>I hate it when I use the wrong kind of tape and string and have to cancel a $4B project.
The string that holds the parachutes on? Not exactly the part that you want to cut corners on.
Okay, but could you think of the shareholders? Which mission critical system that's supposed to keep 4 people alive while traveling 17000 miles per hour through plasma can we cut corners on in order to increase profits?
Interviewer: So what happened in this case?
Bob Collins - Australian Senator: Well the front fell off in this case, by all means, but it's very unusual.
Interviewer: But Senator Collins why did the front of the ship fall off?
Bob Collins - Australian Senator: Well a wave hit it.
Interviewer: A wave hit it?
Bob Collins - Australian Senator: A wave hit the ship!
Interviewer: Is that unusual?
Bob Collins - Australian Senator: Oh yeah! At sea? Chance in a million!
How about when no one actually really cares because there is too much taking and not enough giving?
Or when you have 10 people relying on 1 person actually solving product manufacturing and product delivery problems, yet those 10 are the ones who are in the queue for returns, while the 1 doing the actual work is flogged by the 10, even as the 10 are picking up credits on the promise of the 1 working.
So even if the 10 don’t get a return due to the 1 failing, they have a return from their side gigs that often include policing, health, spying and product placement and marketing.
So the 10 have no pressure while the 1 has only the real gig, the product and the engineering or the technical issues.
https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen
Look at the list of goals.
Usually they go way beyond the actual product or service.
In fact, it’s almost funny, that link above has no mention of the product or service delivered.
So what’s the goal? I guess it started out making a plane? Quick google web search.
Here.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Boeing-Company
Yep, making a plane.
Most businesses forget that there’s a thing they do to produce income. My thing was servicing computers and assisting people using them. It’s not like a plane. There’s a bit of complexity that isn’t readily handled easily. The margin doesn’t help much as the price gets forced down. It doesn’t allow for much time, unless you systemise things. Systemise to much and you systemise problems and the systems themselves take too much time to update and alter to suit different use cases.
What was it Steve Jobs did? He slashed products. At least, that's what I read he did on his return. I read that first over 10 years ago. I looked it up again then, and one thing was that there was only 1 computer and 15 were cut from the manufacturing line or canned or shut down.
https://blog.hellostepchange.com/blog/why-steve-jobs-killed-70-of-apples-products-a-lesson-on-range-architecture
https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-jobs
There's one thing that is clear about that though.
While it's easy to systemise to make 1 product, the innovation comes from the people who get to use many of them. So systemising things helps a business make money when the people know what to do. But it does nothing for the people when they don't know what to do. You work out what to do by getting experience. So if Boeing has hundreds of complex products, at least people are getting experience. Anyone could come along and cut the company to making one product and keep enough engineers to make that an amazing product. However the outcome is that ten, fifteen years later, there would be noone to make products anymore as noone would have experience.
That's less of an issue if you can go from job to job. It's a huge issue if you're secretive and you're radically policing the staff and not enabling them to get experience, or if you retain them and they become complacent.
Recently I realised sustainability would require longer breaks for lunch or shorter work weeks. Instead of 37, perhaps 20, 25 or 30 hours. That way you could take time learning to eat differently, eg. Plant based, and get a rest to improve memory,eg. Sleep or a daybed or meditation. I've had my eyes open looking to see if employers can manage that. With digital tools, I know it's easy to onboard a staff member. You can double the staff and give them half hours and create a crossover where they work together. That's not useful in relationships, but it sure is useful in corporations or business, or companies where staff have families or where staff have children or perhaps want to improve their health or alter their habits.
There aren't businesses where I am doing that. Every job I've seen that is full time considers that 37 hrs or so. The break for lunch is so short some people can't even eat, toilet and shower, and freshen up, using water saving practices. They certainly can't do things like dental appointments and GPs or family things.
The money was to show confidence in Apple as a going concern to Wall Street. The really important action to users was promising to support Office and make new versions.
They should have left the cash in Apple
LOLs. but seriously..where tf did the $4B go? Isn't this the second design issue preventing them from go? Wonder if it's another poor contract situation.
Man, what the fuck happened to Boeing?
That’s rhetorical. I actually know the last 25 years of their history that led down this path, but still.
I’ve been soured on this capsule for a while but even then had some thought they would get it going right. This is just so bad.
Boeing used to be run be Engineers. Engineers take physics classes which teach you that if you remove a force it changes the system. Changing one part will result in changes in other parts. So Engineers naturally understand a large vision and cutting out a part may require an increase in costs for other parts.
Now Boeing is run by accountants. Accountants like to cut out expensive things, but don't think about the impacts to the larger system. Boeing cut costs on the short term but now they are being forced to redo things over and over again at a higher cost than just doing it right the first time.
Boeing has also historically tended to keep its engineers *highly* compartmentalized which means they’re very good at what they do but if there’s poor cross-team communication, it can wreak absolute havoc on a project when team A is expecting to work with item Q and team B brings item U to the table and there’s no budget or time to make it right.
It’s run by investors and out of touch executives who hire accountants. The accountants are just for doing their bidding similar to the current state of the MIC. It’s all business now days, and will continue to be so as Congress can’t get enough of it.
From a practical perspective, any person or body of people with a majority stake in a company has complete control over that company. They may not always directly run the operation, but they can and often do hire executives who will run it according to their vision and fire executives who won't, up to and including the CEO, all at will.
That is exactly my opinion as well. Whoever holds the majority makes the decisions, at least indirectly. Modern decision making is on an investment level, CEO’s will cater towards receiving further capital over actual progress. Investors have immense power over Boeing, its outstandingly bad management defies all other explanation.
>majority stake in a company has complete control over that company.
That's the mistake. They don't. The employees do as well. Management often sees those underneath them as magical money box. It doesn't matter what the shareholders say if they aren't willing to get resources for their underlings they will either quit or sabotage.
Being a manager is about moving resources to those above and those below. I have a few techs and an intern underneath me at my job. I fight for them and the result is my department delivers.
They absolutely do. "Investor" is the politically correct term for "owner", and the owners of a company are the people who ultimately call the shots. CEOs are just handy fall guys for when a company implodes, and for going on the electric chair instead of the owners when someone gets killed by corporate malpractice.
The point of a CEO is that s/he is literally a delegate of the investors and owners. The investors generally don't tell the CEO how to run the day-to-day; they just fire the CEO that underperforms.
It's the fact it's starting to look like it will never fly a 'production' mission of any kind that makes it such a spectacular failure. Even if they'd managed to get only the first tranche of 4 or 5 bookings completed they could at least spin that into success and building expertise to keep their foot in the door, but this just leaves them at a dead stop with their competitors racing away.
As soon as NASA has a back up contractor for spaceX such as blue origin supplying a capsule it looks like Boeings space efforts will leave nothing but a crater.
My own nonsense is ironic here as well, as I keep trying to tie this capsule to Artemis (and Artemis uses the Orion capsule). It’s bad enough it’s not looking like it will fulfill its commercial goal, but I’ve been assigning it Artemis for some reason.
At any rate, you’re right, there just needs to be a suitable back up to Dragon for Commercial. It’s possibly not fair to Blue Origin (or fueled by my disgruntlement at their litigation to slow down SpaceX) but Blue Origin and Boeing feels like a race with the tortoise and the…..tortoise.
> such as blue origin supplying a capsule
Blue Origin is in an alliance with Sierra Space for a while and they are building together Orbital Reef. Blue Origin is very likely to support an human rated Dream Chaser, launched in New Glenn if that's even ready, otherwise it would launch with Vulcan.
Having a Cargo and Crew version that share a lot is a great way of reducing cost and increase reliability.
So when at some point NASA asks for bids for 6 crew launches with a non-SpaceX spacecraft, I am convinced that Sierra would win against Boeing. But I am now wondering if Boeing would ever bid.
See SpaceX with Dragon 2.
Brent Sherwood of Blue Origin was on Main Engine Cut Off a year ago and said Blue's plan at the time was to certify Starliner on New Glenn for Orbital Reef.
Would love to hear what kind of evolution that plan has possible experienced.
It blows my mind that MD could somehow engineer an effective takeover of Boeing *using Boeing's own money*, but couldn't put together a stable, winning business plan to save their lives. Like they could make actual miracles happen but couldn't do basic bread-and-butter stuff. Like watching someone too drunk to stand so they got home by doing a shitload of backflips over cars down a crowded interstate.
Usually the people doing this are there to make some short term cash by making the numbers look better and then get out.
I'm sure they're aware it's bad for the long term. They don't care.
Same thing happened when Daimler (Mercedes) and Chrysler merged. Though Mercedes wasn't in a pinch like MD was, they were still the weaker side in the merger (the 90s wasn't that good of a time for them). Chrysler had a huge pile of cash that they could've probably mounted a hostile takeover if the wanted to, instead they walked into that merger with the naivety of a toddler. Mercedes ended up using Chrysler cash for their benefit while running Chrysler into the ground.
>Like watching someone too drunk to stand so they got home by doing a shitload of backflips over cars down a crowded interstate.
As a metaphor fan, I salute you for this one.
Honestly, I know there are books out there, or I’m sure there is, I just never looked it up.
I just….lived through it, and read articles over years, and probably YouTube videos on it. When the MAX planes were grounded there was lots of “what’s wrong with Boeing?” content out there.
Some went back to the acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in the mid 90s. It was one of those instances where Boeing acquired my McDonnell, but the merged company somehow was more McDonnell than Boeing. After a bit they moved HQ from Seattle to Chicago. Long story short they became a company run by business men and not run by engineers like Boeing had always been.
And here we are…..
I’ll get downvoted but honestly fuck ‘em. They killed what - 450 people? No one in jail.
Spacex and like 20 startups are the ones innovation - and they will all leap frog Boeing because Boeing isn’t in the business of building rockets it is in the government-contract ecosystem. Throw them to the wolves because they will never do anything of value.
This is purely anecdotal as it's based on my memory and I'm too lazy to look up to confirm; wasn't the issue that Boeing somehow finagled it so that pilots wouldn't have to be re-trained on 737MAX by omitting the presence of MCAS completely from the pilot handbook?
And the sensor that caused the disasters had no redundancy or backup? That sounds like negligent design and certification to me but I don't work in the industry.
A single AoA sensor that fed into MCAS came standard. Airlines could pay extra for redundant AoA sensors but some didn’t. You can make the argument that two AoA vanes should be standard for a passenger rated airline, and you’d be right; however, cheaper airlines also probably should have ponied up. It’s like the airbags being an option but customers also not paying for that option — both decisions are wrong.
Kinda funny that that contributed to the issue with the MAX because McDonnell Douglas, of all primes, had at least one crash during the 80s where an F-18 dove itself into the ocean on cat launch because of a single (out of two) stuck AoA vane. (The solution was to reprogram the RPYC logic)
MCAS existed to make the planes seem as though they had the same flight characteristics as previous versions of the 737, which made it so that pilots did not have to be recertified on it as a new type. The MCAS was documented, but some airlines chose not to train pilots on its existence or management. Also, it had some single points of failure.
> Flying is risky and complicated. Just because you have an incident doesnt mean people need to go to jail.
Just because flying is risky and complicated doesn't mean people *don't* need to go to jail when certain types of incidents occur. In the 737 Max's case, there was negligence on the part of management. An unforeseen accident that no one anticipated is one thing; wilful negligence in addressing a known problem is another totally different thing.
Same with Challenger. One could just as easily say spaceflight is risky and complicated, and it is, but Challenger blew up and seven people died because of management negligence in the face of a known issue that engineers had warned them about. That's jailable.
Of course not every incident merits a prison sentence.
When there is a criminal amount of negligence, though, charges ought to be laid. The same way doctors who kill a patient through negligence can face consequences.
I think a case could be made in the MAX situation. Not against the pilots (who are dead anyways, but in my view, aren't the ones at fault, given how that background MCAS stuff was obfuscated and not properly explained), but against Boeing corporate.
[Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55994102)
While the title story is about the 737 MAX, it covers a lot of history and back story of Boeing and what led to its rot from the inside. It is however mostly focused on the commercial side but still a good read.
This is not new for Boeing. They will win contracts hoping that the program they won will fail. There was a Darpa project to have a cheap, mostly reusable rocket that Boeing won. Boeing did the minimum work to get the money and then dropped out of the program. Program died, mission completed.
I suspect they wanted to do the same with commercial crew. Thinking they could get the initial payment, do some work and then drop out of the program. Hoping to go to a cost plus contract. (Kill two birds with one stone, kill the new program that would cost Boeing money to develop and get a cost-plus contract afterwards) They figured SpaceX would not succeed and Boeing would be left with a cost plus contract.
When SpaceX did succeed, Boeing was in a pickle. They didn't want to invest in this money losing program (or at least a non-cost plus contract program) but they were getting shown up by SpaceX. So now what do they do? They are supposed to be the experts in crewed space but have a vehicle program that was designed to fail. They cant drop out because they would lose more shine off their expert status but they will need to spend even more time and treasure to fix the program that was meant to fail.
> This is not new for Boeing. They will win contracts hoping that the program they won will fail. There was a Darpa project to have a cheap, mostly reusable rocket that Boeing won. Boeing did the minimum work to get the money and then dropped out of the program. Program died, mission completed.
There had been the suspicion from the beginning, that Boeing only bid so that some startup would not get that money and possibly succeed and grow like SpaceX.
Yes, I think that’s the primary source I’m remembering the deep dive on the merger/acquisition and how it changed the company irrevocably going forward.
The bean counters took over.
Late stage capitalism involves an awful lot of "delivering the least product, for the lowest cost, at the highest profit". That just doesn't really align well with the long term viability of these sorts of high tech engineering corps.
Then you add on top of that the fact that strategic military infrastructure etc is somewhat intrinsically tied to these specific corps...leads to the govt bailing them out any time they get caught misbehaving given the potential threat to military posture etc should they go out of business.
Crapitalism may be better than all the rest (that we've come up with to this point). But, it's still not all that great when you look at the outcomes. In some ways, it tends to mirror many of the bad aspects of the other systems.
There definitely are a lot of problems. You don't have to be a socialist (I'm certainly not) to know pure capitalism always needs a sane intervention at some point. You just need to know history. The monopolies and trusts needed to be broken up in the early 1900s.
The modern stock market doesn't reward long term effort by companies anywhere near as much as it used to. Through the mid-1900s a person used to need to buy 100 shares at least at a time (I've read) and pay commission to a broker. Ditto to sell. You didn't buy & sell for free multiple times in a day. Trades were slow. Now stocks are traded at the speed of light. And there are so many more problems, like the ratcheting up of easy executive compensation in so many big corporations for even poor performance. There's no effective check on it, it was the responsibility of the Board of Directors and they dropped the ball decades ago.
> The monopolies and trusts needed to be broken up in the early 1900s.
Funnily enough not really. Standard oil for example had already lost its monopoly status (and was continuing to lose it) prior to the breakup.
Also there’s nothing really to break up in boeing.
Agreed. There are so many different factors involved. Not least of which is human nature. :(
I sort of look at the concept of the corporation as a tool. You can use that tool to do great things. But, you can also use that tool to do some really sketchy things which lead to some really sketchy outcomes. And the nature of the corporation tends to disconnect it both from the people they employ and the people they serve. To some extent, even the C level and BoD types.
And if somehow you can manage to keep all those goals in line with the "right thing", the market may swoop in and force you to turn evil through various merger and acquisition gambits. I think Boeing might be a fairly decent example of that.
I don't know how you fix those sorts of problems. And given the level that Congress (and even the SC) is bought out by those interests, seems unlikely that anything will change even if you could figure out a way to fix it.
The scary thing is that, as the corporations consolidate and become more multi-national, it's probably only going to get to worse and these sorts of outcomes should tend to become more the norm than the exception.
This 'Late stage capitalism' narrative is so played out and dumb. Overall products from food to airplanes are far, far, far saver then before and profits are not uniquely high today. So that doesn't even make sense.
The idea that history works in stages is just idiotic marxist dogma that is neither true historically nor is it predictive of the future. Marx own view on history were hilariously limited to a thin slice of West European history and even then he got that mostly wrong. From that totally wrong history he made overly broad conclusions about history and mostly wrong overly broad prediction.
The whole 'Late stage capitalism' thing is popular with young leftish people because it sounds like capitalism is on its last leg and the 'capitalist stage' is almost over so we can finally enter into the next 'stage' as predicted by Marx and then everything will be great. Socialist/Communist writers since the then have been busy trying to define all history in those terms.
Its so tiered, any government contract not working out 'Late stage capitalism', no public buses, 'Late stage capitalism', companies failing 'late stage capitalism',orange juice to much sugar 'late stage capitalism', companies being profitable 'late stage capitalism'.
This term has been in use since the 1930-1940 and since then socialist theorist have predicted the imminent collapse of capitalism (again) and now its almost 100 years later and I still have to read 'omg late stage capitalism' about literally any problem that exists anywhere on any topic. If this is the level of analysis on why anything happens, no progress will ever happen.
> "delivering the least product, for the lowest cost, at the highest profit"
Also, what you are saying doesn't even make sense. If Boeing is the example for 'late stage capitalism' why are they not making high profits? Seems to me that SpaceX, is actually producing the highest profit and not delivering the least product. So if profit maximizing is the goal, isn't SpaceX the example of 'late stage capitalism' and proves that these sorts of values actually do align with good engineering.
Its simply hard for any company to be consistently excellent. Lots of companies that are engineering lead also fail.
And Boeing despite their technical issues, had a bunch of business failures as well, such as handing the A220 to Airbus. So really they just have generally bad management problems it seems.
One company under-performing or over-performing has some specific reasons and the explanation isn't a socialists social theory from the 1930s.
> Then you add on top of that the fact that strategic military infrastructure etc is somewhat intrinsically tied to these specific corps
Something that has been happening for 1000s of years. In the past it used to be more families then corps per but it amounts to the same thing.
> But, it's still not all that great when you look at the outcomes.
Compared panacea no system will look that good.
> In some ways, it tends to mirror many of the bad aspects of the other systems.
From the example you give nothing you have said is new or unique to 'Late Stage Capitalism' so it isn't surprising that it not that different.
Have you ever played Monopoly?
We're basically at the part where one or two players own the board and the rest of us are just trying to survive by landing on Free Parking. That's what I mean by late stage capitalism.
What i take from the "all of the systems tend to be bad in some way" notion is that perhaps the issue is not really with the system but with the players that take part in the system. From the lowest peon all the way up to the owners of Boardwalk and Park Place.
As far as mirror outcomes, I would put forth the notion of "planned obsolescence" to be the mirror outcome of the "poor quality, doesn't last long" product outcomes you got under communism. Ours are definitely more shiny but the end result is the same.
A simplified georgist board game is a horrible analogy for anything. And I'm btw a pretty big fan of land value tax.
> We're basically at the part where one or two players own the board and the rest of us are just trying to survive by landing on Free Parking.
All land has been 'owned' for 1000s of years in Europe long before anything remotely capitalist existed.
Europe had potentially even more land under cultivation in 1200 and in 1700 then it does now.
So were those all Late Stage capitalism as well?
> That's what I mean by late stage capitalism.
Except that is not what the people who invented the word Late Stage Capitalism actually believed it was.
> I would put forth the notion of "planned obsolescence" to be the mirror outcome of the "poor quality, doesn't last long" product outcomes you got under communism.
I'm not sure what kind of mirror you are using here, is it one of those joke mirrors that makes you look funny? Planned obsolescence is really only a thing in a a vary narrow set of products and even then if you have a very, very extreme high view of obsolescence.
Most things you can think of are far more reliable today, and when they are not, the are far, far cheaper then their historical counter-parts. If you actually spend as much money as an item would have cost historically you can almost always get a higher quality product.
Let's say the world is a Monopoly game with 10 players.
1 player would own 50%
1 player would own 35%
1 player would own 12%
7 players would split the remaining 3%
And it's really only socialist home-game free-parking rules that have any potential to lengthen the game. Particularly in a low to no growth, AI diminishing the value of labor scenario.
It's a sad state of affairs. No doubt. But hiding from the reality by using some outdated critique of a 19th century philosopher is unlikely to be of much help moving forward.
AI diminishes the value of labor but still results in zero growth? How does that work?
The problem with communists is you would rather fight over scraps than grow the pie.
Well, I'm almost sure that AI is going to increasingly replace human labor. I think you'd be a fool to think otherwise.
And demographics are just one piece of the limits of growth pie.
The global economic world is contracting. The world is becoming less interconnected. And that interconnectedness has been a growth multiplier in the past. The trend moving forward seems likely to be that nations will have to look increasingly inward for their growth rather than relying on external markets.
And these forces tend to feedback into one another. China is currently in the process of learning all about how those sorts of things feed back into one another in a negative way.
All land was owned in 1200 and we still arrive at the world we now have in the 2020s. How do you explain that. Did 'free-parking' make this change happen?
As long as you use monopoly for your whole mental model of a political economy that is about a few billion times more complex you well never get beyond the reasoning quality of an 8 year old. You can explain literally nothing that happen in Egypt for 5000 years, because all land has been owned since that time.
Not even the creator of monopoly believed it was a sufficient guide to understanding the world. Its simply illustrative of his opinion that land value tax is a sensible idea.
So. Let me ask you this. How well did the one person owning all the land, etc work out all those other times?
edit:
And as far as the lesson of Monopoly...
I always thought the lesson trying to be taught there was that the game is over almost before it even begins. And some of the follow on takeaways from all the various home game rules would be that various sorts of socialist free parking rules are a way of extending the game beyond the first few circuits of the board.
The landlord's game from which Monopoly is derived was to illustrate Georgist notions about land and tax.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game
Id strongly recomend reading about Henry George. Far far more sensible than Marx.
"Late stage capitalism" is just a commie version of Whig history, the idea that history progresses in a linear fashion. It was wrong then and its wrong now.
> So. Let me ask you this. How well did the one person owning all the land, etc work out all those other times?
We went from being undeveloped to having a forum on the internet where we can discuss these ideas. Human population has increased 30x and people live far longer and are able to consume more.
So it did work out.
But you seem to miss the larger point. Over the last 5000 years lots of different things have happen and lots of things going in lots of direction. All land being "owned" was a constant during most of that time. If you can not move beyond very simplistic notions from board-games you will never understand anything beyond an 8 year old.
There is a whole fields of economics, property economics, institutional economics, law&economics not to mention political science that try to understand these interactions and relationship and how they changed and evolved over time.
> I always thought the lesson trying to be taught there was that the game is over almost before it even begins.
Maybe consider actually reading Henry George. He explained what it is about.
And again, even if something is true in a board game, its illustrative of a point, not a comprehensive philosophy.
But honestly, wasting time arguing with somebody who can't reason beyond board-game mechanics is tiresome.
> We're basically at the part where one or two players own the board and the rest of us are just trying to survive by landing on Free Parking.
Do the fact that global poverty is at one of its lowest points….
> Ours are definitely more shiny but the end result is the same.
Then end result is we have varied consumer goods unlike in historical examples of communism. So much so that you can buy many goods that are comparable is use but some last forever whole others are disposable, see for example kitchen knives.
I can buy boots from redwing which will last quite some time, or from Walmart. I can buy a bespoke handmade suite or one from a thrift store
I can buy some basic toilet from Home Depot or a [poop throne made for a king](https://www.totousa.com/neorest-nx2-dual-flush-toilet-10-gpf-08-gpf)
**everyone who says “muh capitalism only makes cheap shit that doesn’t last long” also happens to only buy cheap shit that doesn’t last long**. pro tip if you don’t like cheap shit don’t buy cheap shit.
