Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit
theregister.com
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Dreamliner was delayed and cost 3x the amount to develop as a result.
This may be more follow-on from engineering-hostile management.
Meanwhile they will spend endless amounts on consultants and other fluff.
It feels somehow related to the political dynamic where things like building infrastructure are seen as wasteful but not… well… massive graft and waste.
It’s fine to set money on fire as long as you’re not actually accomplishing anything.
Preferring consultants over employees is a way for those in charge to quietly practice nepotism and other forms of favor-granting, shuffling money to people loyal to them or as favors to other powerful people who they want to get favors from
I'm not saying this is the case 100% of the time, but I think if you could give people a truth serum when they are choosing consultants and ask if any of their friends, family, or personal professional network stand to gain from the contract, many would have to say yes
Their airline operations were effectively subsidized and protected by the government and the military for years. They know how to manage a regulatory environment. They seem to have forgotten everything else.
When you're in a publicly traded company you should expect the engineering environment to be actively hostile, it's a peculiar type of environment, where the balance of stakeholder concerns becomes the primary engineering work and not the end state of the product or feature itself.
McD remained an engineering-driven unit whereas Douglas was constantly stymied by accountancy from the early 70s onwards. Douglas lapsed from defence after Ed Heinemann stepped down as chief designer, they had nothing to offer after the A-4.
Boeing Defence is still riding on the solid engineering of the McD F-15 and -18 of that era. Plus the AH-64 from another engineering-driven company, Hughes, and the CH-47 from Vertol. Note the distinct lack of Boeing design origins.
To add on to this, Boeing's F-15 and F/A-18 derivatives (F-15EX Eagle II and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet) have utterly failed to generate sales outside the US military, being defeated namely by Lockheed Martin's F-35 at every turn.
The V-22 Osprey has also had a crashing record, to say the least.
Every assertion in that sentence is false. Indonesia, of all countries, intends to buy a couple dozen export versions of the F-15EX [0] and the RAAF is supplementing its F-35s with Super Hornets and plans to fly them until the 2040s. [1] And Kuwait will replace its Hornets with the Super Hornet as well. [2]
But it's a different kind of mistake to ascribe failure to the F-15EX because it's not selling a lot of foreign copies. The thing you need remember about the F-15EX: it is a younger brother to the Saudi Arabian F-15SA and Qatari F-15QA, and in turn the Israeli F-15IA is newer still, but they are all really similar. The F-15EX includes a second seat that will never be used operationally, and funny little ears under the canopy which hold sensor equipment on the F-15SA but are completely superfluous on the F-15EX, and an engine that is not state of the art for that form factor, because the US military's intent was - to the fullest extent practical - to minimize development time and costs by using equipment whose development and testing had already been paid for. [3]
I expect the trend of countries wanting to supplement fifth gen fighters with 4th and 4.5th gen fighters, for cost as well as operational reasons, will continue to take away from potential F-35 sales. Although back to your original point, that doesn't necessarily hurt Lockheed Martin too much: they do sell a fair number of F-16s, after all, and the newest ones command a high price.
And yes, the Osprey is dogshit.
[0] https://boeing.mediaroom.com/news-releases-statements?item=1...
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/defence/australian-f/a-18fs-to-...
[2] https://www.airforce-technology.com/news/boeing-consolidates...
> lacked competition for so long
these seem like they could be related...
maybe lack of competition leads to assumption that engineers aren't important to success.
With cost plus contracts that’s unfortunately a feature and not a bug.
I think Boeing has just been unable to pivot to behaving differently for fixed price contracts, which is not surprising given corporate inertia.
My personal razor,
Do not attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by corruption.
Plus, if you already have a little fiefdom of fixed price subcontractors, you can fool yourself into believing you can take fixed price contracts on novel work, passing the burden and risk onto subcontractors, taking a slice no matter what. And that's exactly what has happened with Starliner, right? AFAIU, these valves were designed and built by subcontractors. Boeing's biggest role seems to be project management, and maybe some assembly? Except now they're even failing at that.
Fire talent. Focus on political donations and regulatory capture. Up the C-suite pay and pay high dividends (the dividend was only just very recently cut) whilst taking government handouts.
I think the USA is going to hit a hard wall across all sectors allowing this type shit to go on for so long. Reminds me of the eBay exec steve wymer who said they’ll crush critics of the c suite leading to extreme harassment of journalists. That guy is now more employed than ever because who wouldn’t want such a person on their board in the current operating mode of USA c-suites. Fucking depressing and glaring and anti-American yet we don’t just allow this. We reward it.
