Boeing to ground Starliner indefinitely until valve issue solved | Hacker News Reader

Boeing to ground Starliner indefinitely until valve issue solved

arstechnica.com

I have worked at a few projects at a few companies and I’ve seen some interesting cycles over the years. The pattern I’m thinking of goes something like:

* motivated/passionate/skilled engineers/builders/scientists make a thing happen

* what starts out as a healthy balance between doer/creators and business/decider/facilitators slowly tips towards the latter

* economic cycles and other disruptive actions cause the passionate engineers that make things happen to depart to other pastures

* management/business continues to consolidate decision making prerogative and fails to realize that they are left with engineers of a more compliant ilk (not necessarily worse, just more willing to do as told and less incline to exercise risk taking initiative)

* progress slows to a trickle

I’m curious if anyone with insider information can speak to the possibility that this has happened in Boeing’s space division. The symptoms seem similar from afar.

Like others, I wish the engineers success from afar, because I would really want to succeed in an endeavor like this. But I know sometimes the engineers can become largely a body of people just willing to get the days tasks completed and that’s enough for them.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

Boeing is an engineering and manufacturing company, that is the culture. There are a lot of false narratives out there about Boeing's internal culture being a bunch of bean counters, etc. Of course there are pockets inside any large company that may not be ideal and mistakes are made in the development of any complex system. In my experience, however, Boeing is filled with dedicated engineering professionals trying to do the right thing in the face of increasing complexity. Sometimes there are structural problems in an organization and you get bad results despite everybody's best efforts.

Boeing, like the government, has a lot of antiquated heavy weight processes that slow development down. As a field matures, it gets more complex, many past mistakes result in new processes to follow. Eventually, it is cruft that is difficult to remove and hard to navigate. Overtime, this increases development costs and slows projects down.

Personally, probably the most difficult thing I've experienced is moving towards iterative processes (away from waterfall) and having a government customer wanting to support it but not really being able to.

For example, if one were to begin to develop/evolve a complex system, the government about half way through would want a list of materials so they can be reviewed for a variety or purposes. Well, in an evolving system, this list is generally everchanging as people learn more about the domain and are able to make better choices over time. Something as simple as a list of materials can create all kinds of headaches. I could probably give a dozen or so examples where the government wants to, but cannot interface with modern engineering programs and practices.

I also know that both the government and Boeing are trying to change, but it is difficult to change direction when so much of a large behemoth is made to work a certain way.

> Boeing is an engineering and manufacturing company,

Boeing was an engineering and manufacturing company. Then they bought McDonnell Douglas but MD executives ended up in the management chain.

> I’m curious if anyone with insider information can speak to the possibility that this has happened in Boeing’s space division.

s/in Boeing’s space division/at Boeing/

There's also the MCAS fiasco on the 737 MAX.

In a sane world, NASA would be cutting their losses and pulling all funding from Boeing around now, since it's already beyond clear that Starliner is not going be better than SpaceX's offerings on any meaningful metric.

Unfortunately there's little sane about NASA's funding and contracting process, unless you look at it from a pork barreling politician's perspective.

If the politicians had not spurred faster development by funding competing teams, we wouldn’t be able to stand here today and label one of those teams as a loser.

One team may be failing, but the broader process has clearly worked to produce revolutionary progress in our space industry.

Agreed, but based on my 10 years spent in defense work before escaping to startup land, Boeing and Lockheed are bloated, pathologically wasteful defect factories. Their entire business model revolves around winning contracts via paperwork and legal battles not efficiency and quality. Essentially the defense division of Boeing and Northrop Grumman and Lockheed are all rent-seeking organizations. They make extensive use of the revolving door in the military industrial complex as well and that breeds further inefficiency by constantly bringing in bureaucrats. It's utterly corrupt at the leadership level. Generals retire and are given a massive corner office which they almost never sit in, called in occasionally to play golf with another general who is not retired to cement the deal. And don't think for a second they aren't promising the general that hasn't yet retired a job as long as he goes along. That is the business model of these companies and never forget it.

Boeing had their shot to make space travel cheaper and they never even tried to make it happen.