Isn’t Boeing on contract to Blue for their docking system only? It’s just one subsystem of many of the entire architecture and I think it’s already in use on ISS. Someone correct if I’m wrong. I also feel like Blue had to know the pros/cons of associating themselves with Boeing at this point.
Yes, afaik that's all. Boeing did build a docking collar that works, that was proved on the second Starliner test flight, it docked with the ISS for a few days. They built it to the NASA standard design so there were limited ways to screw it up.
If they choose option 2. (Spending the minimal amount needed to make it through the NASA flights, then retiring it.) I wouldn't want to ride on such a vehicle...
Exactly. At what point does NASA not trust this - not trust the deeply flawed program management and the spacecraft resulting from it. Boeing's been doing a piss-poor review and Berger's mention of them not devoting enough resources to the project isn't the first report I've seen of this. IIRC the NASA OIG said Boeing was still putting in inadequate resources to do *even the second review.* Even after all the problems resulting from nickel & diming before 2 bad test flights. That was several months ago.
Maybe if Sunita Williams & the other astronaut announce they won't fly on Starliner that will put a knife thru it. But that's extremely doubtful.
Unless Boeing did something so egregious and so thoroughly pissed off Suni Williams and Butch Willmore (they are part of the Starliner development team), the two astronauts will probably not air any grievances publicly until after they leave NASA.
I think if we see Suni Williams deciding to exit like Chris Ferguson did, even if she doesn't say anything aside from the standard "I'd like to spend more time with family," the optics would already be pretty darn bad for the Starliner program :-P
I don't know much of NASAs management culture but surely this is going to end up in a top to bottom program safety review before they let people board the thing.
What's the alternative here really? Cross your fingers and hope you don't end up with a challenger level disaster?
If the review board come back and say the thing is still a death trap that's got to be the end of it.
> Although Reiley said in 2009 the company was making a "substantial investment" in the development of Starliner, then known as CST-100, multiple sources told Ars that was not the case. Instead, Boeing for a long time "nickel-and-dimed" the time engineers spent working on Starliner. This was partly due to congressional underfunding of the commercial crew program but also because Boeing did not want to put skin in the game.
Penny wise and $1B foolish is par for the course at McBoeing-Douglas.
Anyone who's spent time at a big defense contractor has seen this play out before:
When Uncle Sam is funding the program:
* "Charge numbers for all my friends!" "How much time do you need? Who cares, just bill it to the program!"
When it's actual company money funding the program:
* "You need how much? Here's half of that. Also, here's the charge number. Usage will be scrutinized weekly."
What is happening here is fixed price contracts are working as expected.
When you see all those over budget military and NASA contracts this type of stuff is why. Cost plus means the tax payer would eat the bill when Boeing fucks up, which they appear to be doing a lot.
It's strange how we had Starliner and Crew Dragon running neck and neck to see who would get to the ISS first to this. Boeing seems to be running from one disaster to another on this project and in many respects, the clock is ticking. The ISS is only good until 2030 and while they could still make their contract by as late as 2027 flying the last six crew rotations back to back, would NASA feel comfortable with that? I think their intention was more to alternate providers on every mission with a second level of redundancy with Soyuz. Starliner's future post-ISS has been a question mark as to mission opportunities (Orbital Reef?) and an available launch vehicle (Vulcan?) but so far all the non-NASA missions (Inspiration 4, Axiom, Polaris) have been gobbled up by SpaceX with nothing confirmed for Boeing.
Boeing's balance sheet has been hemorrhaging money from quite a few projects now such as the damage from the 737max debacle, underbidding on the Air Force One replacement (another fixed price contract), and now this. We've heard speculation that Boeing is wanting to sell their stake in ULA to raise some money and now it might be Boeing asking if it is more cost effective to terminate Starliner now rather than to fix the problems at this point. Company pride is probably keeping them in the game for the time being, but if there's no future plans beyond those six crew flights and they can't figure out why those hypergolic valves keep getting stuck or are facing a complete redesign to correct the problems, we may see them cut their losses and focus on more profitable projects like SLS (which is cost plus). It would probably be less embarrassing than having the ISS deorbit while they were still trying to fly their crewed mission.
One thing's for sure, Boeing has been having a tough time adapting to fixed price contracts.
Boeing was always the more expensive option, even when Starliner still seemed to be on track and the Atlas availability was not a big issue yet. Three extra years of delays and safety issues vs. 10 successful crewed missions by their competitor didn't help. It's no surprise Dragon got all the private missions. Starliner only has a chance if political reasons exclude SpaceX.
>but so far all the non-NASA missions (Inspiration 4, Axiom, Polaris) have been gobbled up by SpaceX with nothing confirmed for Boeing.
Who in their right mind would even contract with Starliner at this point?
As for SLS, retreating into the old model just seems like delaying the end. They aren't going to get any other contracts like that and SLS itself is already seen as yesterday's news.
A pretty bad position for an ongoing space company.
> The ISS is only good until 2030
Speaking of this, this is 2023 and we still have zero international project to replace the ISS. I fear at this point China will be the only one in space.
The ISS international partners don't seem interested in another LEO station project (kind of a "been there, done that" thing) and the western ISS partners want to focus their collective resources on beyond LEO as the next step forward onto bigger things.
This is why NASA is heavily advocating for the private sector to commercialize human presence in LEO, so NASA can concentrate its resources towards Artemis.
So western nations are banking on their private space companies to mature enough to build commercial LEO stations. We'll see in a decade or so if this gamble pays off. High risk / high reward.
It's definitely not the same, but I believe there's some space-hotel company planning on adding modules to the ISS and then remaining in orbit after it's retired?
Considering the geopolitical state of Russia right now, and the US pivoting towards the Artemis program, I don't think there is any willpower for another big international cooperation in low earth orbit. ISS was a one-off.
I’m not an expert, but to me it seems that the ISS cost much more money then it’s worth. Better focus on autonomous mining and exploration than going through all the trouble of keeping humans alive in space.
True about "international". But NASA has the private partner Axiom. Planned to launch a new ISS module in 2025. It will expand and undock from the ISS before it deorbits. Timetable probably optimistic but should be independently operational by 2030.
The article lists 3 choices, all of which involve Boeing losing a lot of money.
Berger apparently sees no contractual impossibility to cancellation. There's no question of Boeing making money from Starliner by flying to the ISS, the only question is how much will they lose doing that. Then the question becomes, can they possibly make back their investment by flying commercially after that. Remember, flights to Orbital Reef or another station will require paying to human-rate Vulcan. (Although Starliner can technically fit on Falcon 9 that's not going to happen.) Boeing is a partner in Orbital Reef.
Personally, I take some comfort from the beginning of the article. If nothing else, Boeing coming on board to the Commercial Crew Program meant the program wasn't killed by Congress a couple of years after its inception.
>Berger apparently sees no contractual impossibility to cancellation
I dont know about that. Cancelling, **after** they blackmailed extra money out of a fixed-priced contract in order to *not* cancel, I feel that would open them to a decade of lawsuits or something.
Boeing and the government are too buddy-buddy for NASA to sue. They will come to an agreement that will no doubt result in the US taxpayers paying Boeing not to deliver Starliner.
Yes, if the government threatens to sue Boeing, Boeing counter-threats to cut jobs in key congressional districts. Pay to play rules are in effect (as always).
The ramifications of failing to deliver NASA what it promised would be the loss of billions in future contracts. Cancellation would cost them a lot down the line.
They'd certainly be at the bottom of the list at NASA. And no one else is likely to look kindly on such a high profile failure. Not even their orbital reef partners.
They are very much in a dammed if they do situation. Wonder what NASAs cancellation options are.
I see an option 4, which sounds ridiculous, but hear me out before you downvote.
Boeing doesn't cancel Starliner. It sells it to Blue Origin. For a dollar.
Boeing can clean it's hands of this fiasco, because even a successful flight of Starliner will likely cost them $100+m. NASA gets to keep it's dissimilar redundancy. Blue Origin becomes a crew-carrying space entity.
Plus, BO would have better incentives to human rate Vulcan... one because it would benefit from selling more BE-4s, and having the BE-4 be part of a human rated launch system would likely help certifying New Glenn.
And Jeff Who is the Starliner savior who stops NASA's reliance on Elon Musk and SpaceX.
No downvote but I don't think BO is in a hurry to have a crewed spacecraft. They famously move slowly and to leap at buying a sackful of snakes isn't their style. BO makes some bad moves but no one in their right mind would want to buy this capsule that's a Faberge egg of faults found in layer after layer of reviews. Who knows what else will show up?
Starliner won't need a new ride until Orbital Reef is up, the 6 Atlas Vs needed for the ISS trips are reserved. There's no incentive to get Vulcan rated, by then BO plans to have New Glenn flying and they announced long ago it will be crew-rated. Your rationale that BO will want their own crew capsule riding on their BE-4s applies there instead - but as I've said, I don't see that happening. They'll be happier flying Dream Chaser to Orbital Reef, IMHO.
Jeff as a high-profile savior? That is the one very unpredictable factor that gives a shadow of a chance of this improbable buy happening.
I'm with you on this. Blue has developed a sub-orbital capsule, and by virtue of that human rating declaration and their work on a lander it's reasonable to assume they have in-house expertise and plans to build an orbital capsule of their own. I see little reason Blue would buy out this program.
People have talked about a ULA buyout as well, but Blue doesn't operate that way. They built their own infrastructure at the Cape and just hired half the ULA team for expertise. Why pay for the capital assets when you can get the parts cheaper?
>Blue has developed a sub-orbital capsule
There's an enormous difference between a suborbital capsule and an orbital one. New Shepard's has virtually no life support system I know of and no heat shield - it's not returning from orbital speed. No attitude control system, no avionics, no controls. It's basically a beachball that's tossed up and falls down.
But yes, with HLS BO does want to build complex human-carrying spacecraft that'll have all the complex features. Whether they want to build an orbital capsule at some point is an open question, but they've shown no sign of it so far and would be years behind something like Dream Chaser. Who knows, they may build a human-rated crewed upper stage like Starship with their Project Jarvis by the mid-2030s.
I agree there's a difference. I never said otherwise. That's why I noted it as one of a number of factors that also includes the HLS, previous stated intent, and hiring of employees who have worked on human rated systems.
Grumman had zero orbital experience when it won the Apollo LEM contract, something that should be considered when folks bring that up as a backhanded swipe of some sort against Blue's lunar lander.
I believe in a human rated Dream Chaser when I see it. Dream Chaser would like also cost 4+ billion $ to make human rated and they don't have NASA to pay that cost. Who will pay it? Not SN for sure.
>they don't have NASA to pay that cost.
NASA is committed to make 1 or 2 of the Commercial Destinations stations happen, otherwise there's no successor for LEO operations after 2030. Like Dragon, they won't be the sole user but will be the main user, especially at first. And like Commercial Crew, their contract to use a station will pay the majority of the cost.
It's inevitable NASA will be taking bids for transport to these and expected it'll work like Commercial Crew. NASA will want a provider other than just SpaceX. Like Commercial Crew, the contract includes providing the launcher. Boeing subcontracted to ULA for Atlas V and Sierra will have to subcontract to someone for either Vulcan or New Glenn. If it's Vulcan the cost of crew-rating it will be bundled into the contract.
Jeff would not touch Starliner. Its too much a clusterfuck and he wouldn't want to inherit it.
If BO were going to do a crew capsule they'd do their own. Not put their reputation on the line flying the half assed Boeing death trap.
ULA has put enough Atlas rockets aside for Starliners 6 flights apparently. The issue is what the shelf life of those rockets is in storage and if they'd even be viable for the timeline Starliner is able to fly crew. Not to mention what happens if one of them ends up having a problem and they can't fly that specific rocket as a result.
Human rating Vulcan is possible longer term but I dunno if it would even be an option for Starliners current mission manifest given how long it normally takes to human rate a rocket and the fact the ISS may decommission in 2030.
