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Comment by orenlindsey | Hacker News Reader

I think it's clear that Boeing, ULA, and all of the "old guard" space companies are still trying to catch up to the disruption from SpaceX and the ensuing boom of innovation that followed it. Let's face it - Starliner would not have even been thought of without SpaceX bringing competition. They were caught flat footed and had to scramble to catch up. Now we see the results of that - a capsule that's only partly baked.

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I can't think of a larger moat in any industry where the leader has such a gigantic head start than spaceX. The "old guard" is so far behind why would the US Govt. or NASA give those companies any money now as it would be akin to setting it on fire. I mean spacex had 96 launches last year compared to ULAs 3. It just shows how much bureaucracy can just kill a companies innovation.

Head start? Boeing has 108 years of vast aerospace history and culture.

The mistakes on this project are well summarized by an Ars article this week, mostly coming down to the well known management issues plus an inability to operate in a fixed price procurement setting; everything about their organization depended on cost plus structures.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/the-surprise-is-not-th...

SpaceX absolutely has a head-start now on reusability, launch costs, etc.

Boeing's century of experience was supposed to give them a head start on Commercial Crew; they squandered it, and recent history has the resulting gap getting bigger, not smaller.

exactly, I mean Boeing can't even make planes with doors that don't fall off in flight. I wouldn't look to Boeing for any engineering excellence in 2024.

They can obviously do that. They just can't do it fast enough or profitable enough to satisfy their managements' sales goals.

Profit, manufacturing speed, reliability: pick 2.

Horse breeders had millennia of accumulated history and culture at the end of the 19th century.

Boeing today is not the same Boeing of yesterday. All that history means nothing if you can’t execute now.

Access to space is a vital enough national interest that it cannot be left to the whims of a single company. The alternative to giving money to the competitors would be installing a politruk in SpaceX and authorizing them to override any decision made by the company. Spending a few billion dollars a year inefficiently is probably preferable to that.

What you have here is a false dichotomy: Giving money to ULA or nationalizing SpaceX to penalize them for success.

Here's a third option: Give that money to Rocket Lab so they can develop their capabilities instead of giving it to ULA for their executives to snort it up their noses.

Public money goes to companies that can make plausible bids when the government has a need for some capability. For the Commercial Crew Program, that was in the early 2010s, when SpaceX was the upstart with a new unproven rocket. Rocket Lab has won some government contracts, but probably less than $1 billion in total, because it has been in serious business with big rockets only for a few years.

> Starliner would not have even been thought of without SpaceX bringing competition

I may be wrong, but I believe both Starliner and Dragon were commissioned when Russia invaded Ukraine, thereby threatening NASA’s access to Soyuz.

The first time presumably, in 2014.

You are I think wrong. IIRC commissioned ~2010-ish, and first (failed) flight test in 2019.

I do not think there is a world where NASA commissions something from Boeing, and it's kind of ready-ish 2 years later. There are meetings to be head! Congress folk to talk to! Overruns to be budgeted!

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