I almost took my own head off nodding vigorously at this.

The "double dipping procurement officer" - the procurement officer arranging a purchase from a supplier that he's already got a job offer from - is so endemic in this sector that these people brag to each other about it over the buffet line at industry conferences. The first time I heard this spiel I thought someone was wearing a wire, but then I realized, slowly, that they didn't care who was listening because literally everyone - from the pentagon down through junior lieutenants and up to the supplier CEOs- was in on this. The corporate "Company-All" email chain is constantly littered with CEO announcements bragging about the latest retired procurement officer they've managed to scam with corner offices and tight little executive assistants.

And of course those same officers are the ones who sign waivers allowing substandard everything. MIL-STD avionics can be duct taped in the rack with a waiver from the program office, but the same equipment on a civilian PAX-carrying aircraft need actual testing by qualified people and equipment, no exceptions. And God forbid you get a EUROCAE auditor with the usual FAA mix - hold onto your nuts/ovaries. But the civilian stuff is aboveboard, for the most part, unless you're Boeing.

But the MIL-STD stuff . . oh god

The defense procurement business is horrifyingly corrupt, maybe even worse than the bureau system of the late USSR, and this is with dollar amounts that dwarf anything you've ever seen anywhere else. Every day I pray to the Defense Gods that a "SpaceX But For Defense" will show up and just blow everyone else out of the water. It might mean the end of my career, but it's what needs to happen.

Do you think this happens to all big contractors and will happen to SpaceX within a few years?

Elon has his own agenda and SpaceX is his vehicle to achieve it. If his plan succeeds, we'll have a self-sustaining commercial space industry.

... but they're not actually competing if they can overcharge and underdeliver and get contracts anyway. This is the same case that Blue Origin is making with HLS: they submitted a bid for 3x the price and worse performance, and they insist that "competition" demands that they get a contract anyway! How is that competitive?

So fund Sierra Nevada instead. Boeing has screwed the pooch.

I think they are so far down the sunken cost fallacy its both unbelievable and a hard call to make to be honest.

I know SpaceX is capitalizing on the bad news, but they do have a history of being aggressive with the promises and hitting delays, but no where NEAR the magnitude of boeing.

I thought it was a fixed price contract, but apparently nasa has been paying them above that.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/nasa-report-finds-bo...

Congress killed the Superconducting Super Collider. Has Boeng successfully gotten to the point where SSC could not? I grew up in the area where the tunnels were being built, and I know there was a mad rush to get a certain % completed so it made more sense and cents to complete rather than kill it. So I guess that's at least one success Starliner can brag about?

As with so many things, the time derivative is what's important. SpaceX is only getting better. Boeing is only getting worse.

I don't think SpaceX delays are anything unusual for the aerospace industry. SpaceX will claim 2 years and hit 4 years; industry standard is to claim 10 years and take 20.

Major construction projects, and software, always take longer and cost more than budgeted. If Pournelle’s law is iron, this one is concrete.

It is a sane world. The US government needs a legal way to funnel money to the only domestic producer of air travel in the US as foreign governments outright funnel money to foreign airline manufacturers. Starliner was never about space, it was never intended to actually leave the ground, it is a legal slush fund for Boeing. It is of crucial strategic importance that we maintain a domestic airline maker. In the US we do not have a legal way for congress to just hand companies outright free money, we use these wacky programs to do it. I ain't even mad about it.

If that's the goal, wouldn't a secret military program be more efficient? Snnce then Boeing wouldn't need to build and demonstrate a product at all.

Don't worry. Boeing fucks up it's secret military programs too.

We do that too but politicians don't get as much credit for secret jobs programs.

> Starliner was never about space, it was never intended to actually leave the ground

Funneling money to Boeing is one thing, but that claim’s a stretch, surely?

In an ever saner world, the US would fix its domestic producers. Keeping them alive is of minimal strategic value if they don’t function. Creating competition, perhaps by forcing Boeing to split into multiple companies, more than one of which produces airplanes, could be a viable strategy.

If you want to nationalize an industry, why not make that argument?

I'm no expert but they probably flies in the face of capitalism which a large portion of senators claim they believe in.

