Emirates’ Tim Clark says Boeing ‘not getting it’ on 737 Max, 787
theaircurrent.com
theaircurrent.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaWdEtANi-0
The following summary is my own:
The whole story is shown in the first seconds: three aircraft encountering more force than a usual landing (such as a runway overrun). All three fuselages breaking into three parts in exactly the same two places! All three aircraft exactly eight years old.
Aluminum members called chords run the length of the fuselage and around the circumference to make up the fuselage structure. The chords are joined to each other and to reinforcing surrounds for large openings like doors.
Poorly fitting chords and bear plates around openings were redrilled when mounting holes were misplaced, reshaped and pounded with hammers in order to mate them. This weakened of the structure to below design margins. In addition excessive metal fatigue due to hand processing led to accelerated corrosion, likely causing structural failure in three eight-year-old NG aircraft that broke up on landing. The aircraft were engineered to survive an emergency landing intact and were designed for 30-year airframe life.
More to the story as the government colluded with Boeing to cover these deficiencies and frustrate the actions (eventually lawsuits) by a team of whistleblowers.
Basically, the subcontractor agreed to use computer controlled manufacturing processes, then did 90% of the work by hand. The resulting substandard parts were beaten into shape on Boeing's production line.
Watching this, I can better understand a recent story on local TV about developments in the US airline industry. They forecast that many companies will using the the opportunity of the pandemic to retire older aircraft.
A single aisle aircraft will do around 2-6 cycles per day.
Of course what makes aircraft fly is money so there are major overhauls needed to keep them flying after a certain number of cycles (a D check)
https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/2012...
It is because each generation of aircraft keeps getting vastly more fuel efficient, and fuel makes up most of the cost of flying.
> In mid-2011, one design objective was matching fuel burn of the 737 MAX to that of the Airbus A320neo's 15% fuel-burn advantage. The initial 737 Max reduction was 10–12%; it was later enhanced to 14.5%. The fan was widened from 61 in (150 cm) to 69.4 in (176 cm) by raising the nose gear and placing the engine higher and forward. The split winglet added 1–1.5% fuel burn reduction, a re-lofted tail cone added an additional 1% reduction. Electronically controlling the bleed air system improved efficiency. The new engine casings included chevrons, similar to those of the Boeing 787, which also helped to reduce engine noise.[100]
But yes, mostly the engines.
The two investigators were later fired, after (they imply) the US government leaked their identities to Boeing.
I wonder if they thought to report this to the European aviation regulator, after getting nowhere in the US.
I’m definitely not flying the 737MAX, and this seriously makes me question the 787 as well as 737NG or in fact Boeing as a whole.
I have experience in a different large aviation company, and this doesn't match my experience at all in the industry. I've seen parts refused because the label was stamped instead of printed like they used to. To make its way to production, the kind of defect we're talking about would need to be approved by an engineering specialist with FAA delegation. And in my experience these people don't sign their name on anything they remotely don't like, and they have means to escalate to the authorities in case of any issue.
more than a week ? is this acceptable?
[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/29/boeing-...
[2] https://www.flightglobal.com/airframers/corrosion-can-prompt...
From what I recall, if your aircraft sits on the ground for a month, you need quite a few more intensive inspections to make sure it's still flight ready.
Aircraft will rarely park for a week unattended, the only reason they would be is a refit or major maintenance. Every hour an aircraft isn't in the air costs the airline A LOT of money.
Just like JIT, the quest for greater efficiency makes systems less robust. Were these failures anticipated due to engineering tradeoffs or due to the manufacturing issues?
What do you mean by this part?
The early Quantas Flight 32 engine failure [1] was quite severe and the plane was lucky to continue to fly, for instance.
"a turbine disc in the aircraft's number-two engine (on the port side nearest the fuselage) was found to have disintegrated, causing extensive damage to the nacelle, wing, fuel system, landing gear, flight controls, and engine controls, and a fire in a fuel tank "
Nobody had "omitted" documenting flight-altering automation in the training required to dodge certification requirements...
Indeed it's astonishing to think that one of the tasks that lead to safety and victory for an aircraft which is simple (as opposed to the many which are complex) is the single point of this particular failure.