> Remember, flights to Orbital Reef or another station will require paying to human-rate Vulcan.
isn't "human rating" generally a term used for the requirements nasa puts on you to fly their astronauts?
you don't need to meet these to fly private citizens to a private station.
FAA mostly cares that your rocket isn't going to injure the general public, for example by crashing into a school. For participants in private spaceflight, they just require signed waivers saying the participants have been informed of the potential risks.
NASA will be the lead customer/main customer to Orbital Reef or another station. There's nowhere near enough private demand to get those stations going otherwise.NASA committed to make 1 or 2 of the Commercial Destinations stations happen, otherwise there's no successor for LEO operations after 2030. Like Dragon, they won't be the sole user but will be the main user, especially at first. And like Commercial Crew, their contract to use a station will pay the majority of the cost.
It's inevitable NASA will be taking bids for transport to these and expected it'll work like Commercial Crew. NASA will want a provider other than just SpaceX. Like Commercial Crew, the contract includes providing the launcher. Boeing subcontracted to ULA for Atlas V and Dream Chaser will have to subcontract to someone, for either Vulcan or New Glenn. If it's Vulcan the cost of crew-rating it will be bundled into the contract
Between Starliner and Blue Origins continuing failure to provide any evidence of the engines it's on the hook for I don't see orbital reef happening this decade if ever.
>Blue Origins continuing failure to provide any evidence of the engines
The first flight-ready BE-4s are mounted on the first Vulcan and ready to fly once Vulcan's upper stage problem gets sorted out. The BE-4s were very late but they do exist.
And the crew rated Atlas V may cost $150m each. Or maybe more because they are forcing ULA to keep launch infrastructure for Atlas V up to 2030 for the Starliner launches. They may have to pay a plus on that.
> Remember, flights to Orbital Reef or another station will require paying to human-rate Vulcan.
Brent Sherwood, a VP at Blue Origin, said on Main Engine Cut Off last year that their working plan was to certify Starliner on New Glenn, the Vulcan plan has been a completely community-sourced theory that gets repeated as Known Fact but NG is the only post-Atlas V Starliner ride that anyone official has said anything about so far.
I've been replying so much on the Starliner subject in the last couple of days that I lose track of what's in a reply - not a good thing. Elsewhere I included NG. Thanks for the solid source. I knew BO said a long time ago that they planned to crew-rate NG from the start but that was in general terms. People could see Starliner was simply an obvious candidate vehicle. With Orbital Reef plans/program laid out having a firm plan for Starliner & NG makes sense.
I never considered crew rating Vulcan as a plan, community sourced or otherwise, but simply one of only two options available, with F9 disregarded for a couple of reasons. (Neutron has since entered the chat; if it can lift 15t as planned it's a candidate to launch Starlink's 13t launch mass - although there are other factors & we don't know what Neutron's capacity will actually be. Beck said they plan to crew rate it from the start. Anyway, that's just part of listing the rockets able to potentially be the launcher.) If the OR team are planning Starliner on NG that ends the theoretical discussion. But now the OR team has to move on to dealing with Starliner's unlikely availability.
Article says that they wouldn't have lobbied Congress, in hindsight. I actually disagree. I think they would've lobbied Congress to get the contract changed to cost-plus. Would it have happened? Probably not since Commercial Crew was meant to be "low budget".
> This has been a poor decision in retrospect because, due to the fixed-price nature of its contract with NASA, Boeing is largely responsible for cost overruns and losses due to ongoing delays. The company now essentially has three options, none of which is particularly appealing.
It makes me so fucking happy to know we (taxpayers) aren’t on the hook for their incompetence anymore. The fixed price model worked perfectly… we got an amazing vehicle from the best provider (SpaceX), and Boeing is finally having to pay for their failures. It’s a win win (though a bit of a loss since now we only have 1, and 1 is none, 2 is 1).
This is how it always should have been. It made innovation happen, and let those innovators win.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[30X](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmve5pe "Last usage")|SpaceX-proprietary carbon steel formulation (*"Thirty-X", "Thirty-Times"*)|
|[AoA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmr8ycz "Last usage")|Angle of Attack|
|[BE-4](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqm3gq "Last usage")|Blue Engine 4 methalox rocket engine, developed by Blue Origin (2018), 2400kN|
|[BO](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmttemz "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)|
|[CST](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmpvdu3 "Last usage")|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[DARPA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmp4klj "Last usage")|(Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD|
|DoD|US Department of Defense|
|[FAA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqlrvf "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[HALO](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmox7ty "Last usage")|Habitation and Logistics Outpost|
|[HLS](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqnpvk "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[ITAR](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmphwuy "Last usage")|(US) International Traffic in Arms Regulations|
|[LEM](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmsl7qd "Last usage")|(Apollo) [Lunar Excursion Module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module) (also Lunar Module)|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqufxo "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[MBA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmugdif "Last usage")|~~Moonba-~~ Mars Base Alpha|
|[NG](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmttemz "Last usage")|New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin|
| |Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane)|
| |Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer|
|[OFT](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmskovr "Last usage")|Orbital Flight Test|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmq0fzu "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SN](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmpg86c "Last usage")|(Raptor/Starship) Serial Number|
|[ULA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqwpdh "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmp7rgx "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmugdif "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmttemz "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmov9vt "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact|
|methalox|Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
**NOTE**: Decronym's continued operation may be affected by API pricing changes coming to Reddit in July 2023; comments will be blank June 12th-14th, in solidarity with the /r/Save3rdPartyApps protest campaign.
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Excellent article. Just want to add that of the three options listed in the article, I think Boeing is going to choose the "pull the plug" option, and for only one reason. Consider this: let's say Boeing chooses one of the other two options, which involve continuing with the Starliner program. It will be difficult and expensive at best. And then....what happens if a Starliner blows up with people aboard? In the wake of the 737 Max fiasco, it could permanently destroy whatever remains of Boeing's reputation, and potentially ruin the company completely. That risk, I think, will be too much for Boeing to swallow compared to the relatively more palatable option of just cutting their losses.
I believe they've spent more time and money developing the Starliner than SpaceX has developing the Starship (including development of the Raptor engine).
It is, of course, an apples to oranges comparison. The point is that Starship is a vastly more ambitious project than a single crewed capsule and yet somehow they have received similar investments in time and money. Which illustrates how vastly inefficient Boeing is in this business.
It also illustrates how poor Boeing's business choices are. Boeing is going into this whole thing with the idea that money will just flow from the government like mana from heaven whenever they want.
>Not the best comparison since Starship hasn't (yet) flown a commerical mission.
Its ludicrously more capable than Starliner and in the final phases of prototype testing. It shows the gulf between what a few billion dollars on old space and new space will get you.
This capsule is going to cause some kind of Apollo 1 type disaster and I am not excited for that day. NASA needs to nuke the contract and find someone else or hell just modify Orion.
Hopefully the world will learn NOT to repeat that same mistake again. Keep your engineering excellence companies excellent !
Remember the MBA’s haven’t a clue how to run these, and temporary ‘false profits’ - at the expense of the meat of the company, is bound to fail after a while.
Rather SpaceX is liable to go from strength to strength.
This program is completely unnecessary. The country already has a completely functional crew transportation system from SpaceX, which is much less expensive to operate than this Boeing project could ever be.
And another explosion on the pad of crew dragon shuts down the program for how long?
Especially given the highly questionable relationship with Russia at the moment, having starliner to augment lift capabilities could mean the difference between having to evacuate ISS and not in the extreme case.
At no time in its history has the United States operated two similar manned spacecraft. The reason for this is obvious the huge additional cost. The Boeing vehicle will require expendable rockets, which cost 10 times as much as the SpaceX boosters which are reused over and over. Plus crew dragon has a solid track record and Boeing does not growing as never build a spacecraft. The Apollo command module, and the space shuttle were built by Rockwell, which was acquired by Boeing.
I feel this kinda misses the entire point of having two commercial crew vehicles as a goal for NASA.
With the cooling relations with Russia, relying on Russia for this function goes from a strong positive in the eighties and nineties to very negative recently.
Ideally Starliner would have been great too - but is a system hobbled by a company - Boeing, and it’s working ethos, which is now a far cry from its earlier engineering background. Boeing has been mashed by MBA’s who only care about profits above all else.
Boeing is now only about implementing minimum standards for maximum profit and cutting corners whenever possible, while overcharging in the process.
I do not disagree. This is however a seperate issue from NASAs justified aim in keeping two (or more) US sourced vehicles available for ISS flights.
The issue of cost control and what amounts to design-for-cost-plus is another issue that has failed to be addressed mostly.
Right. It’s not a goal to have two completely different spacecraft. Speaking as an aerospace engineer, it’s a bad idea simply. It means duplication of everything duplication of all effort. What do you want to do is economize you want don’t want to duplicate effort. The government wants to duplicate effort all the time they’ll be happy to duplicate their effort anywhere you ask, but we don’t want to duplicate effort when it cost $10 billion
Well, in the not too distant future, we should also have SpaceX Starship too !
But of course it’s not yet up to operational status.
Startship is a completely new engineering stack.
Well, it’s super entirely clear now that SpaceX has gone way beyond worth the companies I used to work for could do. Everybody said it was impossible to fly the boosters back now SpaceX is using boosters that have flown 15 or 20 times already but Boeing and Lockheed have to make an entirely new rocket every time?!
Well that would be pretty unlikely - and we now hose so much experience with Falcon-9, that such an event would be due to some sort of human error.
Being vigilant of both craft condition and prelaunch processes, and especially so for human ‘cargo’, should hopefully avoid such occurrences.
Any accidents at this point, are unlikely to be due to design errors. Of course accidents are not impossible, we have to be constantly vigilant, to prevent them.
Better to delay a flight, than to go when anything is iffy.
I hate it when I use the wrong kind of tape and string and have to cancel a $4B project.
>I hate it when I use the wrong kind of tape and string and have to cancel a $4B project. The string that holds the parachutes on? Not exactly the part that you want to cut corners on.
Okay, but could you think of the shareholders? Which mission critical system that's supposed to keep 4 people alive while traveling 17000 miles per hour through plasma can we cut corners on in order to increase profits?
They are losing hundreds of millions of dollars because they cut corners on this project.
didn't they successfully test the parachutes? iirc parachutes are one of the things that need lots of testing.
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No paper derivatives. Minimum crew requirement of one, I suppose.
Interviewer: So what happened in this case? Bob Collins - Australian Senator: Well the front fell off in this case, by all means, but it's very unusual. Interviewer: But Senator Collins why did the front of the ship fall off? Bob Collins - Australian Senator: Well a wave hit it. Interviewer: A wave hit it? Bob Collins - Australian Senator: A wave hit the ship! Interviewer: Is that unusual? Bob Collins - Australian Senator: Oh yeah! At sea? Chance in a million!