Politicians likes to receive money though so of course they say money is speech. I wonder when they say that bribing politicians is speech as well so there can't be laws against direct bribes.
It's our version of the soviet collapse.
The problem is MBA's aren't competent to run companies that require deep knowledge. They have neither the knowledge, the skills, or the interest. So when they grab power they reorganize the company into something they do know how to manage. The problem with a company like Boeing is the company eventually can't function. You get increasing failure to do things that the company used to be able to do.
This "heads they win tails we lose" system is the thing that seems odd. They make millions on the theory that they take responsibility for things... If the union guys aren't doing their job: fix it. If some engineers aren't doing their job: fix it. Otherwise what are they getting paid so much for?
Also I don’t think executive pay has any relation to what I am alleging, which is that part of the blame lies on old boys clubs and unions. Executive pay is determined by its own market of supply and demand. Sure they get some of the blame but there are limits to what is possible even for the best of executives. Also consider that the sum of executive pay is a lot less than the sum of the assembly line pay, so even by your own logic the responsibility cannot be solely at the top.
That said I totally agree that Boeing executives have largely failed, and the choices made by the board in appointing finance people or old guard from other aerospace companies is a big part of the problem.
Dreamliner is the Boeing 787 passenger jet.
Starliner is the spacecraft that has been on orbit for the past month, not cleared to return to Earth due to multiple attitude-control thruster failures.
From what I've heard they're finally keeping the F135, only doing a software upgrade to improve consumption by 7% (so it might improve availability, since less energy is lost, and a huge issue with the F-35 is heat dissipation at low speed, which breaks electronics).
Parts availability is still a huge issue, the f35 pilots don't have the hours recommended by NATO, they do a lot of simulator though, but right now they have sightly more hours than Russian pilots (which were made fun of). It's less of an issue for the US than Norway and Australia though, since you still have F16.
Still a great plane, but maintenance and parts availability issues will shorten it's life and the amount of usable planes at the same time.
Someone mentioned that it’s not just Boeing who isn’t the company they used to be. It’s endemic through out American manufacturing. From the latest Boeing failure, Rocketdyne, Chevy and Ford. America doesn’t build anything any more. What it does build is overpriced and not well engineered.
F-35 appears to be an airborne version of that. Foreign customers love it, its combat record is stellar, procurement queues are now decade long.
> stealth! sensor fusion! VTOL! multirole! fancy pilot helmet!
Only VTOL was completely new. And maybe fancy pilot helmet? The difficulty is to put everything in a single plane. Honestly, without VTOL (which was asked by the UK Navy), i'm pretty sure the f35 would have had a lot less issues and would've made it to production already.
The pilots do. The engineering crew and the armies/navies less, because of its costs. Its hard to have real data, because of armies tendancy to keep it close to their chest, but here is a norwegian report about f35 cost that skyrockets and force them to have less training and less operational capacity:
https://www.riksrevisjonen.no/rapporter-mappe/no-2023-2024/i...
US luckily have functional civilian admin, so i was able to find this: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106703
No luck from UK and Australia. For Australia, i have no hope, but UK might publish something. From what i hard, no particular issue with the RAF, but the Royal Navy grumble a bit (and tbf they shouldn't: 80% of the f35 issues were caused by the UK navy demands).
Also, the selling price for UK, Australia and Norway who helped develop the plane seems to be higher than the selling price for Finland, which i think is weird.
> procurement queues are now decade long
Because it's still in pre-production, when serial production should've started 5 years ago.
The block4 (which will be the production standard) will, despite LM promises to be compatible with TR2, _need_ the TR3 upgrade, no other choice. The TR3 should've been on new planes since 2022. The current planes, with TR3 improvement, were supposed to be out this year for testing, and the DoD refused to take them because it was well below what was expected. Now, the TR3 is finally expected for 2025 (i think 2026 is a far better expectation), which mean Block4 won't be out until at least late 2031.
(Without TR3 and block4: no nuclear capability, no electronic warfare, no anti-ship capabilities, no A2/AD capabilities. A2/AD is what makes the f35 the most interesting plane of the world)
But most importantly it's stealth, which is predicted a game-changer in a future near-peer conflict, but also costs to maintain. So if you look at comparable jets it's really only the F-22 or bombers, both of which cost more per hour.
The Chengdu J-20 and Sukhoi Su-57 might be cheaper options, but information is scare.