It seems that the better a plane is designed, the "luckier" it gets! Strange how that works.
It breaks the most consistent rule in the English language, so no surprise that it trips people up.
I'm in the same position. Before the 737 Max fiasco, the only plane I would really look out for, and woudl change tickets for, was the A380. For long distance flights it's way more comfortable especially in economy. The seats tend to be more comfortable, and it's significantly quieter, than competing planes on long distance routes.
The airline matters too - some have larger seats with more amenities and more space between rows. Those extra inches really matter on long haul flights for those of us who are tall!
I thought the air was less dry too, but didn't really have means to measure that.
Also it’s unlikely to have been upper deck gray water. More likely it was condensate.
My favorite plane for long distance is the 787. The mechanical bits are pretty noisy on climb out, but when cruising it's a really comfortable ride.
I like that actually; makes me sleep better. But the 787 is nice too.
That being said, in my experience, airlines very rarely advertise which 'sub-type' of narrow-body you'll be flying on (at least until you've bought the ticket). Finding a flight which is definitely on an A320-neo (as opposed to ceo) for example is very difficult. I would assume that especially now airlines will do their best to hide the fact that they are flying a 737 Max.
Also, the 737NG is arguably the safest airliner ever produced (by statistics, not speculation), so why would I want to avoid it?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/20/boeing-737-....
There is a notion that Boeing is (was) a company with an insanely great engineering culture. Their engineers lived in an idyllic culture of building amazing products while always putting public safety first. This great culture suffered under the merger with McDonnell Douglas [1], [2], [3]. This narrative further says that McDonnell had a mercenary profits at all cost management culture which infected the management of the combined entity. However Boeing's engineers tried to preserve their engineering ethos while living under this oppressive regime and continued building great and safe products.
This argument is frequently put forth by ex-Boeing engineers. This is a naked apologia for Boeing's behavior which killed 346 people and endangered the lives of 1000s more and destroyed jobs/wealth around the world.
So strong is the apologists conviction in the purity of Boeing's engineering culture that they ignore the fact that thousands of engineers worked on the 737 Max. Not a single engineer raised issues with the engineering of the aircraft. Not a single engineer wrote a blistering memo calling out its failing or quit in protest. They were all held in thrall, paralyzed and forced to go against their ethics, professionalism, decency by the power of this unholy culture forced upon them by McDonnell Douglas!
Eventually, all stellar organizations, public or private, become complacent (e.g. Israeli Intelligence Failure, 1973, NASA by the 1980s). Boeing made an unstable plane which it then stablized with a dangerous MCAS to get it to market fast. They then topped it off by making the MCAS rely on a single sensor. They then made the dual-sensor an upgrade. An undergraduate engineering student with a basic course on probability can see that this is tailor-made for disaster. Boeing made an essential safety feature an upgrade!! But wait there is more. They then proceeded to hide this monstrosity from every regulator and airline on the planet. They insisted that the plane was no different in every aspect of its flight behavior than its predecessor which was over 30 years old and did not require additional safety training.
Boeing had become so criminally blatant that the head of airline training at Lion Air inquired about extra training for the 737 Max and Boeing's test engineers rebuffed him. After the Lion Air crash, Boeing proceeded to cast aspersion on the safety practices of Lion Air. Lion Air had a spotty safety record in the past. In this case it was Boeing that rebuffed their requests for additional training because it would set a precedent for other airlines in SE Asia. When that lack of training became a factor in the crash during the investigation, Boeing proceeded to blame Lion Air. Chutzpah!
Transcripts of messages released during the investigation show how Boeing employees worked in unison to ensure no extra simulator training was required. Folks, this is not a great engineering culture obsessed with safety but rather an organization trying to get away with as much as it can and then indulging in a coverup.
We need to start accepting that whatever stellar engineering culture existed at Boeing is dead. We as a society need to stop scapegoating imaginary forces in the past and giving Boeing engineers a pass.
Strong regulation is necessary to ensure the safety of Boeing Products.