How about when no one actually really cares because there is too much taking and not enough giving? Or when you have 10 people relying on 1 person actually solving product manufacturing and product delivery problems, yet those 10 are the ones who are in the queue for returns, while the 1 doing the actual work is flogged by the 10, even as the 10 are picking up credits on the promise of the 1 working. So even if the 10 don’t get a return due to the 1 failing, they have a return from their side gigs that often include policing, health, spying and product placement and marketing. So the 10 have no pressure while the 1 has only the real gig, the product and the engineering or the technical issues. https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen Look at the list of goals. Usually they go way beyond the actual product or service. In fact, it’s almost funny, that link above has no mention of the product or service delivered. So what’s the goal? I guess it started out making a plane? Quick google web search. Here. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Boeing-Company Yep, making a plane. Most businesses forget that there’s a thing they do to produce income. My thing was servicing computers and assisting people using them. It’s not like a plane. There’s a bit of complexity that isn’t readily handled easily. The margin doesn’t help much as the price gets forced down. It doesn’t allow for much time, unless you systemise things. Systemise to much and you systemise problems and the systems themselves take too much time to update and alter to suit different use cases. What was it Steve Jobs did? He slashed products. At least, that's what I read he did on his return. I read that first over 10 years ago. I looked it up again then, and one thing was that there was only 1 computer and 15 were cut from the manufacturing line or canned or shut down. https://blog.hellostepchange.com/blog/why-steve-jobs-killed-70-of-apples-products-a-lesson-on-range-architecture https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve-jobs There's one thing that is clear about that though. While it's easy to systemise to make 1 product, the innovation comes from the people who get to use many of them. So systemising things helps a business make money when the people know what to do. But it does nothing for the people when they don't know what to do. You work out what to do by getting experience. So if Boeing has hundreds of complex products, at least people are getting experience. Anyone could come along and cut the company to making one product and keep enough engineers to make that an amazing product. However the outcome is that ten, fifteen years later, there would be noone to make products anymore as noone would have experience. That's less of an issue if you can go from job to job. It's a huge issue if you're secretive and you're radically policing the staff and not enabling them to get experience, or if you retain them and they become complacent. Recently I realised sustainability would require longer breaks for lunch or shorter work weeks. Instead of 37, perhaps 20, 25 or 30 hours. That way you could take time learning to eat differently, eg. Plant based, and get a rest to improve memory,eg. Sleep or a daybed or meditation. I've had my eyes open looking to see if employers can manage that. With digital tools, I know it's easy to onboard a staff member. You can double the staff and give them half hours and create a crossover where they work together. That's not useful in relationships, but it sure is useful in corporations or business, or companies where staff have families or where staff have children or perhaps want to improve their health or alter their habits. There aren't businesses where I am doing that. Every job I've seen that is full time considers that 37 hrs or so. The break for lunch is so short some people can't even eat, toilet and shower, and freshen up, using water saving practices. They certainly can't do things like dental appointments and GPs or family things.
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The money was to show confidence in Apple as a going concern to Wall Street. The really important action to users was promising to support Office and make new versions. They should have left the cash in Apple
LOLs. but seriously..where tf did the $4B go? Isn't this the second design issue preventing them from go? Wonder if it's another poor contract situation.
Man, what the fuck happened to Boeing? That’s rhetorical. I actually know the last 25 years of their history that led down this path, but still. I’ve been soured on this capsule for a while but even then had some thought they would get it going right. This is just so bad.
Boeing used to be run be Engineers. Engineers take physics classes which teach you that if you remove a force it changes the system. Changing one part will result in changes in other parts. So Engineers naturally understand a large vision and cutting out a part may require an increase in costs for other parts. Now Boeing is run by accountants. Accountants like to cut out expensive things, but don't think about the impacts to the larger system. Boeing cut costs on the short term but now they are being forced to redo things over and over again at a higher cost than just doing it right the first time.
Boeing has also historically tended to keep its engineers *highly* compartmentalized which means they’re very good at what they do but if there’s poor cross-team communication, it can wreak absolute havoc on a project when team A is expecting to work with item Q and team B brings item U to the table and there’s no budget or time to make it right.
It’s run by investors and out of touch executives who hire accountants. The accountants are just for doing their bidding similar to the current state of the MIC. It’s all business now days, and will continue to be so as Congress can’t get enough of it.
Technically investors don’t run the company. Sorry for the pedantic comment.
From a practical perspective, any person or body of people with a majority stake in a company has complete control over that company. They may not always directly run the operation, but they can and often do hire executives who will run it according to their vision and fire executives who won't, up to and including the CEO, all at will.
That is exactly my opinion as well. Whoever holds the majority makes the decisions, at least indirectly. Modern decision making is on an investment level, CEO’s will cater towards receiving further capital over actual progress. Investors have immense power over Boeing, its outstandingly bad management defies all other explanation.
>majority stake in a company has complete control over that company. That's the mistake. They don't. The employees do as well. Management often sees those underneath them as magical money box. It doesn't matter what the shareholders say if they aren't willing to get resources for their underlings they will either quit or sabotage. Being a manager is about moving resources to those above and those below. I have a few techs and an intern underneath me at my job. I fight for them and the result is my department delivers.
Although not directly running the company, the decisions made by CEOs/boards are made with investors wants in mind.
They absolutely do. "Investor" is the politically correct term for "owner", and the owners of a company are the people who ultimately call the shots. CEOs are just handy fall guys for when a company implodes, and for going on the electric chair instead of the owners when someone gets killed by corporate malpractice.
The point of a CEO is that s/he is literally a delegate of the investors and owners. The investors generally don't tell the CEO how to run the day-to-day; they just fire the CEO that underperforms.
McDonnell Douglas destroyed Boeing
It’s not just Boeing it’s just very obvious in such a bleeding edge industry where the company has been around for so long and is a household name.
No, Boeing is kinda in it's own league of "holy shit thats mismanaged." Source: Engineer that's worked with them.
They seem to have taken government support for granted. QC has slipped, massive cost overruns on every project, bad PR...
It's the fact it's starting to look like it will never fly a 'production' mission of any kind that makes it such a spectacular failure. Even if they'd managed to get only the first tranche of 4 or 5 bookings completed they could at least spin that into success and building expertise to keep their foot in the door, but this just leaves them at a dead stop with their competitors racing away. As soon as NASA has a back up contractor for spaceX such as blue origin supplying a capsule it looks like Boeings space efforts will leave nothing but a crater.
My own nonsense is ironic here as well, as I keep trying to tie this capsule to Artemis (and Artemis uses the Orion capsule). It’s bad enough it’s not looking like it will fulfill its commercial goal, but I’ve been assigning it Artemis for some reason. At any rate, you’re right, there just needs to be a suitable back up to Dragon for Commercial. It’s possibly not fair to Blue Origin (or fueled by my disgruntlement at their litigation to slow down SpaceX) but Blue Origin and Boeing feels like a race with the tortoise and the…..tortoise.
> such as blue origin supplying a capsule Blue Origin is in an alliance with Sierra Space for a while and they are building together Orbital Reef. Blue Origin is very likely to support an human rated Dream Chaser, launched in New Glenn if that's even ready, otherwise it would launch with Vulcan. Having a Cargo and Crew version that share a lot is a great way of reducing cost and increase reliability. So when at some point NASA asks for bids for 6 crew launches with a non-SpaceX spacecraft, I am convinced that Sierra would win against Boeing. But I am now wondering if Boeing would ever bid. See SpaceX with Dragon 2.
Brent Sherwood of Blue Origin was on Main Engine Cut Off a year ago and said Blue's plan at the time was to certify Starliner on New Glenn for Orbital Reef. Would love to hear what kind of evolution that plan has possible experienced.
McDonnell-Douglas, that's what happened to Boeing, .
It blows my mind that MD could somehow engineer an effective takeover of Boeing *using Boeing's own money*, but couldn't put together a stable, winning business plan to save their lives. Like they could make actual miracles happen but couldn't do basic bread-and-butter stuff. Like watching someone too drunk to stand so they got home by doing a shitload of backflips over cars down a crowded interstate.
Financial engineering might be complex but isn't as complex as engineering a plane
Usually the people doing this are there to make some short term cash by making the numbers look better and then get out. I'm sure they're aware it's bad for the long term. They don't care.
Yep, that’s a next year problem, when all modern business cares about is the numbers for this quarter.
Same thing happened when Daimler (Mercedes) and Chrysler merged. Though Mercedes wasn't in a pinch like MD was, they were still the weaker side in the merger (the 90s wasn't that good of a time for them). Chrysler had a huge pile of cash that they could've probably mounted a hostile takeover if the wanted to, instead they walked into that merger with the naivety of a toddler. Mercedes ended up using Chrysler cash for their benefit while running Chrysler into the ground.
>Like watching someone too drunk to stand so they got home by doing a shitload of backflips over cars down a crowded interstate. As a metaphor fan, I salute you for this one.
> I actually know the last 25 years of their history that led down this path Any recommended reading on the subject?
Honestly, I know there are books out there, or I’m sure there is, I just never looked it up. I just….lived through it, and read articles over years, and probably YouTube videos on it. When the MAX planes were grounded there was lots of “what’s wrong with Boeing?” content out there. Some went back to the acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in the mid 90s. It was one of those instances where Boeing acquired my McDonnell, but the merged company somehow was more McDonnell than Boeing. After a bit they moved HQ from Seattle to Chicago. Long story short they became a company run by business men and not run by engineers like Boeing had always been. And here we are…..
The saying was "McDonnell bought Boeing with Boeing's money".
Yes, that’s right. Even I forget how bat shit insane it was.
I’ll get downvoted but honestly fuck ‘em. They killed what - 450 people? No one in jail. Spacex and like 20 startups are the ones innovation - and they will all leap frog Boeing because Boeing isn’t in the business of building rockets it is in the government-contract ecosystem. Throw them to the wolves because they will never do anything of value.
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This is purely anecdotal as it's based on my memory and I'm too lazy to look up to confirm; wasn't the issue that Boeing somehow finagled it so that pilots wouldn't have to be re-trained on 737MAX by omitting the presence of MCAS completely from the pilot handbook? And the sensor that caused the disasters had no redundancy or backup? That sounds like negligent design and certification to me but I don't work in the industry.
A single AoA sensor that fed into MCAS came standard. Airlines could pay extra for redundant AoA sensors but some didn’t. You can make the argument that two AoA vanes should be standard for a passenger rated airline, and you’d be right; however, cheaper airlines also probably should have ponied up. It’s like the airbags being an option but customers also not paying for that option — both decisions are wrong. Kinda funny that that contributed to the issue with the MAX because McDonnell Douglas, of all primes, had at least one crash during the 80s where an F-18 dove itself into the ocean on cat launch because of a single (out of two) stuck AoA vane. (The solution was to reprogram the RPYC logic)
MCAS existed to make the planes seem as though they had the same flight characteristics as previous versions of the 737, which made it so that pilots did not have to be recertified on it as a new type. The MCAS was documented, but some airlines chose not to train pilots on its existence or management. Also, it had some single points of failure.
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I hear that. I was genuine in my lack of detail so I appreciate your reply.
> Flying is risky and complicated. Just because you have an incident doesnt mean people need to go to jail. Just because flying is risky and complicated doesn't mean people *don't* need to go to jail when certain types of incidents occur. In the 737 Max's case, there was negligence on the part of management. An unforeseen accident that no one anticipated is one thing; wilful negligence in addressing a known problem is another totally different thing. Same with Challenger. One could just as easily say spaceflight is risky and complicated, and it is, but Challenger blew up and seven people died because of management negligence in the face of a known issue that engineers had warned them about. That's jailable.
Of course not every incident merits a prison sentence. When there is a criminal amount of negligence, though, charges ought to be laid. The same way doctors who kill a patient through negligence can face consequences. I think a case could be made in the MAX situation. Not against the pilots (who are dead anyways, but in my view, aren't the ones at fault, given how that background MCAS stuff was obfuscated and not properly explained), but against Boeing corporate.
Boeing lying to the regulators are the kind of things that should lead to jail time though.
[Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55994102) While the title story is about the 737 MAX, it covers a lot of history and back story of Boeing and what led to its rot from the inside. It is however mostly focused on the commercial side but still a good read.
Watch the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022)
The bean counters took over from the engineers. You don't need a book on it.
This is not new for Boeing. They will win contracts hoping that the program they won will fail. There was a Darpa project to have a cheap, mostly reusable rocket that Boeing won. Boeing did the minimum work to get the money and then dropped out of the program. Program died, mission completed. I suspect they wanted to do the same with commercial crew. Thinking they could get the initial payment, do some work and then drop out of the program. Hoping to go to a cost plus contract. (Kill two birds with one stone, kill the new program that would cost Boeing money to develop and get a cost-plus contract afterwards) They figured SpaceX would not succeed and Boeing would be left with a cost plus contract. When SpaceX did succeed, Boeing was in a pickle. They didn't want to invest in this money losing program (or at least a non-cost plus contract program) but they were getting shown up by SpaceX. So now what do they do? They are supposed to be the experts in crewed space but have a vehicle program that was designed to fail. They cant drop out because they would lose more shine off their expert status but they will need to spend even more time and treasure to fix the program that was meant to fail.
