Turns out they're just a giant company suckling on the teat of mommy government and have developed severe structural dysfunction that prevents them from effectively executing their plans.
> Can anyone pull Boeing out of its nosedive?
Apparently the answer is a sound no.
They decided to proudly shoot themselves into the stomach, then mitigating the situation by setting themselves on fire.
The inspector general is wrong saying "blame on the aerospace giant’s mismanagement and inexperienced workforce". How can someone blame clueless person? The blame is on those putting clueless person there in the first place. Or is the management the most inexperienced and clueless of all for this line of job perhaps?! As suspected for many many years now. Ajh!!
It looks like they are having a go at correcting some of their more noted flaws - he's an engineer and is going to run things from Seattle. Good luck to him!
"CEO changes will continue until morale improves"?
Lets see they were allocated a budget of $962 million in order to deliver in 2025. But now they can deliver in 2028 and they will be paid $2.8 billion.
They would have to be stupid to deliver in time.
They’re just bad policy if you want the _nominal objectives_ of the project delivered on time and on budget; they have structural incentives for contractors to go over.
(It’s pretty clear that delivering the nominal objectives is not what the relevant policy-makers are actually aiming for, though. The cost overruns are the real goal for them, as it’s a kind of pork to steer regional funding)
That should die. This is what happens when you allow monopolies, you can’t even let them die because you’ll be left with nothing.
They face no competition , and have no reason to improve
This is part of the reason why the new era of firm, fixed price contracts at NASA is so important. And why it's so troubling that NASA is having difficulty transitioning SLS contractors to such contracts for later (Artemis V+) rockets.
Northrup Grumman seems to be doing a pretty good job with Cygnus. And ULA seems to be doing alright with NSSLv2 (although it sounds like they may have had to give up a launch or two due to Vulcan delays).
Ever since Bezos installed David Limp as CEO, it seems like they've been able to ship stuff. It's hard to know if he was set up for success by his predecessor, but their older no press policy prevented anyone from knowing it, or if he changed the company culture for the better.
Regardless, it appears like Blue Origin is likely to launch New Glenn this year. Or, at least the DoD thinks it's likely enough that they agreed to onramp Blue Origin to NSSLv3 (pending a successful launch).
> it'll be a long time before these younger companies produce anything capable of rivaling Falcon 9
I don't think it'll be that long.
* Blue Origin's New Glenn should launch in 2024-2025.
* RocketLab's Neutron should launch in 2025-2027.
* Relativity's Terran R should launch in 2026-2028.
That's remarkably soon.
Of course, as you point out, Starship should be operational quite soon. It'll be exciting to see how things shake out.
My personal opinion is that SpaceX will move to payload based pricing, somewhat akin to their current rideshare pricing. I'm just pulling numbers out of the air, but something like $10m + $3m/tonne. That way they can compete for smaller payloads while also being paid appropriately for launching really heavy stuff. However it ends up, I'm sure pricing will be heavily influenced by the competition when it comes out.
Starliner is fixed cost.
It sounds like you agree that Boeing is failing to adopt to fixed cost?
Just from pop culture, isn't starliner that thing that leaves people stranded for a year after making them shed "excess" baggage for a supposedly weeklong(?) trip?
Also from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner
> Boeing has lost more than $1.5 billion in budget overruns on the Starliner project which has been marred by delays, management issues and engineering challenges. The price paid per flight has also drawn criticism from NASA's inspector general and from observers who point to significantly lower costs on the competing Crew Dragon.
“Will never adopt” and is failing to adopt and adapt to are miles apart.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/boeing-says-it-cant-ma...
Engineers (management are also employees, right?) ranking management erodes management authority, and management will never stand for it.
Outside consultants are usually hired with a fixed agenda - the rotten eggs almost always get to stay.
Stack ranking is evil, period.
I'm not advocating stack ranking for yearly review but rather a quintennial or decennial event to clean-house. In other words, a mechanism to avoid what happened to Boeing, Intel, Yahoo, and what is happening to Google and others.
360 reviews obviously allows orgs to get fat and carry bloat.
All I'm saying is that stack ranking might not successfully get rid of dead weight. As with any system of metrics, the people who game the system are the ones who reap benefits from the system - thereby subverting the system, and preventing it from achieving its stated goals. As systems of its kind go, stack ranking is particularly insidious and gameable.
I have no idea what _would_ work, though. I have some half-baked thoughts, but will reserve them until such time as they are better than half-baked.
I think Boeing needs to immediately fire everyone in leadership positions with a finance or consulting background, unless they're under the CFO. Everyone needs to be reviewed to make sure they have the background to lead their team. If the leader can't do the work of the people at least one and ideally two levels under them they need to be fired for incompetence. Basically Boeing needs rebuilt from the top down as a company of doers.