Ben Brockert on Nostr: Steve Sitch confirmed that the "mission data load" (MDL) on Starliner now is meant ...

Steve Sitch confirmed that the "mission data load" (MDL) on Starliner now is meant for crewed undock, so if something goes sufficiently wrong it hands things over to crew, rather than continuing to automate. Well short of the claims some people were making that the software was somehow broken.

When launching orbital rockets we'd put on a new MDL for winds within an hour of launch. Even though that meant rebooting the computer, it wasn't like you were upgrading it to Win 95 SP2 or something.