While an F-35 can carry 22,000 pounds of munitions to a ceiling of 50,000 feet and a distance of 670 miles at a top speed of Mach 1.6, the F-15EX can haul 29,500 pounds of weapons as high as 60,000 feet and as far as 1,100 miles at a top speed of Mach 2.5.
An F-35 costs $35,000 per hour to operate. An F-15EX costs $27,000 per hour.
Starliner is also a pile of hot garbage, but it has the benefit of costing the US taxpayers 300 times less than the Lockheed debacle.
The F22 has better stealth technology than the F35.
Presently the stealth capability of F35 fight jets is highly reduced to a design problem where the engine overheats if the F35 is carrying significant munitions.
The F22 was never sold (that I know of) to other powers. The next generation fighter that the air force is allegedly testing now will have much better stealth again and it will not be sold to foreign powers.
Mad respect.
“1000 men to make 5 chariots/day?!”
Harris is the chair of the Space Council. Even if it's in no way her fault, two torched astronauts with her in some way attached is just too easy to write headlines about. Similarly, if they publicly decide that it's unsafe, that's declaring failure.
Based on our current understanding of it's problems, Starliner should be able to wait on the station for the full 6 months it's certified for, none of the known issues in it limit endurance when docked to the station.
Of course, there could issues that have not cropped up yet...
Imagine what Trump will say when he finds out Harris is chair of the space council and Musk had to help her...
But that's still not a reason to risk two astronaut's lives.
The idea is, if you have enough street cred, and enthusiasm from the public, and genuine shit to do, you can get up on stage and say
"The American rocket we spent $10B on doesn't work."
and every reasonable person will kinda shrug and move on. I don't know if the Harris campaign is at that point, but I'd love to see them get there. Every second spent on optics and politics is a second of thrust not spent on reaching a stable, matter-of-fact orbit
This whole election is about optics and politics, regardless of which side you're on, so I wouldn't hold your breath
Would be egg on the face of Boeing but not Harris or NASA. Seems to me the egg would land where it belongs.
How about the border czar for the state of the border?
I suspect (with heavy irony) that such decisions are delegated to, well... NASA; and indeed, were they not, there's a problem with the whole setup.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
It's not like there are Dragon capsules just floating around up there. Right now, the one docked to the ISS is earmarked for the return of Crew 8. The next one up will bring Crew 9, and it needs to stay on-orbit for their return.
The Dragon capsules hold 4 people, so if these Starliner astronauts need to come down on a Dragon then Crew 9 will have to drop by two in order to equalize the number of astronauts and seats.
Send Boeing the bill. Not really kidding.
> 1:17 "How can an organization that is so great at science be so terrible at creating a new launch system?"
> 2:33 "What goes on inside any organization is what I've taken to calling the game. ...
Every large organization has their own version of the game. The goal of the game is simple - it is to move up the ladder in the company to get more money more reports more power more budget more respect. The game is about career, and very much about the career for the people who matter: management and especially executive management."
> 15:20 "The game was:
Keep NASA space flight centers open,
Keep money flowing to NASA contractors,
Keep votes flowing to Congress people,
Preserve NASA management jobs"
The oft-quoted Steve Jobs quote on why Xerox failed [1] is always relevant.
Starliner, SLS and Artemis both behave exactly like a jobs program gone bad. Now I'm not opposed to a jobs program per se. We could honestly use more of that. But the difference between Boeing's efforts and SpaceX's efforts is just astounding.
Starliner launches on the fully expendable Atlas V N22 rocket, which reportedly costs $164 million [2] to launch. Falcon 9 seems to cost ~$62 million per launch [3] before you even factor in reuse.
I don't know how (or even if) a company can be rescued when it gets to this stage. It becomes a rent-seeking Frankenstein of tiny warring fiefdoms. We've also seen this with Intel's complete inability to internally collaborate as mid-level VPs seemingly engage in turf wars rather than share resources and information.
EDIT: fixed typo (Xerox)
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V
[3]: https://nstxl.org/reducing-the-cost-of-space-travel-with-reu...
We spend several hundred times that on education and poverty eradication every year.
Hardly enough to even be noticed, let alone make a difference.
The argument "we shouldn't go to space before solving problems on earth" is only for people who don't understand actual large (budget) numbers. Unfortunately, this is a very large portion of the voting population. (And, no I am not saying that $6.7B would be meaningless if deployed in a program with effective results leverage, or that we shouldn't demand better than Boeing is giving us, only that the soace & science initiatives are worth far more than the single-digit-percentages allocated to them)
As if that's a bad thing.