[1] https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
[2] https://fortune.com/longform/boeing-737-max-crisis-sharehold...
The McDonnell Douglas merger occurred in 1997, the 737 Max programme wasn't started until 2011. So if people say that the merger caused a decline in engineering standards that would seem to be consistent with 737 Max being badly executed ?
- First there is no way to falsify that assertion. It is completely unfalsifiable and unscientific.
- Second, there is no one from McDonnell here to defend them. This assertion is at best innuendo and at worst defamatory and tars McDonnell unfairly.
- Let's say that the merger was the cause of all the evil. So what? Really, so what. The shareholders and employees of the combined entity have reaped the benefit of the merger for two decades.
I don't care if they merged with McDonnell or McDonald or McSorely's. The current Boeing inflicted this disaster on us. Lets hold them accountable and dispense with the fantastical stories of some company they merged with 20 years ago which did them in.
The problem with doing as you say is ypu're cutting out the factors that led to the problem. Companies do not fail in a day except in the most spectacular circumstances. Culture death is a death of many cuts, just as a successful corporate culture is the outcome of concerted, consistent effort.
People in the presence of a good corporate culture don't generally make downright negligent, dangerous decisions. You need a dysfunctional culture to elevate those dangerous decisions to the "new, desirable status quo". Just look at investment banking or finance for examples of those by the boatload.
Quality culture requires Quality upkeep. If you set the incentives wrong, everything quickly goes downhill from there. I see it everywhere I go. Maintaining a quality first mindset is not natural at all. It is Hard. It requires accountability, it requires everyone chipping in and doing at times their own job, plus someone elses enough to cover those bad days. It requires vigilance, egolessness, and a drive to stop the whole bloody show rather than deliver a sub-par, unworkable product. It requires as close as you'll ever get to unity and clarity of purpose from top to bottom. Throw out any of that, and effort invested to desirable output ratio just balloons from there.
You had a Boeing competitor with a clear history of decision making that caused issues like MAX (DC-10, MD-11).
You had an unprecedented period of aerospace consolidation. You saw a turning over of the guard in a shining star of the space where the very people who worked there and still had family there calling out that the culture had changed for the worse.
>The relentless message: Shareholders would henceforth come first at Boeing. The important thing was not to get “overly focused on the box,” Hopkins said in a 2000 interview with Bloomberg. “The box”—the plane itself—“is obviously important, but customers are assuming the box is of great quality.” This was heresy to engineers, to whom the box was everything. The strike that year was formally over wages and benefits, but workers described it as a referendum on management.[1]
The engineering powerhouse, famous for building "the box" stopped caring about the building "the box". They pivoted to growth and financial performance at all costs.
>12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.[2]
>12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.[2]
They did everything they could to union bust, damping the spirits and pride that workers brought to the job.
>End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.[2]
They outsourced without regard for Quality of product or building loyalty and trust with suppliers.
>Boeing began putting more junior employees into the roles, and some employees believed that was because they’d be more willing to listen to managers and less likely to dig in their heels, Dickson says. “How long do you want to keep polishing that apple?” was a phrase managers often used with engineers who wanted to keep testing, he says.[1]
They skimped on training, and did everything possible to wring leniency out of their regulator. They penalized anyone who pointed out a Quality problem. These are not the hallmarks of a company that people point to as an example of quality culture, and the tipping point and timeframe from shift of incentives to long-term production of lackluster results is just about right.
These are not unscientific observations. They are clear as day. You had means, management swapout/changing of incentives, culture degradation; opportunity (merger); and motive (hello stock options)! You don't do any of the aforementioned and come out smelling like roses, let alone all at the same time. The finance first school of corporate management, is not, in fact, the same culture that blazed the path for ever safer skies. Even once an Engineer (Mullenberg) got bumped up to CEO eventually, he inherited a dysfunctional organization, stripped of it's safeguards by the severity of the cultural transformation that had already taken place, and that he was a part and parcel of. To be honest, I feel bad for the guy. If anything went wrong, it was that he didn't disrupt the place enough on turn over to see where the mold had started to grow.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-09/former-bo...
