NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9
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The helium leaks were not desirable but helium is difficult. Boeing engineers could demonstrate the rate of the leaks did not threaten the mission so it was manageable.
The thruster issues are completely different. Boeing couldn't present NASA with a convincing model of how the thrusters would perform. If they can't characterize such a fundamental part of the vehicle it is impossible to make an informed decisions which is a huge fail.
In hindsight a cargo first experience would have been valuable for commercial crew whether the winner was Sierra, NG or Boeing however that would have disqualified Sierra and Boeing. Boeing's involvement in commercial crew legitimized it politically. Boeing directly, via acquisition and through their suppliers including Aerojet have decades of experience in space flight far beyond SpaceX at the time. Boeing were not the underdogs.
I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
I'm sure there's a number of books on the topic in the publishing pipeline.
> It can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the leadership, right?
It can.
https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg... - 2020 article on the topic
I'm trying to find an article from circa 2007 on the changes at Boeing but I can't find it right now. Read those two and follow their various links and you'll get more information.
The long story short version is that post McDonnell Douglas merger, Boeing's management culture was replaced with MD's management culture and things have only declined since.
- Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation with a significant source of revenue coming from the government. 40% in 2024¹, billions of dollars of public funds! Just a bit more and it would be mostly state-funded.
- They're the 4th biggest American defense contractor, so they're likely seen as vital for securing state power by many in the government.
- The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
Using Ockham's razor, here's my guess what happened: To get in this position in the first place, there will have been a fair bit of lobbying and "greasing the wheels" involved. Boeing eventually found themselves in a position where they got government contracts, no matter what. Leadership got complacent, they didn't really compete anymore because they didn't have to. This was when Musk came in and disrupted the space industry. But at that point, company culture was likely already too far down the drain for quick fixes. The situation would already be much worse for their space division, if not for the fact that they have such good relations with NASA and the government. NASA basically covered for them and played down the seriousness of the issues for weeks. And even now, they're not having SpaceX rescue the astronauts immediately, which would be even more embarrassing for Boeing. Instead they're bringing them back together with the already planned SpaceX Crew-9 flight next year. Boeing keeps getting away with black eyes, there aren't enough consequences despite all the serious issues.
¹ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/why-u...
https://preview.redd.it/evolution-of-the-raptor-engine-by-v0...
A lot of defense and aerospace is not used to the Silicon Valley mindset. Gotta give Elon credit in achieving what he did with spacex
Despite his projected persona, Musk would love nothing more than to get to the position of being the bloated encumbant supplier with guaranteed government contracts regardless of results.
I'm impressed you can keep saying this nonsense despite how SpaceX operates being pretty well documented.
Fortunately it seems that we also have quite a few wealthy people that actually want to use their money to fund and do new and innovative stuff.
Selection bias?
People who don't care about constantly accumulating more wealth than they need rarely end up obtaining it.
Sounds like china currently has zero rockets that are reusable
Not true, ArianeGroup has decided that reusability is the future with their Ariane Next program [0].
And ultimately that wasn't enough for safety.
But it's way less time/labor intensive than the shuttle.
I think you raise a good point even if there are some "technicalities" about it.
Real question: I'm not an aerospace geek. The term "first stage" has probably changed at lot in rocket science in the last 50 years. From the NASA Space Shuttle to SpaceX Falcon 9, has the definition changed? From my elementary school memories, the Space Shuttle used a giant center rocket and two booster rockets that we expendable, but you are definitely right that the Space Shuttle "thing" (no idea how to call it) was used over and over again, (somewhat) safely. Something that I don't know: Where Apollo programme capsules reusued? I assume no.
That's incorrect. The orange "giant center rocket" had no engines, it was an external tank which held the propellant burned by the orbiter's main engines. The SSMEs were on the "Shuttle thing" and were reused.
Apollo/Saturn had a much more traditional staging design where the first stage booster would run then drop off, then the second stage booster would run, then drop off, etc. There exist other rockets like the Atlas which had what they called a “stage and a half” design where the center stage burned for a long time and there was an outer “ring” stage that dropped off after a shorter time while the center stage kept going.
After going to the moon, the only part of the entire Apollo/Saturn rocket that came back was the command module capsule with the astronauts and moon rocks. These were completely torched and affected by salt water and were not designed to be reused. Reentry from the moon is significantly faster than reentry from low earth orbit.
The shuttle orbiters were refurbished and reused. It was a very difficult, expensive, and time consuming process to get an orbiter ready for another flight.
All of that is to say that the picture is blurry for the shuttle regarding first stage reusability. Yes the SRBs and orbiters were reused and were lit at launch. The ET was in use at launch but discarded. In my opinion it’s sort of not that interesting to argue what is and isn’t first stage on the shuttle because the elements just don’t map cleanly.