Boeing seems to be doing this particular launch with their own funding, as per the article.

One metric in which Startliner could be different from crew dragon, is that Starliner does not splash down in the sea, rather parachutes down on land.

Different, yes. But how is that better? And how hard would it be for space x to make theirs parachute down on land?

How much of this is a total surprise that it is happening vs somebody thought somewhere this was totally likely but was forced to go through the processes anyways because deadlines and keeping up appearances? Also, pressure because SpaceX is kicking everyone's ass? My money is there's a group of engineers that were desperately hoping for something else to go wrong before it got to their part.

Back when the contracts were initially awarded the prevailing opinion was that SpaceX was the risky play that might pay off with something useful; and that Boeing/Lockheed/WhateverMilIndustComplexMerger would be expensive but at least produce something safe and known to work if slow and expensive.

As has been proven by the commercial aircraft wing; the 'reverse acquisition' ~2 decades ago put the accountants and MBA types in charge and effectively gutted the engineering, safety, and 'built it right then apply a price tag' culture the company used to have in decades past.

Lucky NASA pushed hard to have SpaceX as a second source or would still be waiting for human rated spacecraft.

You mean thankfully SpaceX sued NASA for the right to compete and won.

That was a different program, COTS (which never involved Boeing). SpaceX has been a contract recipient for Commercial Crew since the beginning.

Thank you for the correction!

IATA but it's mildly exiting to see one of my decadal hn predictions inch closer to coming true, a year and a half in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21943167

> Aside from one time when I correctly predicted my coworker's house would be under a volcano in 15 years

I'm amazed no one in that thread asked you for details about this. What happened?

2003, was working in a science lab, lab tech came in and said he (or maybe it was his brother) had just bought a house, really cheap, in hawaii. He said it was in lanikai estates. Family is from hawaii and I'm a bit of a geography geek, so I hopped onto mapquest to see where it was... Noticed it was due east of pu'u o'o, and I know the volcano is moving east, so I told him, look you have 10-15 years to sell that house before it winds up under a volcano. Fast forward 15 years and volcano! The volcano just snuck in under my time window, haha.

To be fair, I do not know for sure if HIS house went under; there are houses in the neighborhood that were spared.

I didn't bother to ask because when I stalked him it said he was an employee of Theranos, and I decided it was probably not a good idea to poke a hornet's nest.

Speaking of Theranos, back when I was in my 2nd postdoc (2013) we were talking about how theranos was a fraud and it was going to come crumbling down, Some other crazy short term things I predicted: Sarah Palin VP candidate, Feb 2008, Simone Giertz becoming famous (ca winter 2015). I also predicted the failure of the first starliner launch (documented here in HN). I also have managed to pick some ascendant "obscure" PLs just before hockey sticking. Used Julia professionally in 2015 (proof of use in 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0Y1uAA-2Y&t=53m), used Elixir in 2017, been using Zig since 2019. And I haven't really used any other non-mainstream PLs, so I have a pretty good hit record I think. And a couple of obscure cryptos that I don't want to talk too much about.

It's interesting to think how astronauts had little qualms about hopping in space craft designed in the 1960s on drafting tables. Yet with the insane leaps in engineering we've made since then, it almost feels like it be hard to replicate the same leaps in space travel that we saw from the 1950s to 1980s.

This is an incredible laboratory of process and methodology: compare "design -> build" to "iterate as fast as possible".

While software spent a few decades slaved to traditional engineering approach (building a bridge), R&D like this, even in hardware, has proven to do well at incremental development approaches.

We had a few hints of this with how Apple produces things...but it never leaked out into the rest of the world until SpaceX literally started building a spaceship factory out in the open.

I am an engineer without aerospace experience. However, In my experience, when several identical valves fail in the same service enviromment, you have made a design mistake. Valves with packing leaks make it a sophomoric design error.

Yet, this craft was ready to launch. What else might wrong with it?

I was reading up a bit on Boeing and it seems that their best days were in the 1960s and 70s. Just coasting on past successes.

Luckily for them they literally cannot fail because their competitors simply don't have the production capabilities to take over- Airbus has a massive backlog.

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