[2]https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/
It isn't about blaming ghosts. It's about acknowledging that as human beings, the institutions we establish are as much in a transient state of being, development, and growth as we ourselves are. The are the being, to which we were the cells and organelles.
Therefore, you have to take into account the devil in the details to ensure the same degradation or slipping is recognized for what it is and remediated the moment it rears its ugly head. To do anything else; to blind oneself to the way change propagates through human systems, is to doom the lot of us to making the same mistakes again.
You do you. However, as someone who dug into every detail of those investigations I could get my hands on at the time, down to running the math, looking up regulations, designs, blueprints, etc.? I saw enough of the warning signs to recognize the processes at work. Culture went down the tubes. It doesn't exonerate anyone involved necessarily, and yeah, more people should have spoke out. Maybe they'd have risked it if there was more competition in the sector? Maybe not. But we at least know a pattern to look for.
I hope you dont imply banks in general have a culture problem, more than aviation or bakeries ?
Cutting corners is a result of a cultural dysfunction that happens everywhere. The reason why you feel you care about IB is because salaries are high and it was easier to blame them for 2008 than blame the culprits (easy loan policies, millions of voting adults jump on speculative loops in real estate, specialized lenders lying on loan application, US gov exporting securitized debt to Germany, etc... IBs just were a middle man taken by surprise in an ocean of shit everyone was swimming in happily)
Sure there is. If all the management at Boeing stayed in charge, there would be no MD executives and management to have tarnished Boeing's culture. But that's not what happened. MD DID take over management and DID change the culture.
>Second, there is no one from McDonnell here to defend them. This assertion is at best innuendo and at worst defamatory and tars McDonnell unfairly.
Really? It was pretty widely known throughout the industry what MD's culture and management was like. There's nobody to "defend them" because they considered the behavior perfectly acceptable.
>Let's say that the merger was the cause of all the evil. So what? Really, so what. The shareholders and employees of the combined entity have reaped the benefit of the merger for two decades.
So... I would hope we as a species realize there are limits to profit at all cost and learn from it??
As for proof, all you need to do look back to the mid-90s. I remember what a mess MD was, it's not hard to research.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/12/17/c...
Highlights include:
>All aerospace firms are cutting costs to match declining orders, but McDonnell Douglas does it with an unmatched aggression. It has shed 52 percent of its work force over the past seven years, dropping to 63,000 employees.
>Stonecipher defines one of his key roles as "making sure we employ not one person more than we absolutely need." He insists that company managers cut costs yearly, with "zero allowance for inflation."
Cutting costs to absolute 0 doesn't allow for a culture of quality and craftsmanship, period. Taking time and doing things right has excess spend by definition.
The problem with this narrative is that Boeing CEO/President/Chairman Philip Condit knew precisely what he was doing when he sought the merger. The board had elevated him precisely to make a strategic move like that--in fact, to make that particular move. And most importantly the board knowingly chose the financial pitches of the McDonnell Douglas executives over the protests of the more risk-averse Boeing CFO Givans and his faction. Givans was pushed out shortly after the merger by Condit and the board, including original Boeing board members. (See https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug... Unfortunately I can't find some of the more informative contemporaneous accounts that explain it better.)
All of which is to say, Boeing's engineering-first culture was already on the way out before the merger. Yes, McDonnell Douglas executives ended up winning the power struggles, but that was Condit's and the board's plan from the get go. McDonnell Douglas was the vehicle, not the instigator. But top Boeing leadership didn't want too much spectacle because they needed to keep stringing along a handful of board members and major investors who were wary of the strategic and cultural shifts.
I don't think there's any serious dispute (now or then) that McDonnell Douglas was a financial engineering company first and foremost, not an engineering company. Likewise, leading into the merger Boeing's reputation as an engineering-first company was widely accepted. But as I mention elsethread, claims that McDonnell Douglas corrupted Boeing are problematic. Top Boeing leadership had already made their choice to transform the culture before the merger; the merger was the execution.
My problem with the narrative is two fold:
[1] Assigning the "cause" of the 737Max fiasco to culture instead of plain hubris, complacency, etc.
