is detached, and if Starliner is detached without crew then there aren't enough seats on Crew 8 to get everyone home. They could technically return on Crew 8 without suits or seats, but that's been deemed too dangerous.
Even though I don't see them specifficly say that in the offical NASA release today, I would assume that's what they are now going to do. It's also possible that one of the reason it will take so long is because each suit is probably custom made for the person (or they just don't want to pay Elon's emergency falcon rescue rocket fee).
www.nasa.gov
Starliner will be detached and sent back down as soon as the firmware for remote control is set up, in September:
spacenews.com