The design of the system with the SRBs, tank, and orbiters being adjacent to each other is considered by many to have been too dangerous in retrospect. This design was a factor in both shuttle disasters - the SRB shooting fire at the ET causing it to explode on Challenger and cracked foam falling away from the ET during launch and hitting the leading edge of the orbiter wing for Columbia. If they were stacked vertically rather than adjacent, those specific failure modes would not have been possible.
Each launch cost almost half a billion dollars in 2010 money. The Falcon 9 is reportedly $60-65M per launch.
SLS was just more of the same, welfare for all the states with contractors who grew fat and happy off the shuttle contracts. There was no technical argument whatsoever for reusing such ancient technologies.
Each RS25 engine cost $35M to refurbish for use in the SLS. For the cost of building TEN falcon 9 engines, NASA refurbished one RS25 engine.
And yes, of course it was absurdly dangerous to rely on not just one but two solid rocket motors of which there is no control whatsoever except for slight thrust vectoring...
My understanding of the federal government of the US is that it is mainly a subsidizer of their national military-industrial complex. Something I would call: military-industrial socialism.
With that said, it is just more of the same in a different era. 1930s and the Empire State Building: to re-invigorate the economy, Eisenhower and the interstate highway system: to provide a stronger national defense, etc
First stage needs to go through rigorous safety check in order to be re-certified for next flight thats what drives the cost up.
This is irrelevant here; the only people buying most of the products that Boeing makes are governments or airlines (many of which have government backing, because countries find it advantageous to have an airline). Without government, there's just no Boeing, or SpaceX, or Lockheed Martin, or Airbus, or...
The problem ultimately goes back to 1996 when Boeing was more-or-less taken over by McDonnell-Douglas management, and quality engineering took a back seat to quarterly results. Everything, from bad QA to "greasing the wheels" with lobbyists, ultimately goes back to someone with an MBA deciding that those behaviors were worth it for the stock price increase.
And to be fair, they were... until they weren't. But by then, the guy with the MBA has either left or divested, and it becomes someone else's problem.
SpaceX's success can be in a large part contributed to the fact that they don't have a bunch of retirement and pension funds demanding a chunk of the profits every quarter regardless of actual market space performance.
But the Government has to buy them from businesses that meet certain characteristics. Woman owned, etc. That’s a great thing, right?
In this case however, that female owned business is the guy who invented the things wife. Who he sells them to at a mark-up. Who then sells them to the government.
Economy of scale? Ya! They are the number one buyer and pay the most. Honestly, who cares though, it’s only a couple million a year. Drop in the bucket.
How did Boeing fail? Death by a thousand cuts. That same story probably plays out across the entire supppy chain. Every part, every product, every supplier. Compounded over and over again.
There’s people who would say any bigotry in government is wrong.
That doesn't explain why their civilian aircraft aren't just not the best product, but have gone completely to shit over the last decade or two. The 737 max is the most notorious example here, as it's their most recent development and has never been good from the start - but reporting suggests that the engineering on their formerly-good lines has been going downhill also, and it's only the fact that they started out as good products which means they've taken longer to fall as low.
And there's very little government revenue for the civilian aircraft design and manufacturing side of the business. It's all free market competition.
> gone completely to shit over the last decade or two
> Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation
My more thoughtful reply: I think "too big to fail" gets a bad rap on HN. In my view, for any sufficiently large country+economy, at some point, your top 3-5 defense contractors will be considered "too big to fail". No way around that. Depending upon the size of your country+economy, this is true for steel manuf also, but probably just the top 1-2.
Has anyone with great expertise in Boeing considered the effects of a break-up? I'm not sure why Boeing needs so many different industries under one roof -- space, civil, military, plus others.
I would speculate that when those got shaken out, (and likely some space contracts sniped away by SpaceX) Boeing did not make any adjustments for the revenue loss and simply tried to continue on their original bloated trajectory but instead cutting every corner possible along the way.
Government aquisition is a monopsony (market dynamic where there is one purchaser who wields all the power) which means "free market competition" doesn't exist. This causes lots of negative consequences. Here's a discussion of the topic in the context of defense but a lot of the same surely applies to space.
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/break-the-department-of-def...
The gov created this environment and the private companies protect it because it's big money and grease it so it's the only option (like selling the bullshit idea "no one else can do what [Boeing] does cuz we huge staff counts and billions").
They both enable each other
And people are too scared to have a system that encourages new smaller companies take part because they don't have fancy sales pitches or fail early prototypes or take longer to get to Step A. And everyone criticizes them to death. So the only option is to get bought by Boeing or Lockheed, who then do really good at Step A just to fail a Step C and D and E.
SpaceX (as of a year or two ago) was getting 45%+ of its funding from the US government.
And then there's the $900M in subsidies SpaceX asked for to provide rural internet access via starlink...
But it's a net benefit for the company
....no, that does in fact explain everything that led to the decline of American manufacturing and engineering.