[2] Even if [1] is true, attributing the culture shift to the McDoug merger. There is simply no way to test/falsify it. It becomes purely a narrative.
Even if McDoug was a financial engineering company first and foremost where is the counterfactual that Boeing would not have arrived here anyways?
Are there other great engineering organizations that have arrived in a dysfunctional place without an infusion of alien culture. Look at NASA, what was the financial engineering culture that enforced a launch at any cost mindset?
McDoug culture as the culprit in the 737Max disaster is a fanciful narrative, an adult version of the tooth fairy and santa claus.
Fanciful narratives are fine but here they are being used to exonerate Boeing by blame shifting.
It distracts from the more important question of, what to do about the fact that Boeing is a dangerously broken "too big to fail" (code for a national firm in Americanese) money pit?
My vote would be to remove the bullshit capitalist figleaf and just nationalize it. This has the advantage of aligning expectations for Americans, who are convinced government can't function competently.
More seriously, left to their own devices, Boeing will continue to shove enormous gobs of money into executive pockets. Make them GS-scale and most of them will leave, clearing the way for an attempt at hiring some competence.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/04/world/middlee...
They could make these planes from paper and they still would sell. The moment the systemic thread of the soviet union was considered no longer imminent (70s-80s) the slide into abysmal quality began. So to join the "I don't want to pay for my own military and still be relatively safe" club, you buy those planes.
I think your analysis of the culture problem is insightful; even the most broken corporate cultures believe internally that they are not broken, and that problems are someone else’s fault. In fact this belief is probably an essential clue to a broken culture as it breaks the feedback-improvement loop and erodes accountability.
It's entirely realistic that most engineers by far were not aware of it.
I work (not at Boeing) on an aircraft system. On the aircraft I work on, I have no idea if the flight controls architecture is fully safe, I don't know nearly enough about it to judge. I don't know how many sensor they use and how. That's not the system I work on.
> Boeing made an unstable plane which it then stablized with a dangerous MCAS to get it to market fast. They then topped it off by making the MCAS rely on a single sensor. They then made the dual-sensor an upgrade. An undergraduate engineering student with a basic course on probability can see that this is tailor-made for disaster.
It's really not that straightforward. Again, without knowing a lot of details about the implementation of the MCAS you couldn't say it was so obviously dangerous.
For instance, I understand that the use of a single sensor was justified by the fact that the MCAS was supposed to be possible to activate only once, which wouldn't give it enough authority to reach a catastrophic condition. This literally gives you the justification to use a single sensor. However the implementation of the MCAS software combined with the flight crew procedures ended up activating it several times.
The point is, you need to know an awful lot about a system to judge whether it's dangerous or not. And there are lots of systems. It's not something that any engineer not working on that particular part could do, and it's certainly not in the reach of any external undergraduate student.
> Strong regulation is necessary to ensure the safety of Boeing Products.
Right, and the only thing any engineer on the program could have been concerned about is the apparent lack of oversight from the authorities, although I don't know enough about how it went in practice to say if it was really apparent to lower level engineers.
I'm guessing not.
Note that too big to fail, and small enough to fail has less to do with the size of the company and more to do with market position and government perception.
It's a difficult space to make decisions in and I think it's difficult to make any broad statements about reliability of product or company. Someone would need to actually run some numbers.
Companies like Pipistrel that are producing innovative aircraft are usually small enough to fail.
Just thinking about that, maybe it's both? A combination of little "skin in the game" and short sighted incentives ("budget efficiencies") that lead to a "lack of imagination"?
How did NASA solve this problem after Columbia?
NASA, despite being part of the US government, faced a much larger risk of being shut down after Columbia (more so than Challenger, since the Cold War was over).
Isn't Boeing the result of having many "small enough to fail" aerospace companies actually fail?
not the best choice of wording. i'm sorry, that's all i can see.
There is - it's an incredibly capital and know-how heavy business, with loooong lead times and huge risk. Just ask Bombardier - a company with plenty of aeronautical experience nearly went bankrupt developing the C-series ( which is a short haul airliner, so not even the most expensive), had to sell off everything they do, and the pandemic will probably finish them off.
