Why did someone put down 400M on this market before the capsule attempted to land? Is there some kind of insider information, or just a bad bet?

So I’m only the second largest Yes holder, but for me it was mostly that the people over at GJOpen (the more or less Superforecasters®) are weirdly pessimistic, even most of the usually accurate forecasters: https://www.gjopen.com/questions/3689-will-the-boeing-starliner-spacecraft-in-orbit-as-of-29-august-2024-attempt-a-re-entry-and-landing-on-earth-before-19-october-2024

How would you resolve if the decision to destroy happens during a return attempt (e.g. because of a loss of telemetry that could endanger populated areas), but before it's certain that human return would have been unsurvivable?

YES. If that were done, it's more likely than not that nobody could have survived.

I think Lukas' point is that because it's uncrewed they'd be much more likely to trigger an FTS than if it had crew on it. (Does it even have fts? I don't think so.)

Yeah, that's what I'm suspecting. For remote steering I would imagine the safety margins to be very different (i.e. skewed towards intentionally destroying vs. endangering others) than for a crewed mission. All landing sites are in the Western U.S., but at least somewhat inland.

@lxgr Do they have a FTS system on capsule? If whole journey was meant to be crewed then it seems unlikely. It also has robust heat shielding and given propellant quantities maybe vent propellants for passification might be a more likely thing in software if prepared* for uncrewed return?

(* Adequately prepared? They had ~ a month to re add uncrewed functionality?)

Given that there was some deliberation on the decision, the chance of catastrophic failure can't be that high. Someone probably knows the actual safety margins but they can't be above 1% chance of failure. A 10% chance of failure would have been immediately unacceptable.

Never bet on Boeing. This is true assuming Boeing was totally honest with Nasa about all their data/info, which I doubt.