That's a very different type of business.
If Boeing was forced to make money with a successful civil aviation business alone it would be run very very differently.
2. Moving headquarters to Chicago - part of the MBAs taking over
3. Losing the engineering first mindset - this is really the core of what happened there.
When the company kept focusing on stock returns and "financializing" the company, and did things like spinning off Spirt airplane assembly company, that was the real visible symbol of the problem. In the past few months they gave up and rebought them to join with Boeing.
The solution for being will be a multiple year transition of the company into being much more technology and engineering focused. They will have to eject the MBA type "reducing cost is the goal" type leaders. The problem is those are completely the leaders of the company today.
My two most major issues with the world today.
Boeing got some but worse, and also made their products so complex that humans can’t understand it as a whole let alone communicate it to others.
It’s not just Boeing. It’s everyone, everywhere. All systems in every market require so much extra “stuff” that we’re on a spiral.
Compound that with MBAs that insist things “run lean” and “the core competency group you aren’t in found X, so meet your target of Y or find somewhere else to work” to “We need that BlackRock money, so do whatever the govs of NY, IL, and CA say to do because their trillion dollars speaks”.
No one is ready to address either issue.
There was an interesting lecture Jonathon Blow gave a while back that addressed this issue but it was predictably panned as the ramblings of an insane game developer, I think wrongly. A lot of the points made were true.
> It’s not just Boeing. It’s everyone, everywhere. All systems in every market require so much extra “stuff” that we’re on a spiral.
Nah. That's just another facet of engineering incompetence.
Complexity doesn't just happen, it is allowed to happen.
We repeatedly went to the moon over 50 years ago, with complex systems that were well understood by the different teams that built them.
Now, 50 years later, if we are not capable of repeating the same feat, we are doing something wrong.
If we use software-controlled hardware and then throw are hands in the air screaming "it's too complex", we are doing something wrong. That stuff shouldn't have been used in the first place.
For instance, Boeing famously bungled the 737 Max. But 737s were first created in the era of slide-rules, there is nothing about the plane which is too inherently complex to be done well. MCAS, the software portion of the debacle, was so simple in principle it could have been easily implemented by one competent engineer plus a few more to check his work. Complexity inherent to the problem space is NOT the problem here.
MCAS was one flight control law, a one that was poorly conceived in the first place and then botched in implemention, but still only a single flight control law. If you think that such a system is too complex to created properly, then please tell me how many thousands of engineers must have been on the team that created the first all-digital fly-by-wire system for an aircraft. That was a hell of a lot more complex than one flight control law on a 737, and they were actually doing something new back then. Thousands, why it must have taken tens of thousands of people amirite.
It’s not my fault you can’t think beyond Boeing.
It’s the whole world, and you are just one of the people that even if it is pointed out to them can not see it. Because like I said, you haven’t made anything to see the issue.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-...
It reads like a plea to not turn into McDonnell Douglas (this was only a few years after the MD and Boeing merger), which we all know it essentially has. The last couple of sentences fire shots at Douglas Aircraft directly:
"The fate of the former Douglas Aircraft Company, which was reduced to a systems integrator in the early 1970s by excessive outsourcing of DC-10 production, is a clear indicator of what will happen to other companies which fail to sustain the conditions under which it is possible to launch new products. It is hoped that this sacrifice can save the new and expanded Boeing from a similar fate."
Government/Defense contractors can track their suppliers and tell Congress exactly how many jobs are in which districts per project.
These aren't businesses operating in a competitive market with pressure to produce the best things quickly. Their goal is simply to be the best gov lapdog vs the only 1 or 2 other gov lapdogs.
Being extremely late and extremely over budget is standard practice in that world and worst case is usually the project gets cancelled for budget reasons then restarted 5yrs later doing the same thing.
This is the environment the gov fostered, they made Boeing etc critical to national security and industry while having a total aversion to risk, and zero forethought into long term investment in legitimate competition. All we get is the same growing monster that becomes the living embodiment of The Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
NASA led private contractors to develop the Saturn V rocket and associated modules, now NASA is buying solutions, services, and products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Program
Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.
Public-private partners is a good idea because public orgs that need to produce IRL things are very flawed, but you still need national interests beyond market interests so this is the compromise that has worked many times.
But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.
Boeing has no risk and neither does NASA because they can just keep choosing the safe choice, Boeing. What a lovely market.
We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old. And we need to force any public-private arrangements to legitimately foster competition, which means lots of compromise beyond a VC type situation, like reducing the litany of special interest checkboxes (jobs, geography, diversity, etc) and paperwork for small companies.
I'm blaming capitalism 100% for the hollowing out of NASA. I never said early NASA was perfect.
>But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm blaming capitalism of doing.
>We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old.