What exactly was the nature of this ""The wake up call"?
No amount of empirical evidence to the contrary will disuade them because you don't understand the _science_
Starship will be better for international flights (30 minutes to anywhere), and Boom Supersonic for shorter flights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
EDIT: Willing to make a bet with naysayers, email in profile (just fixed it, thanks)
SpaceX can only do what they do because there is no human pilot on those test flights. I know that the Navy pilots argued and argued that you need a human on board but is that really true, or did that end up destroying the space program by making the cost of failure so impossibly high?
So no. That is not the reason. Try again.
1. the science hadn't been fully developed ahead of time
2. he would have had a harder time getting other people on board with his idea -- he would have been labelled a complete crackpot
3. governments may have not have been so willing to allow him to do it
So pretty much, not before computers were good enough to autonomously land, so at best the 2000s.
Friction stir welding was invented in 1991. Full flow staged combustion was tried out in the 1960s. GPS was available 1993. Not sure how much computing power it needs.
SpaceX was founded in 2002.
-
Do you know what is the actual limiting factor in train speed? It's not energy, or friction - we can make really fast trains. No, the limiting factor is radius of curvature needed to maintain confort while turning.
Otherwise, we can already make maglev trains that go 600+km/h, for cheaper than the hyperloop, and without the awful design flaws. But you'd need to destroy a lot of property to do so, so pretty much no one is interested outside of China.
No. Its flaws make the vacuum tunnel version entirely unfeasible. Therefore not a good idea. The non-vacuum version is just a tunnel – Musk doesn't get to call that a "Hyperloop" just because he put Teslas in it.
> the flaws are actually solvables
No. But we don't have to have that debate. We can just sit back, and relax, and our lord and savior Elon Musk will solve the solvables. Then I promise to be the first in line to sing his praises and ride the Hyperloop when the problems are solved. (Hint: they won't be).
Can we please stop praising Musk for things he says he will do? Why does this man get to promise all kinds of shit, and harvest the praise immediately?
The airline industry, for all of its faults, is multiple orders of magnitude safer than rockets. Perhaps rocket based vehicles are the future, but rocket failures must first become drastically more rare or at least less prone to everyone dying onboard in the case of a failure to be used in lieu of traditional airplanes.
Rockets - https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-the-s...
2020 Airline safety - https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-airlines-safety/aviation-...
You might want to look at the early days of airplane safety, not the 2020 numbers. Look up reliablity learning curve, safety comes from doing a huge volume of flights. All existing rockets have a small number of flights
EDIT: am a SpaceX shareholder and I’ve met with Elon more than once, so not sure what you mean by parasocial
Reminds me of the "All Birds are Cats" sketch by Clarke and Dave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIl1VuGTk3g (Relevant bit starts at 51s)
You see, there are those very top notch and quite a bit complex raptor engines powering it, but modern efficient jet engines are also pretty complex. The rest is basically "just" two cans of propelant and some very basic cold gas thrusters and big but simple aerosurfaces.
Also while indeed the energies Starship needs to handle at any given time are much bigger, it needs to handle them for minutes at a time (launch, landing) versus an airliner fighting air resistance and 10 different types of weather during a 12 hour transcontinental flight. Not to mention passenger and crew amenities you dont need to lug with you with a ~30 minute hop time.
Rocket engines also have their own oxidizer on board so FOD ingestion or birdstrike is not an issue.
And for launch and landing you need an isolated but rather simple and small area compared to the many kilometers of runways, taxiways and other airport infrastructure.
Lastly they run on liquid oxygen & methane, which might be actually cheaper and easier to get than jet grade kerosene, at least over time.
So indeed, Starship definitely is rocket science but it also does not have many pain points of modern airliners.
Wings are also way simpler than rockets.
You also have way more time to try to fix or workaround issues.
Reliability wise, airplanes will always be much better than rockets, especially if you include a propulsive landing.
Still, Starship does not really need an airport for emergency landing - anything reasonably level will very quickly become a landing pad once the raptors get going for landing.
