Boeing Starliner's flight's flaws show “fundamental problem,” NASA says

Europeans got seriously spooked because they were afraid that if Italian Airlines flew Italian planes and such, fragmented markets would prevent any European company from being a viable player in the long term.

So they collaborated on the Concorde, and then the Airbus A300, consolidating the European aerospace industry quite successfully.

It costs a lot of money to train a pilot to fly a new aircraft, and on top of that you have mechanics, ground handlers, air traffic controllers and many other skilled people whose operations revolve it.

Thus there is some public and industry benefit to consolidation, but at the moment the competitive landscape looks very different for widebody (B787, A350) airliners where new technology is making it to to the public as opposed to narrowbody (B737, A320) airliners where the youngest design is 35 years old.

(Some of that parallels the lack of competition in the U.S. airline market which is dominated by narrowbody airliners as opposed to international flights on which you are likely to ride on a widebody. If you're going to compress people in all three axes to get them in a 737, why bother thanking them for flying with you?)

We have since realized that Anti-Trust in the Progressive period basically was applied with very little oversight and it was not applied consistantly. It was basically a way for politicans to go after the competition of their funders. This part of Anti-Trust history is often ignored in the glorifited 'Progessives fight evil capitalists'-story that is now so popular with the modern progressives.

Under the new rules, that the judges (specifically Richard Posner) came up with you actually have to show consumers were harmed. And since then all Anti-Trust cases are judged according to that criteria. And unsurprisingly the amount of Anti-Trust conviction has gone to basically nothing.

Standard Oil being case and point, during Standard Oil the oil price consistantly went down and the quality improved. The people that ran amoke against it were not in fact the poor consumers but rather local oil companies that were getting their ass handed to them by Standard Oil. They simply could not compete with the price or the quality.

I think that there will/can be competitors that spring out from the lower end. The trick is to prevent the oligopolists/monopolists from squashing them through manipulation of the legal system or other underhanded tactics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...

Specially if there is also tons of international competition as well.

When there was a real need for a new company, because of EV shift, a new one happened. If it was a real oligopoly such could not be done. In fact the Big 3 attempt at using their market power against Tesla have mostly been marketing oppertunites for Tesla.

Do you have any evidence that this would actually work?

Small companies generally don't have the resources to do large project. How is a small company going to build a state-of-the-art fighter jet? It's pretty much impossible. Look at other countries to see how they do it with small companies: they don't. The European nations basically have only a few large companies, the Chinese are the same, and so are the Russians.

The reasons America had a lot more aerospace companies in decades past are 1) planes were a lot simpler, 2) they were wiling to accept higher risk back then (some test planes crashing and killing the pilot was OK), and 3) the defense budget was enormous because there was a Cold War and the US's economy was gigantic thanks to being the only industrial power left standing after WWII. #3 is probably the biggest factor, and isn't going to happen again.

As for the stuff about golden parachutes, that's endemic to US companies in general, not just contractors. I don't see how it really affects competition much since everyone does it, except that it adds costs to American companies that, for instance, Chinese companies do not have, so it's probably bad in the long term for American competitiveness, but that really doesn't affect this argument for competitiveness between US government contractors (since they don't compete with foreign companies anyway). The bit about "a nice private sector job post government retirement" is pretty much the same: it's bad for American competitiveness, but doesn't affect things much internally, except that it probably makes upstart companies more competitive as far as costs go, but since acquiring contracts is very political it actually probably hurts upstarts since they're not connected the way the incumbents are.

Also, I should add they government actually does farm out smaller contracts to smaller companies. They even have a policy I think which causes them to do this more than they probably should, in an effort to help small companies. They don't farm out fighter jets to small companies, of course, but there are a bunch of processes that cause them to farm out small things to small companies.

The other thing that's important to understand is that most small companies do NOT want government contracts, if they're not already in that business. It's not like there's small companies that would be happy to bid on these things but are being prevented. In reality, government contracting is a giant pain in the ass, so the companies that do it are ones that are interested in it, and are good at it: their processes are set up to handle that kind of business model. Bidding on contracts is a pretty arduous thing and requires a lot of specialized skill and knowledge and special staff, so companies that aren't in that sector just don't bother.

First, the thing about cars doesn't work even for individuals, because it's not comparable. Buying an all-new spacecraft or aircraft isn't anything like buying a car. Cars are engineered and designed for a market, and manufactured in quantities of tens to hundreds of thousands or more. This is more like getting an extremely custom house built for yourself (think something like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, not a subdivision house): you have to find someone who can architect it, and someone to build it. Neither of these is easy because the house is entirely unique and not even like other houses. It's not something you can just go pay someone to do and not think much about, like you can with a car: you have to be actively involved in the design and construction process.