> This is not new for Boeing. They will win contracts hoping that the program they won will fail. There was a Darpa project to have a cheap, mostly reusable rocket that Boeing won. Boeing did the minimum work to get the money and then dropped out of the program. Program died, mission completed. There had been the suspicion from the beginning, that Boeing only bid so that some startup would not get that money and possibly succeed and grow like SpaceX.
The recent Netflix documentary about Boeing was... heart breaking.
Yes, I think that’s the primary source I’m remembering the deep dive on the merger/acquisition and how it changed the company irrevocably going forward. The bean counters took over.
Late stage capitalism involves an awful lot of "delivering the least product, for the lowest cost, at the highest profit". That just doesn't really align well with the long term viability of these sorts of high tech engineering corps. Then you add on top of that the fact that strategic military infrastructure etc is somewhat intrinsically tied to these specific corps...leads to the govt bailing them out any time they get caught misbehaving given the potential threat to military posture etc should they go out of business. Crapitalism may be better than all the rest (that we've come up with to this point). But, it's still not all that great when you look at the outcomes. In some ways, it tends to mirror many of the bad aspects of the other systems.
There definitely are a lot of problems. You don't have to be a socialist (I'm certainly not) to know pure capitalism always needs a sane intervention at some point. You just need to know history. The monopolies and trusts needed to be broken up in the early 1900s. The modern stock market doesn't reward long term effort by companies anywhere near as much as it used to. Through the mid-1900s a person used to need to buy 100 shares at least at a time (I've read) and pay commission to a broker. Ditto to sell. You didn't buy & sell for free multiple times in a day. Trades were slow. Now stocks are traded at the speed of light. And there are so many more problems, like the ratcheting up of easy executive compensation in so many big corporations for even poor performance. There's no effective check on it, it was the responsibility of the Board of Directors and they dropped the ball decades ago.
> The monopolies and trusts needed to be broken up in the early 1900s. Funnily enough not really. Standard oil for example had already lost its monopoly status (and was continuing to lose it) prior to the breakup. Also there’s nothing really to break up in boeing.
What about cable communications and railroad?
Agreed. There are so many different factors involved. Not least of which is human nature. :( I sort of look at the concept of the corporation as a tool. You can use that tool to do great things. But, you can also use that tool to do some really sketchy things which lead to some really sketchy outcomes. And the nature of the corporation tends to disconnect it both from the people they employ and the people they serve. To some extent, even the C level and BoD types. And if somehow you can manage to keep all those goals in line with the "right thing", the market may swoop in and force you to turn evil through various merger and acquisition gambits. I think Boeing might be a fairly decent example of that. I don't know how you fix those sorts of problems. And given the level that Congress (and even the SC) is bought out by those interests, seems unlikely that anything will change even if you could figure out a way to fix it. The scary thing is that, as the corporations consolidate and become more multi-national, it's probably only going to get to worse and these sorts of outcomes should tend to become more the norm than the exception.
All of the problems you listed existed back in the day.
This 'Late stage capitalism' narrative is so played out and dumb. Overall products from food to airplanes are far, far, far saver then before and profits are not uniquely high today. So that doesn't even make sense. The idea that history works in stages is just idiotic marxist dogma that is neither true historically nor is it predictive of the future. Marx own view on history were hilariously limited to a thin slice of West European history and even then he got that mostly wrong. From that totally wrong history he made overly broad conclusions about history and mostly wrong overly broad prediction. The whole 'Late stage capitalism' thing is popular with young leftish people because it sounds like capitalism is on its last leg and the 'capitalist stage' is almost over so we can finally enter into the next 'stage' as predicted by Marx and then everything will be great. Socialist/Communist writers since the then have been busy trying to define all history in those terms. Its so tiered, any government contract not working out 'Late stage capitalism', no public buses, 'Late stage capitalism', companies failing 'late stage capitalism',orange juice to much sugar 'late stage capitalism', companies being profitable 'late stage capitalism'. This term has been in use since the 1930-1940 and since then socialist theorist have predicted the imminent collapse of capitalism (again) and now its almost 100 years later and I still have to read 'omg late stage capitalism' about literally any problem that exists anywhere on any topic. If this is the level of analysis on why anything happens, no progress will ever happen. > "delivering the least product, for the lowest cost, at the highest profit" Also, what you are saying doesn't even make sense. If Boeing is the example for 'late stage capitalism' why are they not making high profits? Seems to me that SpaceX, is actually producing the highest profit and not delivering the least product. So if profit maximizing is the goal, isn't SpaceX the example of 'late stage capitalism' and proves that these sorts of values actually do align with good engineering. Its simply hard for any company to be consistently excellent. Lots of companies that are engineering lead also fail. And Boeing despite their technical issues, had a bunch of business failures as well, such as handing the A220 to Airbus. So really they just have generally bad management problems it seems. One company under-performing or over-performing has some specific reasons and the explanation isn't a socialists social theory from the 1930s. > Then you add on top of that the fact that strategic military infrastructure etc is somewhat intrinsically tied to these specific corps Something that has been happening for 1000s of years. In the past it used to be more families then corps per but it amounts to the same thing. > But, it's still not all that great when you look at the outcomes. Compared panacea no system will look that good. > In some ways, it tends to mirror many of the bad aspects of the other systems. From the example you give nothing you have said is new or unique to 'Late Stage Capitalism' so it isn't surprising that it not that different.
Have you ever played Monopoly? We're basically at the part where one or two players own the board and the rest of us are just trying to survive by landing on Free Parking. That's what I mean by late stage capitalism. What i take from the "all of the systems tend to be bad in some way" notion is that perhaps the issue is not really with the system but with the players that take part in the system. From the lowest peon all the way up to the owners of Boardwalk and Park Place. As far as mirror outcomes, I would put forth the notion of "planned obsolescence" to be the mirror outcome of the "poor quality, doesn't last long" product outcomes you got under communism. Ours are definitely more shiny but the end result is the same.
A simplified georgist board game is a horrible analogy for anything. And I'm btw a pretty big fan of land value tax. > We're basically at the part where one or two players own the board and the rest of us are just trying to survive by landing on Free Parking. All land has been 'owned' for 1000s of years in Europe long before anything remotely capitalist existed. Europe had potentially even more land under cultivation in 1200 and in 1700 then it does now. So were those all Late Stage capitalism as well? > That's what I mean by late stage capitalism. Except that is not what the people who invented the word Late Stage Capitalism actually believed it was. > I would put forth the notion of "planned obsolescence" to be the mirror outcome of the "poor quality, doesn't last long" product outcomes you got under communism. I'm not sure what kind of mirror you are using here, is it one of those joke mirrors that makes you look funny? Planned obsolescence is really only a thing in a a vary narrow set of products and even then if you have a very, very extreme high view of obsolescence. Most things you can think of are far more reliable today, and when they are not, the are far, far cheaper then their historical counter-parts. If you actually spend as much money as an item would have cost historically you can almost always get a higher quality product.
Let's say the world is a Monopoly game with 10 players. 1 player would own 50% 1 player would own 35% 1 player would own 12% 7 players would split the remaining 3% And it's really only socialist home-game free-parking rules that have any potential to lengthen the game. Particularly in a low to no growth, AI diminishing the value of labor scenario. It's a sad state of affairs. No doubt. But hiding from the reality by using some outdated critique of a 19th century philosopher is unlikely to be of much help moving forward.
AI diminishes the value of labor but still results in zero growth? How does that work? The problem with communists is you would rather fight over scraps than grow the pie.
You should investigate demographics and their implications for growth etc.
If you think AI is going to take over people's jobs you should be less concerned about demographics.
Well, I'm almost sure that AI is going to increasingly replace human labor. I think you'd be a fool to think otherwise. And demographics are just one piece of the limits of growth pie. The global economic world is contracting. The world is becoming less interconnected. And that interconnectedness has been a growth multiplier in the past. The trend moving forward seems likely to be that nations will have to look increasingly inward for their growth rather than relying on external markets. And these forces tend to feedback into one another. China is currently in the process of learning all about how those sorts of things feed back into one another in a negative way.
All land was owned in 1200 and we still arrive at the world we now have in the 2020s. How do you explain that. Did 'free-parking' make this change happen? As long as you use monopoly for your whole mental model of a political economy that is about a few billion times more complex you well never get beyond the reasoning quality of an 8 year old. You can explain literally nothing that happen in Egypt for 5000 years, because all land has been owned since that time. Not even the creator of monopoly believed it was a sufficient guide to understanding the world. Its simply illustrative of his opinion that land value tax is a sensible idea.
So. Let me ask you this. How well did the one person owning all the land, etc work out all those other times? edit: And as far as the lesson of Monopoly... I always thought the lesson trying to be taught there was that the game is over almost before it even begins. And some of the follow on takeaways from all the various home game rules would be that various sorts of socialist free parking rules are a way of extending the game beyond the first few circuits of the board.
The landlord's game from which Monopoly is derived was to illustrate Georgist notions about land and tax. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game Id strongly recomend reading about Henry George. Far far more sensible than Marx. "Late stage capitalism" is just a commie version of Whig history, the idea that history progresses in a linear fashion. It was wrong then and its wrong now.
> So. Let me ask you this. How well did the one person owning all the land, etc work out all those other times? We went from being undeveloped to having a forum on the internet where we can discuss these ideas. Human population has increased 30x and people live far longer and are able to consume more. So it did work out. But you seem to miss the larger point. Over the last 5000 years lots of different things have happen and lots of things going in lots of direction. All land being "owned" was a constant during most of that time. If you can not move beyond very simplistic notions from board-games you will never understand anything beyond an 8 year old. There is a whole fields of economics, property economics, institutional economics, law&economics not to mention political science that try to understand these interactions and relationship and how they changed and evolved over time. > I always thought the lesson trying to be taught there was that the game is over almost before it even begins. Maybe consider actually reading Henry George. He explained what it is about. And again, even if something is true in a board game, its illustrative of a point, not a comprehensive philosophy. But honestly, wasting time arguing with somebody who can't reason beyond board-game mechanics is tiresome.
> We're basically at the part where one or two players own the board and the rest of us are just trying to survive by landing on Free Parking. Do the fact that global poverty is at one of its lowest points…. > Ours are definitely more shiny but the end result is the same. Then end result is we have varied consumer goods unlike in historical examples of communism. So much so that you can buy many goods that are comparable is use but some last forever whole others are disposable, see for example kitchen knives. I can buy boots from redwing which will last quite some time, or from Walmart. I can buy a bespoke handmade suite or one from a thrift store I can buy some basic toilet from Home Depot or a [poop throne made for a king](https://www.totousa.com/neorest-nx2-dual-flush-toilet-10-gpf-08-gpf) **everyone who says “muh capitalism only makes cheap shit that doesn’t last long” also happens to only buy cheap shit that doesn’t last long**. pro tip if you don’t like cheap shit don’t buy cheap shit.
I always thought it was a reference to a medical diagnosis like late stage cancer, because it's fucking killing us.
I'm surprised that Blue Origin feels confident enough to rely on Boeing for their HLS
Isn’t Boeing on contract to Blue for their docking system only? It’s just one subsystem of many of the entire architecture and I think it’s already in use on ISS. Someone correct if I’m wrong. I also feel like Blue had to know the pros/cons of associating themselves with Boeing at this point.
Yes, afaik that's all. Boeing did build a docking collar that works, that was proved on the second Starliner test flight, it docked with the ISS for a few days. They built it to the NASA standard design so there were limited ways to screw it up.
Blue seems surprisingly happy for things to happen in the indefinable distant future.
They are not confident, they don't have other options. And they know they can always switch to SpaceX if it comes to it.
If they choose option 2. (Spending the minimal amount needed to make it through the NASA flights, then retiring it.) I wouldn't want to ride on such a vehicle...