I really think if we just didn't let this happen constantly we'd have a better system. It's going to shift the litany of special interest because the goal is profits, but barely, existing contractors will just open up a bunch of subsidiary companies.
"You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing" - December 26, 2008
https://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Order-Change-Turnaround/dp/1...
Probably mostly of the "do the opposite of whatever this guy says" variety. ;)
The top review on this book says:
The author credits James McNerney for turning around Boeing. He
neglected to say which way they were turning. For example, he
credits JN for outsourcing so much of the 787 -- which included
the wings, perhaps the thing Boeing did best. The 787 ended up
way over budget and three years late. That's good management?
https://www.amazon.ca/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America_and/d...
I’m tired of this hyperbolic, melodramatic angst about the general decline of the U.S. Did you not read the part about the crew being returned by SpaceX? A company that just made landing rockets a reality only 9 years ago, not even 10 years has passed and reusable rockets are as boring as smartphones. NASA identified an issue on the Boeing Starliner, and a cutting edge company (SpaceX) stepped up for a non-emergency rescue mission. There was no loss of life, or equipment, there’s been no injuries, just mild inconveniences. This isn’t a nation in decline, this is a nation that has even begun to peak yet.
Spend less time reading the news and more time enjoying your family. The world has been “ending” for decades now, the U.S. isn’t going anywhere and will continue to get some things right while getting other things wrong.
“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”
~ Nick Fury
Edit: and to those that do, SpaceX probably looks a lot more attractive.
Without knowing the details it makes a lot of sense that Boeing ended where they did (Boeing/SpaceX fits a lot of theories above). What may save the US is not the ability to save companies like Boeing - that would more likely hinder progress on a mid to long term scale - it's the ability to come up with new companies/innovators to overtake the incumbents.
In my interpretation. Fundamentally it goes all the way to the quality of institutions and culture. Time will tell, but I'm feeling more worried about those than the current ability to innovate.
Markets cycle. Companies cycle. People cycle (actually just die unless you consider their offspring their continuation).
All systems do cycle; including the USA. It doesn't mean it's the end. If China doesn't rise and crashes it, there isn't really any other serious challenger and it will likely be the "rising" empire again.
Peak air-travel.-
They are not impressive at all on almost any subject you talk to them about. Not for Boeing engineers and definitely not as MIT grads.
I don't think they could handle the coursework at Cal IMO, and I thought MIT was even more difficult.
They do seem like a very good example of diversity DEI type admission and hiring. And these kinds of Boeing problems might be the result.
I feel bad for Boeing. Though to be honest when I worked on a project where we were a Boeing sub (defense)we didn’t really care for them..
Competition is good, and it’s sad they can’t get their act together. Hopefully someone else will, though it will take years. The problem with Boeing is they seem to treat all their projects like the non competitive defense space..
I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about? That the executives made the wrong decision?
Of course we taxpayers (corporate share of tax revenue is miniscule compared to 50 years ago) bailed them out...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/business/coronavirus-bail...
It wasn't Boeing's fault that the governors shut down the economy, something that had never happened before in the US.
In Boeing’s case it has very little to do with coronavirus, which was just a related example: some businesses set aside enough seed corn to survive without help, and others didn’t.
Of course you can. There are thousands of examples around the world - not least the great success story of the last decade or so, Apple.
Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization. It might get you a fraction of a percent more return in good times, but that doesn't make it wise.
The purpose of being in business is to make more money than you could by putting the money in an interest-bearing account. Another way of saying it is there is no point to operating a business if you cannot make more than the "opportunity cost".
> Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization.
What businesses are in business to do is put cash to work earning more than the opportunity cost, often meaning about 15% ROI.
That certainly is not a microoptimization.
In fact, what most businesses do is borrow money at, say, 5%, and then invest the money so it earns, say, 20%, and therefore make 15% overall.
I do something similar with my investments. I borrow money and buy investments with the borrowed money.
It's similar to borrowing money to buy a house, and then selling the house at an appreciated price to make many multiples of your down payment.
Yes, minimizing uninvested capital --- or the extreme case of it, turning that negative through leverage --- is great, until it isn't.
Elon Musk at one point was within hours of personal bankruptcy with Tesla when he managed to secure more funding. He's the richest man in the world, and got that way by taking on enormous personal risk.
How wealthy would you be today if you put everything you had into Amazon stock the day of its IPO?
At some point, you're just hoping to get lucky, and to leave other people (debtors, governments) holding the bill if you don't. This is what people talk about when they criticize others for "privatizing profits, socializing risk."
Economists have a word for it, too: "moral hazard." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
Back to Boeing: Boeing put up really good numbers by gutting engineering and manufacturing organizations, hoping it would all turn out okay. For awhile it did, but then it didn't.
And it's questionable how much of these costs Boeing is going to bear, because there's a whole lot of talk in policymaking circles about how to keep an important defense manufacturer and top manufacturer alive (through contracts, tariffs, and supportive policy).
