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Comment by Clewza313 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

... 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?

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.

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

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?

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...

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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