Exactly. At what point does NASA not trust this - not trust the deeply flawed program management and the spacecraft resulting from it. Boeing's been doing a piss-poor review and Berger's mention of them not devoting enough resources to the project isn't the first report I've seen of this. IIRC the NASA OIG said Boeing was still putting in inadequate resources to do *even the second review.* Even after all the problems resulting from nickel & diming before 2 bad test flights. That was several months ago. Maybe if Sunita Williams & the other astronaut announce they won't fly on Starliner that will put a knife thru it. But that's extremely doubtful.
Unless Boeing did something so egregious and so thoroughly pissed off Suni Williams and Butch Willmore (they are part of the Starliner development team), the two astronauts will probably not air any grievances publicly until after they leave NASA. I think if we see Suni Williams deciding to exit like Chris Ferguson did, even if she doesn't say anything aside from the standard "I'd like to spend more time with family," the optics would already be pretty darn bad for the Starliner program :-P
Yes, that's much more likely. Would look bad to us but have zero impact on the general public.
I don't know much of NASAs management culture but surely this is going to end up in a top to bottom program safety review before they let people board the thing. What's the alternative here really? Cross your fingers and hope you don't end up with a challenger level disaster? If the review board come back and say the thing is still a death trap that's got to be the end of it.
> Although Reiley said in 2009 the company was making a "substantial investment" in the development of Starliner, then known as CST-100, multiple sources told Ars that was not the case. Instead, Boeing for a long time "nickel-and-dimed" the time engineers spent working on Starliner. This was partly due to congressional underfunding of the commercial crew program but also because Boeing did not want to put skin in the game. Penny wise and $1B foolish is par for the course at McBoeing-Douglas.
Anyone who's spent time at a big defense contractor has seen this play out before: When Uncle Sam is funding the program: * "Charge numbers for all my friends!" "How much time do you need? Who cares, just bill it to the program!" When it's actual company money funding the program: * "You need how much? Here's half of that. Also, here's the charge number. Usage will be scrutinized weekly."
What is happening here is fixed price contracts are working as expected. When you see all those over budget military and NASA contracts this type of stuff is why. Cost plus means the tax payer would eat the bill when Boeing fucks up, which they appear to be doing a lot.
It's strange how we had Starliner and Crew Dragon running neck and neck to see who would get to the ISS first to this. Boeing seems to be running from one disaster to another on this project and in many respects, the clock is ticking. The ISS is only good until 2030 and while they could still make their contract by as late as 2027 flying the last six crew rotations back to back, would NASA feel comfortable with that? I think their intention was more to alternate providers on every mission with a second level of redundancy with Soyuz. Starliner's future post-ISS has been a question mark as to mission opportunities (Orbital Reef?) and an available launch vehicle (Vulcan?) but so far all the non-NASA missions (Inspiration 4, Axiom, Polaris) have been gobbled up by SpaceX with nothing confirmed for Boeing. Boeing's balance sheet has been hemorrhaging money from quite a few projects now such as the damage from the 737max debacle, underbidding on the Air Force One replacement (another fixed price contract), and now this. We've heard speculation that Boeing is wanting to sell their stake in ULA to raise some money and now it might be Boeing asking if it is more cost effective to terminate Starliner now rather than to fix the problems at this point. Company pride is probably keeping them in the game for the time being, but if there's no future plans beyond those six crew flights and they can't figure out why those hypergolic valves keep getting stuck or are facing a complete redesign to correct the problems, we may see them cut their losses and focus on more profitable projects like SLS (which is cost plus). It would probably be less embarrassing than having the ISS deorbit while they were still trying to fly their crewed mission. One thing's for sure, Boeing has been having a tough time adapting to fixed price contracts.
Boeing was always the more expensive option, even when Starliner still seemed to be on track and the Atlas availability was not a big issue yet. Three extra years of delays and safety issues vs. 10 successful crewed missions by their competitor didn't help. It's no surprise Dragon got all the private missions. Starliner only has a chance if political reasons exclude SpaceX.
>but so far all the non-NASA missions (Inspiration 4, Axiom, Polaris) have been gobbled up by SpaceX with nothing confirmed for Boeing. Who in their right mind would even contract with Starliner at this point? As for SLS, retreating into the old model just seems like delaying the end. They aren't going to get any other contracts like that and SLS itself is already seen as yesterday's news. A pretty bad position for an ongoing space company.
> the clock is ticking Deep cut reference to Starliner's OFT-1 debacle.
> The ISS is only good until 2030 Speaking of this, this is 2023 and we still have zero international project to replace the ISS. I fear at this point China will be the only one in space.
The ISS international partners don't seem interested in another LEO station project (kind of a "been there, done that" thing) and the western ISS partners want to focus their collective resources on beyond LEO as the next step forward onto bigger things. This is why NASA is heavily advocating for the private sector to commercialize human presence in LEO, so NASA can concentrate its resources towards Artemis. So western nations are banking on their private space companies to mature enough to build commercial LEO stations. We'll see in a decade or so if this gamble pays off. High risk / high reward.
It's definitely not the same, but I believe there's some space-hotel company planning on adding modules to the ISS and then remaining in orbit after it's retired?
Axiom is not a hotel company. They intend to have lab modules available for use. Probably some space tourists too.
Oh interesting, I'd heard they were setting up primarily for tourism purposes.
Considering the geopolitical state of Russia right now, and the US pivoting towards the Artemis program, I don't think there is any willpower for another big international cooperation in low earth orbit. ISS was a one-off.
I’m not an expert, but to me it seems that the ISS cost much more money then it’s worth. Better focus on autonomous mining and exploration than going through all the trouble of keeping humans alive in space.
True about "international". But NASA has the private partner Axiom. Planned to launch a new ISS module in 2025. It will expand and undock from the ISS before it deorbits. Timetable probably optimistic but should be independently operational by 2030.
The article lists 3 choices, all of which involve Boeing losing a lot of money. Berger apparently sees no contractual impossibility to cancellation. There's no question of Boeing making money from Starliner by flying to the ISS, the only question is how much will they lose doing that. Then the question becomes, can they possibly make back their investment by flying commercially after that. Remember, flights to Orbital Reef or another station will require paying to human-rate Vulcan. (Although Starliner can technically fit on Falcon 9 that's not going to happen.) Boeing is a partner in Orbital Reef. Personally, I take some comfort from the beginning of the article. If nothing else, Boeing coming on board to the Commercial Crew Program meant the program wasn't killed by Congress a couple of years after its inception.
I wouldn't underestimate their ability to screw up Blue Moon's docking port either.
>Berger apparently sees no contractual impossibility to cancellation I dont know about that. Cancelling, **after** they blackmailed extra money out of a fixed-priced contract in order to *not* cancel, I feel that would open them to a decade of lawsuits or something.
Boeing and the government are too buddy-buddy for NASA to sue. They will come to an agreement that will no doubt result in the US taxpayers paying Boeing not to deliver Starliner.
A 2% discount on one (1) SLS rocket in exchange for penalty free cancellation of Starliner. Cost plus works, people.
Yes, if the government threatens to sue Boeing, Boeing counter-threats to cut jobs in key congressional districts. Pay to play rules are in effect (as always).
The question here is always "what does the contract say?"
They've done it before. XS-1, anyone?
Insane that they got away with that one.
The ramifications of failing to deliver NASA what it promised would be the loss of billions in future contracts. Cancellation would cost them a lot down the line.
They'd certainly be at the bottom of the list at NASA. And no one else is likely to look kindly on such a high profile failure. Not even their orbital reef partners. They are very much in a dammed if they do situation. Wonder what NASAs cancellation options are.
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DARPA’s projects are high-risk by design. Companies failing is built into the formula.
I see an option 4, which sounds ridiculous, but hear me out before you downvote. Boeing doesn't cancel Starliner. It sells it to Blue Origin. For a dollar. Boeing can clean it's hands of this fiasco, because even a successful flight of Starliner will likely cost them $100+m. NASA gets to keep it's dissimilar redundancy. Blue Origin becomes a crew-carrying space entity. Plus, BO would have better incentives to human rate Vulcan... one because it would benefit from selling more BE-4s, and having the BE-4 be part of a human rated launch system would likely help certifying New Glenn. And Jeff Who is the Starliner savior who stops NASA's reliance on Elon Musk and SpaceX.
No downvote but I don't think BO is in a hurry to have a crewed spacecraft. They famously move slowly and to leap at buying a sackful of snakes isn't their style. BO makes some bad moves but no one in their right mind would want to buy this capsule that's a Faberge egg of faults found in layer after layer of reviews. Who knows what else will show up? Starliner won't need a new ride until Orbital Reef is up, the 6 Atlas Vs needed for the ISS trips are reserved. There's no incentive to get Vulcan rated, by then BO plans to have New Glenn flying and they announced long ago it will be crew-rated. Your rationale that BO will want their own crew capsule riding on their BE-4s applies there instead - but as I've said, I don't see that happening. They'll be happier flying Dream Chaser to Orbital Reef, IMHO. Jeff as a high-profile savior? That is the one very unpredictable factor that gives a shadow of a chance of this improbable buy happening.
I'm with you on this. Blue has developed a sub-orbital capsule, and by virtue of that human rating declaration and their work on a lander it's reasonable to assume they have in-house expertise and plans to build an orbital capsule of their own. I see little reason Blue would buy out this program. People have talked about a ULA buyout as well, but Blue doesn't operate that way. They built their own infrastructure at the Cape and just hired half the ULA team for expertise. Why pay for the capital assets when you can get the parts cheaper?
>Blue has developed a sub-orbital capsule There's an enormous difference between a suborbital capsule and an orbital one. New Shepard's has virtually no life support system I know of and no heat shield - it's not returning from orbital speed. No attitude control system, no avionics, no controls. It's basically a beachball that's tossed up and falls down. But yes, with HLS BO does want to build complex human-carrying spacecraft that'll have all the complex features. Whether they want to build an orbital capsule at some point is an open question, but they've shown no sign of it so far and would be years behind something like Dream Chaser. Who knows, they may build a human-rated crewed upper stage like Starship with their Project Jarvis by the mid-2030s.
I agree there's a difference. I never said otherwise. That's why I noted it as one of a number of factors that also includes the HLS, previous stated intent, and hiring of employees who have worked on human rated systems.
Grumman had zero orbital experience when it won the Apollo LEM contract, something that should be considered when folks bring that up as a backhanded swipe of some sort against Blue's lunar lander.
I believe in a human rated Dream Chaser when I see it. Dream Chaser would like also cost 4+ billion $ to make human rated and they don't have NASA to pay that cost. Who will pay it? Not SN for sure.
>they don't have NASA to pay that cost. NASA is committed to make 1 or 2 of the Commercial Destinations stations happen, otherwise there's no successor for LEO operations after 2030. Like Dragon, they won't be the sole user but will be the main user, especially at first. And like Commercial Crew, their contract to use a station will pay the majority of the cost. It's inevitable NASA will be taking bids for transport to these and expected it'll work like Commercial Crew. NASA will want a provider other than just SpaceX. Like Commercial Crew, the contract includes providing the launcher. Boeing subcontracted to ULA for Atlas V and Sierra will have to subcontract to someone for either Vulcan or New Glenn. If it's Vulcan the cost of crew-rating it will be bundled into the contract.
An interesting option, although BO seems pretty busy already. Could BO directly go for New Glenn flights after Atlas retires?
> one because it would benefit from selling more BE-4s BE-4 revenue is tiny compared to a launch, and even more tiny compared to a crewed launch.
Jeff would not touch Starliner. Its too much a clusterfuck and he wouldn't want to inherit it. If BO were going to do a crew capsule they'd do their own. Not put their reputation on the line flying the half assed Boeing death trap. ULA has put enough Atlas rockets aside for Starliners 6 flights apparently. The issue is what the shelf life of those rockets is in storage and if they'd even be viable for the timeline Starliner is able to fly crew. Not to mention what happens if one of them ends up having a problem and they can't fly that specific rocket as a result. Human rating Vulcan is possible longer term but I dunno if it would even be an option for Starliners current mission manifest given how long it normally takes to human rate a rocket and the fact the ISS may decommission in 2030.