The moral hazard comes into play when the risk is forced on some unwitting bystander.
A degree of risk is priced into the interest rate. I still have a fiduciary duty to my lenders to not take undue, undisclosed risks. In practice, people get away with this except in the most egregious cases, but that doesn't make it less wrong.
Worse, systemic risk isn't priced into the interest rate, because the government tends to bail out the banks.
Everyone using leverage and betting on things going up forever is a really big part of how you get 2008. A lot of people made a ton of money in the run-up to 2008 (privatized profits); the population as a whole paid the costs (socialized losses).
edit: I wrote "borrowers" above when I meant lenders.
Getting more of your capital as debt is a microoptimisation (unless there are special circumstances like different tax treatment, and usually even then) - that's the classic Modigliani-Miller result. Holding more cash makes your nominal return on equity lower, but improves your cash position, and unless you push it to the point where you're taking a real risk of actually going bankrupt the two effects balance and your risk-adjusted return is the same.
> I borrow money and buy investments with the borrowed money.
Exactly. So it really doesn't make a lot of difference how levered a given company is, because an investor can always make a more or less levered investment in the company - if a company has a lot of cash then an investor can lever up a lot, if a company has a lot of debt that same investor levers less or not at all, and ultimately either way the investor gets the same level of risk and the same return.
> It's similar to borrowing money to buy a house, and then selling the house at an appreciated price to make many multiples of your down payment.
Not really - there are all sorts of special treatments for home mortgages (in particular the mortgage interest tax deduction, the most horribly regressive piece of the tax code) that mean you're genuinely disproportionately better off to do one. But it's rare for something like that to apply to corporate borrowing.
But can feel sorry for the rest of the organization and the subcontractors. Blameless parties are going to suffer a lot of collateral damage.
The reality is often a lot more complex and nuanced.
The issue with Boeing is less any individual and more institutional decay. Over time, a spigot of effectively unconditional cash corrupts an organization, especially once anyone with enough internal weight to fight against it is no longer involved in the day-to-day. Give it 20 years, and SpaceX will be the same way.
<cough> 737MAX
> It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're just held to an extremely high bar.
... only to the bar they set themselves with the older 737s?
We want it all to be a matter of just one or two incompetent individuals, because then the solution is simple. We just need to be aware that incompetent individuals exist, and through sheer force of will we can prevent them from destroying great things! But a much darker possibility is that it's something inherent to complex systems. Then, there's nothing to do to escape the inevitable cycle. Whatever brilliant schemes we come up with are doomed to failure, because the issue isn't individuals being stupid but institutional incapability to repair itself.
Apple is one of the halves of the phone duopoly sadly, so it will take a long time for them to pay for Cook's decisions this time.
I hope to be alive long enough to see how Toyota's story plays out. They seemed to have lost their way under Akio Toyoda. We'll see if Koji Sato can get them back on track.
I'm also keenly interested in Haier and its "Rendanheyi model". They're worthy of HBR style case studies, receiving at least as much attention as Apple, Sony, Honda, Toyota, etc. And yet we know so little about them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier
In 2021, Liang Haishan succeeded Haier's legendary CEO Zhang Ruimin. What happens next? Continued success? Long slow decline? Jump into a volcano?
I'd love to know.
But among other things they are subject to the dictator trap, and of course they have a best before date.
So a visionary leader is a good person to have during bootstrap, but then your processes need to become self-sustaining.
This has not been true at any job I’ve had, from working in fast food as a teenager to now being a data scientist. What you describe would be exceptional in almost any company, where things otherwise regress to the mean of these various aspects, or, in especially bad circumstances, go south of that. Boeing would seem to be in the latter category at this point.
I really want to know about studies being done in this area.
Sure, on an individual basis, you have pockets of amazing managers that can't overcome organizational inertia. I feel for them as well, but when organizational failures come into play, I'm certainly taking more pity on the employees then the managers.
It's possible for the underlings to be good despite bad management, but if the underlings are bad that is again a consequence of poor management.
The only exception would be deliberate sabotage, which is not unknown but incredibly rare.
It should rub you the wrong way. It denies both the agency and the moral obligation of the professionals working under the managers.
Managers too, though ultimately this failure must come down to management at some (presumably high) level.
So not everyone who is not a manager is good, but almost all top-level managers are bad. They need to be in order to make the decisions needed to advance short term profit before all else.
There are bad employees but they have less influence over the company overall.
From my limited experience with megacorps, and lots of reading, persons Director level and up are bat guano insane. Execs live in their own separate Machiavellian fantasy world bubble. Any nod to reality (eg rocket go boom) is a selfown for corporate ladder climbers.
Any productive work at an org like Boeing, post infection by MD's leeches, is in despite of "managagement"'s best efforts.
engineers on the bottom don't care about the politics. they design and implement the best they can.
Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all. I mean, why? People obviously like it there, otherwise they wouldn't work there, so why feel bad for them?
You can’t compare something like these massive pieces of hardware with people inside failing and taking all your work with it, with some software launch that maybe fails and takes a couple of bugs to be fixed before relaunch.
The Boeing story is tragic because they were a source of pride for America overall, played a huge part in winning WW2, made some great technological advances, but succumbed to MBAs fleecing all their goodwill. There are still world class aerospace engineers working there, and sure they could probably get a job somewhere else, but they might need to uproot their lives to do so.
I don't understand this sentiment at all. I know quite a few people who worked on the Google Domains team. It was a good team, a good product, and it sadly was all blown up by some senior executive decision that didn't make any sense.
Why can't I feel bad for the workers I knew whose product got deleted out from under their feet?? Some of them are in the process of getting laid off now!
Because there are people working at Boeing, people like you or me, who poured their heart into the project and the institution sapped their energy away and made their efforts ultimately worse than futile.
There was someone working at Boeing who spent years of their life qualifying those thrusters. They tried their very best. Perhaps they even batted for more testing. Or more analysis. Or perhaps they didn't because they didn't know better, but they still spent their best effort to do a good job.
And when they heard that the engines are acting up they probably felt like a trap door has opened under them. They felt that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. Either angry that they haven't caught this in testing, or angry that they haven't approved their request to test more.
Years and years ago they proudly told their mom/girlfriend/drinking buddies that they are working on a beautiful spaceship. And they were very proud of the project. And now all those people have heard that their spaceship is a liability. All that good feeling turned ash in their mouth.
There are people at Boeing who worked very very hard the last few weeks (months?) trying to uncover what is wrong with those thrusters. There are others who spent endless hours in meetings with NASA discussing risks and explaining tests and arguing persuasively that the space ship is fine enough to ride. And it is not really their individual fault that the spaceship is not fine.
And even worse, there are people who spent years of their life designing and building flawless systems. And they did a great job and built their subsystem really really well. Well made, high quality products. Yet nobody will think of their stuff positively because some other subsystem failed.
It is kind of like you are working on a beautiful great pyramid. (FYI pyramids were not built by slaves.) And you work hard, and quarry stone all day, and shape it, and push it and pull it and you really really do your best job. You are really a champ. And you should deserve to celebrate in the sun with your team mates the beautiful pyramid. But unfortunately you are not one of the lucky ones working on Khufu's pyramid, you are on the team which works the second pyramid built for Sneferu. And something is wrong with the plans. Or the foundations, or the site selection. Or the rocks are not strong enough. Nobody really knows but even though you are doing a great job individually the damn thing is collapsing in front of your eyes. And it will be known forever as the "bent pyramid". And it sucks. And you feel bad. And that is sad and we should feel bad for those people.
What do Boeing actually do?
It is a tragedy that what was even greater has been so badly diminished by the greed and incompetence of a few. Hating what’s happened to Boeing (and perhaps those responsible for it) is very different than hating Boeing.
That memo from 20 years ago talks about how Boeing management was optimizing their earnings to capital expenses ratio by selling off factories and manufacturing lines to their contractors. The idea was that this would make Boeing more efficient. In theory they would have the same profits but lower capital expenses. The memo points out how fallacious this is, because while it does improve _this year’s_ numbers, next year’s profits will drop because they no longer own the factory that makes the profits. The memo points out that the contractors will now be earning a larger and larger share of the profits that Boeing used to collect, while Boeing keeps all of the risks. When you buy a whole fuselage from one supplier and a pair of wings from another, you take on all the risk that they won’t fit together properly while the suppliers pad their profits by making you pay extra for every change you ask for.
https://manifold.markets/TimothyBandors/will-boeings-starlin...
If people knew what NASA knew that graph would look a whole lot different. NASA misled the public and then slowly let the cat out of the bag.
Two, anyone pretending to have known a month ago how this would turn out was lying.
I'm still processing that sentence
Given that, the subsequent merger of McD with Boeing should not have been approved.
Boeing got more value out of the defense part of McD.
Good job bean counters.
> we didn’t really care for [Boeing]
- They'll reconfigure Crew-8 for 6 occupants for contingency evac between Starliner undock and Crew-9 arrival.
- Starliner leaving ISS autonomously early September
- Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2 empty seats
- Crew 9 coming back down in ~Feb 2025
So from a keep humans safe while still attempting to complete the Starliner mission as much as possible, to me this is the best solution. In fact, it's kind of bonus for Boeing to test the automated return that was not part of the original mission. </spinDocter>
Actually, they said no sooner than Sept 24th.
What shall we make of all of this should it succeed?
- returning Starliner empty is the correct decision
- a successful return doesn’t indicate they were wrong about the risk
- the experts will learn a lot more from poring over mission data
This was news to me tho, "and Dragon-specific spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams." The spacesuits are specific to the vehicle?
