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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

I'd really love to see someone compare this to Apollo era hardware, I know there were significant defects that required rework during the Apollo era - this is an organizational competency issue within Boeing, NASA and the United States, we've lost the organization competencies to organize projects like this - that doesn't mean they're gone forever, just that those skills must be rebuilt.

I also feel like some of this, being starliner or SLS issues are shades of the "good, fast, cheap, pick two" problem.

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They built comparatively poor QA into the design of the Saturn V. I've seen very revealing pictures of the bottom of the engine, where the exhaust leaves the combustion chamber on an F-1 engine. There was this kind of symmetrical bunch of holes, and one slightly dug in hole, maybe a quarter of an inch thick. A mistake. They had started drilling in the wrong spot and quickly stopped. That was a deviance, it was logged, but it was within spec.

That's Saturn V in a nutshell.

Go read “The Right Stuff.” Not quite Apollo, but we almost lost Neil Armstrong before he got a chance to step onto the moon due to faulty attitude control. Humans were a lot more disposable then.

Yeah, I have, I've also read a couple retrospectives of Apollo by NASA - and some retrospectives of Shuttle too.

Key difference though, the corners Boeing cuts are to line the pockets of their execs and stockholders.

One thing to be pushing boundaries, doing something never done before, everyone knows there are significant risks. Another altogether to be doing a terrible job to save money doing something that has been done successfully time and time again.

You act like this is different now than it was with NAA or Grumman in 1965, it's not. The nature of companies has not changed that much since 1965.

But many of the same issues still exist, poorly defined requirements being the primary one.

The MBA-brained focus on short term profits is a relatively recent development and was not nearly as prevalent back then.

Safety engineering is about as long-term a value as you can imagine, so it makes sense that it's one of the things being cut as companies move to focus almost exclusively on quarterly reports.

>> focus on short term profits is a relatively recent development and was not nearly as prevalent back then

That’s not true, nasa engaged in studies of its suppliers in the 60s to determine if their short term profit seeking was working well enough that it might encourage further capital investments from the private sector in supply chain companies, nasa wanted to make sure there was enough fat in what it paid suppliers to attract further investment but not so much to attract public scandal as to the disposal of public tax dollars.

> That’s not true, nasa engaged in studies of its suppliers in the 60s […]

Are these available online anywhere? Curious to know how they calculated (?) such things.

> The nature of companies has not changed that much since 1965.

The nature of management has changed since the 1970s:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_theory

Note, it took 40 years to render jet flight safe...am I joking no...go read right stuff....

two issues for QA of tech hardware:

1. How new is it? 2. how many tests on the new areas...

Or just for fun read the books on Russian engines in their own moon program....especially the post on the accidents.

400K people worked on the Apollo era missions. And they literally had unlimited money from the boom time post war American economy. Things are different.

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