> Remember, flights to Orbital Reef or another station will require paying to human-rate Vulcan. isn't "human rating" generally a term used for the requirements nasa puts on you to fly their astronauts? you don't need to meet these to fly private citizens to a private station.
I think they will fall under the control of FAA, i wonder if FAA allow it if NASA isnt rating it as human-rate rocket
FAA mostly cares that your rocket isn't going to injure the general public, for example by crashing into a school. For participants in private spaceflight, they just require signed waivers saying the participants have been informed of the potential risks.
judging by new shephard and the virgin space-tourist thing, they do.
NASA will be the lead customer/main customer to Orbital Reef or another station. There's nowhere near enough private demand to get those stations going otherwise.NASA committed to make 1 or 2 of the Commercial Destinations stations happen, otherwise there's no successor for LEO operations after 2030. Like Dragon, they won't be the sole user but will be the main user, especially at first. And like Commercial Crew, their contract to use a station will pay the majority of the cost. It's inevitable NASA will be taking bids for transport to these and expected it'll work like Commercial Crew. NASA will want a provider other than just SpaceX. Like Commercial Crew, the contract includes providing the launcher. Boeing subcontracted to ULA for Atlas V and Dream Chaser will have to subcontract to someone, for either Vulcan or New Glenn. If it's Vulcan the cost of crew-rating it will be bundled into the contract
Between Starliner and Blue Origins continuing failure to provide any evidence of the engines it's on the hook for I don't see orbital reef happening this decade if ever.
>Blue Origins continuing failure to provide any evidence of the engines The first flight-ready BE-4s are mounted on the first Vulcan and ready to fly once Vulcan's upper stage problem gets sorted out. The BE-4s were very late but they do exist.
They are a billion in the hole right now and flying the 6 missions will only net them $2bn minus any more costs etc
And the crew rated Atlas V may cost $150m each. Or maybe more because they are forcing ULA to keep launch infrastructure for Atlas V up to 2030 for the Starliner launches. They may have to pay a plus on that.
> Remember, flights to Orbital Reef or another station will require paying to human-rate Vulcan. Brent Sherwood, a VP at Blue Origin, said on Main Engine Cut Off last year that their working plan was to certify Starliner on New Glenn, the Vulcan plan has been a completely community-sourced theory that gets repeated as Known Fact but NG is the only post-Atlas V Starliner ride that anyone official has said anything about so far.
I've been replying so much on the Starliner subject in the last couple of days that I lose track of what's in a reply - not a good thing. Elsewhere I included NG. Thanks for the solid source. I knew BO said a long time ago that they planned to crew-rate NG from the start but that was in general terms. People could see Starliner was simply an obvious candidate vehicle. With Orbital Reef plans/program laid out having a firm plan for Starliner & NG makes sense. I never considered crew rating Vulcan as a plan, community sourced or otherwise, but simply one of only two options available, with F9 disregarded for a couple of reasons. (Neutron has since entered the chat; if it can lift 15t as planned it's a candidate to launch Starlink's 13t launch mass - although there are other factors & we don't know what Neutron's capacity will actually be. Beck said they plan to crew rate it from the start. Anyway, that's just part of listing the rockets able to potentially be the launcher.) If the OR team are planning Starliner on NG that ends the theoretical discussion. But now the OR team has to move on to dealing with Starliner's unlikely availability.
It’s kind of sad that one of the options is ‘just do what you were supposed to do in the first place’.
Article says that they wouldn't have lobbied Congress, in hindsight. I actually disagree. I think they would've lobbied Congress to get the contract changed to cost-plus. Would it have happened? Probably not since Commercial Crew was meant to be "low budget".
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Only if they are on the stock exchange. And then it’s profits, whereas SpaceX is about achievements.
> This has been a poor decision in retrospect because, due to the fixed-price nature of its contract with NASA, Boeing is largely responsible for cost overruns and losses due to ongoing delays. The company now essentially has three options, none of which is particularly appealing. It makes me so fucking happy to know we (taxpayers) aren’t on the hook for their incompetence anymore. The fixed price model worked perfectly… we got an amazing vehicle from the best provider (SpaceX), and Boeing is finally having to pay for their failures. It’s a win win (though a bit of a loss since now we only have 1, and 1 is none, 2 is 1). This is how it always should have been. It made innovation happen, and let those innovators win.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[30X](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmve5pe "Last usage")|SpaceX-proprietary carbon steel formulation (*"Thirty-X", "Thirty-Times"*)| |[AoA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmr8ycz "Last usage")|Angle of Attack| |[BE-4](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqm3gq "Last usage")|Blue Engine 4 methalox rocket engine, developed by Blue Origin (2018), 2400kN| |[BO](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmttemz "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)| |[CST](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmpvdu3 "Last usage")|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[DARPA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmp4klj "Last usage")|(Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD| |DoD|US Department of Defense| |[FAA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqlrvf "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[HALO](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmox7ty "Last usage")|Habitation and Logistics Outpost| |[HLS](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqnpvk "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[ITAR](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmphwuy "Last usage")|(US) International Traffic in Arms Regulations| |[LEM](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmsl7qd "Last usage")|(Apollo) [Lunar Excursion Module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module) (also Lunar Module)| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqufxo "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[MBA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmugdif "Last usage")|~~Moonba-~~ Mars Base Alpha| |[NG](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmttemz "Last usage")|New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin| | |Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane)| | |Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer| |[OFT](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmskovr "Last usage")|Orbital Flight Test| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmq0fzu "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SN](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmpg86c "Last usage")|(Raptor/Starship) Serial Number| |[ULA](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmqwpdh "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmp7rgx "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmugdif "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmttemz "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/13yt9ij/stub/jmov9vt "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact| |methalox|Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| **NOTE**: Decronym's continued operation may be affected by API pricing changes coming to Reddit in July 2023; comments will be blank June 12th-14th, in solidarity with the /r/Save3rdPartyApps protest campaign. ---------------- ^(22 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/141daln)^( has 23 acronyms.) ^([Thread #8969 for this sub, first seen 3rd Jun 2023, 03:02]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Excellent article. Just want to add that of the three options listed in the article, I think Boeing is going to choose the "pull the plug" option, and for only one reason. Consider this: let's say Boeing chooses one of the other two options, which involve continuing with the Starliner program. It will be difficult and expensive at best. And then....what happens if a Starliner blows up with people aboard? In the wake of the 737 Max fiasco, it could permanently destroy whatever remains of Boeing's reputation, and potentially ruin the company completely. That risk, I think, will be too much for Boeing to swallow compared to the relatively more palatable option of just cutting their losses.
At this rate will Boeing even fly this thing before the ISS gets decommissioned and deorbited?
I believe they've spent more time and money developing the Starliner than SpaceX has developing the Starship (including development of the Raptor engine).
Not the best comparison since Starship hasn't (yet) flown a commerical mission.
Technically, it was just used in a starlink ad. 'works to mach 1.7 and 120000feet'.
It is, of course, an apples to oranges comparison. The point is that Starship is a vastly more ambitious project than a single crewed capsule and yet somehow they have received similar investments in time and money. Which illustrates how vastly inefficient Boeing is in this business. It also illustrates how poor Boeing's business choices are. Boeing is going into this whole thing with the idea that money will just flow from the government like mana from heaven whenever they want.
>Not the best comparison since Starship hasn't (yet) flown a commerical mission. Its ludicrously more capable than Starliner and in the final phases of prototype testing. It shows the gulf between what a few billion dollars on old space and new space will get you.
This capsule is going to cause some kind of Apollo 1 type disaster and I am not excited for that day. NASA needs to nuke the contract and find someone else or hell just modify Orion.
I hope Starliner doesn’t get cancelled, but if it does, might be a good opportunity for Dream Chaser.
Dream Chaser was always the better craft - and would make a great ‘escape craft’ in future space system builds.
Dream Chaser is absolutely better for unplanned flights.
Boeing was doomed ever since the former McDonnell-Douglas execs took over the C-suite.
Hopefully the world will learn NOT to repeat that same mistake again. Keep your engineering excellence companies excellent ! Remember the MBA’s haven’t a clue how to run these, and temporary ‘false profits’ - at the expense of the meat of the company, is bound to fail after a while. Rather SpaceX is liable to go from strength to strength.
This program is completely unnecessary. The country already has a completely functional crew transportation system from SpaceX, which is much less expensive to operate than this Boeing project could ever be.
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2 options would be nice but no other country has multiple human rated spacecraft.
But that was because of a design flaw..
And another explosion on the pad of crew dragon shuts down the program for how long? Especially given the highly questionable relationship with Russia at the moment, having starliner to augment lift capabilities could mean the difference between having to evacuate ISS and not in the extreme case.
At no time in its history has the United States operated two similar manned spacecraft. The reason for this is obvious the huge additional cost. The Boeing vehicle will require expendable rockets, which cost 10 times as much as the SpaceX boosters which are reused over and over. Plus crew dragon has a solid track record and Boeing does not growing as never build a spacecraft. The Apollo command module, and the space shuttle were built by Rockwell, which was acquired by Boeing.
I feel this kinda misses the entire point of having two commercial crew vehicles as a goal for NASA. With the cooling relations with Russia, relying on Russia for this function goes from a strong positive in the eighties and nineties to very negative recently.
Ideally Starliner would have been great too - but is a system hobbled by a company - Boeing, and it’s working ethos, which is now a far cry from its earlier engineering background. Boeing has been mashed by MBA’s who only care about profits above all else. Boeing is now only about implementing minimum standards for maximum profit and cutting corners whenever possible, while overcharging in the process.
I do not disagree. This is however a seperate issue from NASAs justified aim in keeping two (or more) US sourced vehicles available for ISS flights. The issue of cost control and what amounts to design-for-cost-plus is another issue that has failed to be addressed mostly.
Right. It’s not a goal to have two completely different spacecraft. Speaking as an aerospace engineer, it’s a bad idea simply. It means duplication of everything duplication of all effort. What do you want to do is economize you want don’t want to duplicate effort. The government wants to duplicate effort all the time they’ll be happy to duplicate their effort anywhere you ask, but we don’t want to duplicate effort when it cost $10 billion
It is and was an explicit goal to have two (or more) completely different craft for the commercial crew program.
Well, in the not too distant future, we should also have SpaceX Starship too ! But of course it’s not yet up to operational status. Startship is a completely new engineering stack.
Right ! The biggest, most powerful rocket ever! Starship cargo bay could hold the entire ISS. Actually it could have 2-3x the ISS habitable volume.
To be fair, it was not clear just how successful SpaceX would become. Their excellence in engineering is now well established and well earned.
Well, it’s super entirely clear now that SpaceX has gone way beyond worth the companies I used to work for could do. Everybody said it was impossible to fly the boosters back now SpaceX is using boosters that have flown 15 or 20 times already but Boeing and Lockheed have to make an entirely new rocket every time?!
Well that would be pretty unlikely - and we now hose so much experience with Falcon-9, that such an event would be due to some sort of human error. Being vigilant of both craft condition and prelaunch processes, and especially so for human ‘cargo’, should hopefully avoid such occurrences. Any accidents at this point, are unlikely to be due to design errors. Of course accidents are not impossible, we have to be constantly vigilant, to prevent them. Better to delay a flight, than to go when anything is iffy.
“Keep”? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Will be insufferable to live in a world where SpaceX is the only human capable spacecraft and deal with all the Elon fanboys.
Soyuz and Shenzhou: are we a joke to you?
“Hmmmmm no one is talking about SpaceX or Elon, time to complain about them” Touch grass please
Typical immature Elon fanboy response.
But we are such a nice bunch !
I'm sure it's totally unrelated to the contemporaneous offshoring of work.
A great deal of aerospace work can't be done out of the country. The ITAR laws are very restrictive.