Changing my underwear so I can drive to hardware store.
We are literally building the future, HTF do we keep getting into these situations?
A group of professors liked jokes, but got tired of hearing the same ones, so they started numbering them. So instead of telling a joke or funny observation when something happened, they'd say "112" and the others would laugh. or "64", more laughter.
One day they get a new prof on their team and after a few weeks of this number, laugh, number, laugh, during a meeting, the new guy says "-149". There's dead silence for a while. The eldest prof starts laughing, "i've never heard that one!"
At least it's more pithy than "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra".
In the words of someone in the industry who tends to be on the laconic side:
"It is not as simple as a 'common connector'. There are different pressures, mixture ratios, comm gear, seat interfaces, etc. A requirement for commonality flows requirements upstream to the suit, seat and spacecraft. "
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2...
Oh, good. Previous proposals included having them return in a Dragon unsuited.[1]
[1] https://futurism.com/stranded-astronauts-spacex-boeing-space...
Quite recently there was a Soyuz with crippled cooling and the contingency plan for the American astronaut that came with it was to evacuate via Dragon if there was an emergency before new Soyuz arrived.
It all seems a bit over the top when things go well, but especially as we start to up the rate of sending people into space - things don't go well quite often. The Space Shuttle only sent people to space 135 times, and there was a complete loss of life on two of those missions. If aircraft had that sort of failure rate then you'd see a plane dropping out of the sky about once a minute, literally.
It’s why scandals like the 737 Max are so appalling. We know better. Boeing knew better.
The 737 Max was objectively surprisingly safe to fly at the time of the groundings. As in for the average flying passenger their odds were significantly higher to die of something else on the day of their flight than from a crash. But still we know how to do better and things improved.
Imagine if we treated each individual car accident as a failure and millions of like could have been saved. It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.
You can't maximize both.
Obviously, that’s average many cars are significantly worse. Run the numbers and swapping a high mileage but poor fuel economy car for a hybrid/EV and the payback can be a net positive.
Manufacturers push those because of less environmental regs on those vs the perfectly viable Class 1.
And FYI those trucks are bigger because you need more volume and moment-arm when building them out of lighter aluminum instead of heavier steel- a direct consequence of CAFE standards.
I imagine we'd agree that CAFE was poorly done.
I think you mean to say cutting back on costs due to corporate greed?
#1 most obvious atm is autostop.
Starter gives you enough juice to enter the intersection, but engine sputters and you get tboned. Same for not providing enough acceleration/ hp.
Also 1 pedal driving.
Electric cars that outweigh the 'old' 'inefficient' light trucks because batteries are heavy. Harder to stop, more wear on roads. Tires that are designed to extract breaking energy over stopping.
Lithium fires (not cause but much more dangerous result).
Aluminum crush zones in cars not big enough to have crush zones.
Every design decision is a compromise.
It is a testament to the not-yet-entirely-captured regulatory regime of international flight that the 737 MAX was not considered safe enough.
Is the MAX safe now? After killing over 300 people needlessly, being grounded for 1.5y, and an extensive investigation? Yeah sure, probably.
To be saying what your saying, I think you mustn't of followed Max 8 MCAS debacle very closely, or at all.
~2 years * 2 flights per day * 365 days per year * ~350 aircraft would be 511,000 flights but it’s / 2 because aircraft where being delivered over time that’s 2 crashes per ~255,000 flights or 1 per ~127,000. (Edit: Actual numbers were less than half that at 3 crashes per 1 million flights.)
By comparison someone living to 80 is 80 * 365 days = 29,200 days. Meaning the average day would be more than 3x as risky as taking a flight on a 737 Max. It’s not actually that simple as hospitalized patients are unlikely to fly, but you get plenty of elderly people dying from hart attacks etc on aircraft.
I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft, (edit: it beat the DC-8 and 707 which was still in use at the time) but general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours not flights. https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/GeneralAviationDashbo...
People dying because a plane crashes because of the negligence and penny-pinching of the airline manufacturer is no comparable at all.
What we want to compare is the crash/fatality rate of the 737 MAX during that period with rates for other aircraft types. And I suspect we'll find the 737 MAX falling far short of the standard if we do that.
> I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft
Right, but that's the only kind of comparison that really matters.
> general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours
We're talking about commercial airline safety. It's pretty well-known that general aviation is less safe, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.
I agree that I'm safer getting into a 737 MAX than I am into a buddy's Cessna or a car or train(?) or boat or whatever, but I don't care about that. If I've chosen to fly somewhere, I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.
So, I’ll ask you which commercial aircraft have still in use have worse safety histories. If you’re being rational clearly you should be concerned with actual risks not just media reporting.
Not that I actually mean this as personal attack on you, it’s just the kind of irrationality I am referring to here.