Also as for wings - those seem very complex to me on a modern airliner - flaps, spoilers, ailerons, wingless, integral fuel tanks, etc. In comparison to that starship is a lightweight water tower with a couple metal barn doors attached - much simpler structure with far less moving parts.
For instance, you cannot have a single failure (whatever its probability) that leads to a catastrophic condition. Meaning, for every component and at every moment, you have to assume the component fails and still have to ensure you don't kill your passengers.
There have been around 6000 orbital launches, in total. That's across all countries, all companies, and all time. This is simply insufficient volume to learn how to do it safely. When airplanes were at a similar level of maturity they crashed regularly for every reason from mechanical failure to the fact that people didn't know how to fly into a cloud and not fall out of the sky. (It turns out that in about 15 minutes the inner ear gets confused and you're almost certainly trapped in a spiral if you don't have the right instruments.)
Judging from their public comments, SpaceX is hoping to get 3 launches per day from each Starship, and is hoping to produce hundreds of starships per year. Which means that after a few years, they intend to get to more orbital launches per day than we have had orbital launches in all of human history.
If they do so, there is every reason to believe that they will learn how to make rockets safer. Not by a factor of 5 or 10 because they have good engineers. But to the level of, say, car travel. Because they will develop the volume of operations that will let them find the things that go wrong one flight out of 10,000.
(It will take rockets a long time to get to the volume of operations that enables them to match airplanes. But in the long run there is no reason that rockets can't become that good.)
This sort of talk has always seemed to be really infeasible to the point of being nonsensical. What could possibly drive the need for 6000 orbital launches per day? Where are the fuel resources going to come from?
This sort of pie-in-the-sky thinking I don't find motivating at all, I just find it to be so excessive that I have no choice but to immediately dismiss it.
The double-standard with eco-consciousness gets me too. Green cars, green home power, green everything... but 6000 orbital launches per day. What?
I'm not trying to be a SpaceX hater - although I admit to being very sick of the Musk fanboyism - I just genuinely don't understand where these claims are coming from.
That said, rapid delivery of materials from one spot on Earth to another is inherently valuable. I'm sure that most of their flights will actually be suborbital instead. As in point to point travel between two places on Earth. The ability to do transcontinental trips in an average of 30 minutes is of interest to a lot of people, and doing so with physical packages is acceptable at higher risk than doing so with humans.
You know, I've read about easy rocket transportation in science fiction for decades. I'm reading _The Man in the High Castle_ to my son now, and it's an example of this.
But I honestly have trouble buying it, and I'd love if you could tell me why you believe it.
For one thing, it will take ages. I'm having trouble finding good numbers, but I think a reasonable SWAG is that there have been on the order of 100 million airplane flights in human history. Rockets have decades of catchup.
And rockets have an inherently worse failure mode. Many airplanes that fail during flight can still land. I don't think this is true of rockets. Failures are vastly more likely to be catastrophic. Is it possible to ameliorate this at all?
The same arguments could've been made for train travel against planes at first. In my opinion, rockets are likely safer than planes in a non-fuel incident since they are built to have parachutes and other safety devices built in from the beginning beyond just gliding with the hopes rudders and flaps aren't affected.
Below a few thousand feet (if I recall), both rockets and planes have similar risks in my opinion. The most deadly planes crashes are in the first or last few minutes of the flight when they have the least altitude and speed to figure out a plan; similarly, if an incident occurs with a rocket in the first 90 seconds, there is a good chance of high fatalities.
Maybe I would argue that rockets _could_ be safer since they will spend less time in this dangerous altitude but I am neither an aerospace engineer nor a rocket scientist.
And yes, it is possible to make rockets safer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_escape_system for one of the ways. But there are limits. If you're next to something that decides to explode, that explosion is a problem.
The tiny amount of work being accomplished for the ludicrous amount of fuel being used is just silly.
Even compares Starship and airplane.
Also, the article is full of baloney, like assuming rocket fuel will be made using renewable energy - it won't, because it's magnitudes cheaper to just extract it from fossil fuels, and if it was viable you could do the same for airplanes, but at an even lower cost.
Also the methane used by Starship could be synthetised possibly used captured CO2 if you had enough power available for that.