It’s space. The ground state is emergency. I am training to be a pilot. Anything going off flight plan is an emergency. If ground control gives me corrective instructions, in the course of a mistake, I hope I will have the humility to not refuse its designation as a rescue.
Like, if you want an Exhibit A for why Boeing doesn’t deserve forward trust, it’s this response.
When the ground state is emergency the definition of emergency changes because emergency cannot be the same as ground state...
If we go by technical definition of "emergency" then anything not by the plan is an emergency, but it's not used that way normally and it's not a technical publication.
If you are stuck in space with no lifeboat back then I agree it is an emergency, but they apparently have Starliner and it works. If they or Nasa are more comfortable with another option maybe that makes it an emergency or maybe not.
If it turns out Starliner doesn't work, that's an emergency. If there is radiation event coming then it's an emergency, but it is always an emergency in space regardless.
One, had. Starliner went home. Two, they didn’t. Starliner was broken. Its manoeuvring thrusters, a critical reëntry system, were misbehaving. If you’re on a plane and the oxygen system fails, that’s an emergency. You don’t have to wait for cabin pressure to fail for it to qualify, and oxygen systems aren’t even a critical system; this is closer to the flaps or landing gear behaving erratically.
Actually, NASA protocol requires more than a single layer of safety. The astronauts currently do not have a lifeboat home - that is extraordinarily irregular and I believe that it constitutes a danger to the astronauts. The spacecraft are not only for down transport, they are also shelters for radiation and particle events - which could be declared with days or hours notice. For a month these astronauts have had no viable shelter nor transport in case of emergency.
Danger is not when the last later of safety fails. Danger is when the level of risk exceeds a set threshold - and that level has been exceeded as per NASA protocol.