(btw, it's Xerox, not "Zerox.")
In the 1990s we managed to get enough evidence that useless jobs are worse than just giving people money in every way. So that idea died almost everywhere.
Governments putting money on unprofitable but useful things is great. But they really should try to be efficient on those.
Because the government money never goes equally to the workers. Would there be better outcomes if government money only went to co-ops and worker unions?
Government debt? That one is not clear at all. My best guess is that it depends on lots and lots of factors.
> to reduce future inflation
There exist an optimum number for inflation, making it smaller makes things worse. That optimum number is almost always greater than 0.
> or give rebates
Nope, sending the money to poor people is almost always better than rebating taxes. (Taxes rebates is such a weird concept. I've only seen it discussed on the US.)
> to boost growth somewhere
Giving money to poor people is a very effective way of achieving this.
The computer industry has been experiencing inflation around -10% a year for almost a century - if deflation is such a problem, why hasn't it collapsed yet? People delay their purchases a few months, but the foreseen total dry-up of purchasing just doesn't happen. (Except to Osbourne.)
90s-10s Japan seems a better comparand, and it does not support your thesis
For very computationally expensive tasks such as the Human Genome Project, the answer is indeed to delay the purchase.
(This does lead to an interesting question on the motivations for current very-expensive AI training runs today: for those who are convinced their specific model is the future, is there really so much value in doing this right now rather than next year at 70% of the price?)
Really what keeps economies stable is broken expectations. If a certain thing was guaranteed to make lots of money, everyone would do it, but because no financial games can be reliably expected to, even the things that are making lots of money at a certain point in time (like holding it during deflation) they don't.
Nothing beats giving money to poor people in either account, except if the results of the labor are useful.
As a society, we get caught up in the idea that a government service has to turn a profit. This comes up all the time with the post office and public transit. Yet we never have a conversation about the fire department or roads turning a profit.
These services don't lose money. They simply have a cost.
We could have people who fix the roads, for example. Directly. Not by having a tender process that allows some extra entity to leech government funds, not do the thing and cost 5 times as much as they promised.
We could be training people in mental health services and providing those services so we can appropriate deal with the problems of homelless people and people having mental health episodes, rather than calling the police, which tends to be about the worst thing you can do as the person having an episode has a pretty high chance of simply ending up dead. Best case scenario, they end up in the criminal "justice" system.
For my own edification, what was the evidence? I was a toddler then.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner_Calypso
As far as I can tell, "Calamity" is a name The Register made up.
‘In Greek mythology, Calypso was a nymph who lived on the island of Ogygia, where, according to Homer's Odyssey, she detained Odysseus for seven years against his will. She promised Odysseus immortality if he would stay with her, but Odysseus preferred to return home. Eventually, after the intervention of the other gods, Calypso was forced to let Odysseus go.’
Then again, that wasn't quite fast either. Or reliable. Or new.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg#Early_life...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Stonecipher#Early_life...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Condit#Education
I've heard of a few more companies who are bleeding engineers and selling off parts to fill the deficit but still keep the divident payouts and stock buybacks rolling as that's the most important of all.
He's starting with some big challenges - the company just posted a $1.4bn loss, has possibly stranded a pair of their test pilots in orbit, an airliner that can only be described as "probably OK but we're not totally sure", union unrest over the Charleston factory, and the Secret Service is upset over delays and cost overruns on the next Air Force One 747s.
As they say - the only place he can go from here is up.
Just look at Intel.
19 days until the ISS needs the docking port freed up for the ninth crewed Space-X mission.[1] The prep work is underway to bring the Starliner crew back on the Space-X Dragon, but NASA is stalling on the embarrassing decision.[2]
Meanwhile, the next un-crewed supply Falcon 9 flight launches tomorrow, with a Northrop Grumman Cygnus craft.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/boeing-starliner-deadline-nasa-spac...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/yes-nasa-really-could-...
The issue seems more like, whoever is in the Iron Throne, has almost no discernible ethical compass.
But absolutely no one in a position to do anything, seems to want any kind of oversight or accountability in place, so we’d just be switching deck chairs on The Titanic, until that happens.
They need to bring in competent engineers, regardless of their age.
The SV way is very good at creating billion-dollar companies out of MVP products, but it is not good at creating a culture of quality engineering. Which is the exact issue Boeing currently has.