>If the government started bidding out smaller real hardware contracts to new companies

What companies have these abilities? Would you have a super-custom mansion designed and built by some random guy you met on a street corner? Of course not. You have to find someone who can actually do the work, and you have to be careful because a bunch of people will claim they can do it, but they really can't, so you can't accept their bids, and that means you have to do a lot of work in verifying they're capable of delivering.

Building a new spacecraft or airplane isn't trivial, and isn't something some small company can just do, like you seem to believe. How is a new company going to start up that can actually do these things? The only reason SpaceX worked out is because a billionaire started it as a hobby project, and even there, it's been at it for well over a decade now. Same goes for Blue Origin: it wouldn't exist if it weren't for some billionaire who apparently had nothing better to do with his time. Even going back to the old days, this is what happened with TWA and Hughes aviation: Howard Hughes was a billionaire who inherited his fortune and got bored with oil drilling bits. You can't just award a hardware contract to some tiny company that has no ability to deliver on the contract in a reasonable timeframe.

I don't think large R&D orgs have a monopoly on innovation. And they aren't guaranteed to produce good results. In context, though, the US put people on the moon 50 years ago at the cost in present dollars of $.5T. Easily that much or more has probably been invested in the defense side of rocket development. I think SpaceX was applying 50 years of incremental improvements to a technology that was relatively stagnant ("it just works" conservative approach/lower government funding/general risk aversion profile). This is not to slight them at all, just putting it in perspective.

But look at the payloads. Right now it's satellites/cargo. They still haven't done a manned mission. Commercial aircraft fly thousands of miles per day and carry hundreds of people. They do this while being repaired by different teams around the world.

It's not as glamorous, but incremental updates in adhesives, radar, rivets, and other safety and repairability are big deals and R&D into safety and reliability shouldn't be discounted. That's on top of the satellite division and Phantom Works (sustained and controlled hypersonic scramjet, wings that change shape). I am not a rocket scientist, so take it all with a grain of salt.

Essentially capital intensive makes it harder to enter and reduces the rate of attempts while EOS affects how well they can actually compete when they get there. Take Microsoft establishing the XBox Console ve Bing. Both took large ammounts of capital to launch but one is a success while the other is generally regarded as a joke. Once they got large enough as a platform the Xbox was "on the map" and a significant segment here to stay. Bing meanwhile remains a "second best".

Other examples of EOS in action - while there are larger law firms they haven't consolidated, and most artists take commissions independently instead of forming a megaconglomerate. They don't get much of anything from it due to specialization and lack of shared demand.

One example of EOS shifting is the decline of music producers with digital music and the rise of independent artists - the higher scale lost the relative edge.

As an engineer, he was accountable to reality. As a CEO, he was accountable to the board and the financials.

Guess which won.

Moreover, the 737 Max program ran from 2011-2015. The CEO at the time was an MBA.

That's true for a lot of other companies where people here have advocated the employees would benefit from unionization.

For the record, I am conflicted on engineer unionization, and my original statement was intended to be neutral.

As to this specific example, on one hand I understand the drive that comes from having a real mission (as opposed to an MBA-concocted "mission") and how a team who share that drive can execute with amazing speed; conversely, I have seen how poorly teams of clock-punchers putting in the bare minimum can perform.

On the other hand, I have also seen "the mission" used as a means to guilt trip people into overwork or accepting substandard compensation.

Of the two, I lean towards the SpaceX approach being the better one. In the absolute I don't particularly like either of them.

> EDIT: Eh. They aren't paid fantastically but not slave wages either. Additionally this is spread out over three very different cities.

> https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/SpaceX-Engineering-Salaries....

Those salaries look to be in line with what equivalent engineers at Raytheon, Lockheed, and Boeing are making in those same locations, maybe a bit higher. Thus, if the WLB reports from SpaceX are to be believed, their per-hour pay is much lower. It's hard to tell, though, without a proper breakdown by years of experience. Also, there are certainly teams within those companies where the engineers put in just as much time and effort as SpaceX engineers. Boeing is the only one I am aware of that has unionized engineers, though.

People want to work on cool stuff (in the sense of rockets or in the sense of making the world better, or both). They will accept lower pay (per hour) to do that. Therefore, working on cool stuff demands longer hours and lower pay compared to less glamorous things. It's not an inherent requirement of the field; it's a side effect of human preferences.