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The thought it that somehow for the actual crew capsule they literally made an "undock" button somehow required to undock, and that in order to bypass it, they need to write code to work around it. The code to actually DO the undock is there, I guess, it's just set to only be triggered by astronauts right now? I suppose as it is their lifeboat/way-home, it could be seen as a safety thing, no software glitch could undock it unintentionally?

Cygnus is 250m from station, berthing set for 3:10 Eastern

Yeah, no, that's what the flight director is for. Wayne Hale has an excellent blog about it, literally today: https://waynehale.wordpress.com

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/nasa-likely-to-significantly-delay-the-launch-of-crew-9-due-to-starliner-issues/ Crew-9 might move from August 18 to Sept 24. This is of course related to Starliner.

Yes. That's what it is.

Yeah, the only issue here is launch. They have all the Atlas Vs they will ever have (short of buying a few more from Amazon who has the rest bespoke for Kuiper). They can crew-rate Vulcan of course—but they have to pay for that, not sure what sort of investment required. Unless they want SpaceX to launch it... the issue there is pad infrastructure.

New Glenn at Port Canaveral—F9 for scale.

The economics of Starliner going forward are not great at this point. They've been paid I think the bulk of the contract, so it's 6 operation flights for a final payment of something like $1.4B (1.6?). If their cost is above that ~$233M/flight, doing the operational missions would be at a loss. Excellent point. FWIW, the testing seemed to go well, & many at MCC seem to think it's good to go (I am told). Minus the botched press there would be no "Astronauts stranded" nonsense and they might feel like they are not under a microscope (which I can only assume will make everyone more cautious than they otherwise might have been—and they're already cautious by default).

Sorta the first. Group A "We think that everything will be fine, it's probably slightly less certain than what we currently know about Dragon." Group B "We agree, but if anything goes wrong we—us in this room—will be savaged for making the wrong decision when the signs were there to the public, and we ignored a simple contingency plan. I don't think it's the second scenario at all—I talk (usually txt, lol) to someone somewhat involved literally daily (ok, it's like 75% meme exchange ). I think the PAO (and Boeing) have botched this from the start. Minus the unforced PR errors (public now thinking something is terribly wrong), I think they come home on Starliner for sure. Should they pull the trigger on a SpaceX contingency, they would be smart to underline that they think Starliner is fine to return, but one of the points of two providers was to have just this sort of contingency option. Nominal ISS work will seamlessly continue, they will come home in 6 months on Dragon, and Starliner will return by itself for analysis. I would hope that they have actually characterized the problems so that they can simultaneously tell everyone that the added time at ISS allowed them to determine exactly what needs to be fixed on future flights, and they have already begun testing the fixes. If they have to refly the cert mission, they'd have to talk to Amazon about buying one of their Atlas Vs (they're already gonna lose money on this contract, might as well at least succeed).

I realize English is not the first language of the authors, but man, that paper is terribly written.

LOL. Nothing you just said ^^^ is true at all. The coin flip nature of what might happen entirely conforms to what I am hearing personally. I think the assumption is that Starliner can return just fine, but the (PR) situation has been so bungled that there are now pressures to be extra safe for crew.