The difference is we don’t do NTSB style investigations after a traffic accident.
NTSB investigations of road fatalities, given teeth, would radically change how cars interact with one another.
e.g., "Things ran great, until ... they didn't."
This gets my vote for most vacuous statement on HN this year.
Tossing that many caveats and still not being the worst aircraft is shocking to many people.
Again it should be compared to modern aircraft, but this just shows how far we’ve come that the bar has moved this far.
Right, exactly, and this is why this sub-thread is so maddeningly weird. I'm going to compare the 737 MAX's safety record to that of the 737 NG, 777, 787, 757, as well as to Airbus' current-gen 3xx planes. I don't care how it compares to the DC-8 or 707 or 720 because it's exceedingly unlikely I'll ever fly on one of those.
And I'm certainly not comparing to the kinds of small planes general aviation pilots fly, and I'm not comparing against other modes of transportation. I already know that I'm safer in a plane (even in a 737 MAX) than in a car, but if I'm choosing to drive, I'm choosing to drive. If I'm choosing to fly, then then the 737 MAX's record, coupled with how poorly Boeing has handled the situation, is a big concern to me.
And I get that, it’s obvious given the choice you pick the safer aircraft. But in a broader context the numbers are so low it’s hard to contemplate.
Currently it’s 2 per 6 million flights. Spend the cost of a flight on Powerball tickets and you’re more likely to with the jackpot than have been on one of those fatal crashes. But people still think of those risks and chances as worth thinking about, which is also why lotteries stick around.
The 787 Dreamliner which came out 15 years ago, has no deaths at all.
It's not good. It's about 5x as deadly as the 747-400... And it just got started.
Driving 25 miles in the US is in 2022 was as dangerous on average vs a random 737 Max flight over its history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... In 2022 the average car was driven 14,500 miles or ~600 flights worth of risk, but people still really worry about it.
The Concorde was a niche aircraft that hasn't flown for over 20 years. Even if it were flying today, I would still consider its safety record as in a completely separate bucket than subsonic commercial airliners.
And I don't care how the 737 MAX compares to driving. I care how it compares to other, similar, commercial aircraft in use today. If I'm going to drive, I drive. If I'm going to fly, I'm going to care about how the plane on my itinerary compares to other planes I could be sitting on with a similar itinerary.
Risk I regularly take are hardly irrelevant to me. I consider this kind of comparison to be foundational to rational behavior.
> completely separate bucket than other subsonic commercial airliners
It didn’t have the worst history compared to other subsonic commercial airliners flying at the time when they grounded it. What it had was the potential for improvement.
If you actually care about safety knowing what the actual most dangerous aircraft are would be the rational decision. And today the 737 Max has had 20x the flights and still the same number of accidents. So if you’re concerned about safety how does it stack up?
> It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature [for cars] etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.
My understanding is that drunk driving is a small minority of car crashes/fatalities. In most crashes, the driver(s) involved are completely sober. Making breathalyzers mandatory in cars would be awful.
Your understanding is wrong, “About 32% of all traffic crash fatalities in the United States involve drunk drivers (with BACs of .08 g/dL or higher).”
> 737 MAX being safe
At the time it was under 1 accident per 300,000+ flights which is objectively lower than 2 other jets flying at the time. Today with 346 died in 2 crashes but another 200+ people died of medical emergencies on 737 Max flights. That’s the kind of risk people are taking, flying it’s slightly more dangerous than spending that much time sitting at home watching TV.
One crashed on the runway after pilot error, killing three people (two of them weren't wearing seatbelts)
One was shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft missile, killing all on board.
And the other is a mystery, we can't even find the crash site. But most evidence points towards deliberate pilot suicide.
What? Do you have a source for the last one? That sounds like corporate propaganda. It’s well understood AND PROVEN that the MCAS system (which was a system borrowed from decades old military code) was at fault for this incident. Saying it was suicide seems incredibly disrespectful to both pilots… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610 In the article it even states they found the wreckage…
To date, neither the 777 nor the 787 have had any passenger fatalities from any aircraft engineering flaw. That is a monumental achievement.
I have read up on the 777 and yes, I agree it’s incredibly safe statistically (as is the 787). I didn’t realize the commenter was talking about the Malaysia flight either. Apologies to them
I think Dragon 2 could easily be roughly an order of magnitude more reliable than the shuttle, if not more. It has full abort coverage and a TPS that doesn't habitually receive damage from falling debris, and is more robust to impacts besides; and its record so far is exemplary.
The seats are standard, but each astronaut has their own mold, taken on Earth, which is put into the seat.
The completed Soyuz seat (head is toward the left): https://ar.culture.ru/attachments/attachment/middle/5de8f6c2...
Source https://ar.culture.ru/en/subject/lozhement-kosmonavta-kov
For the journey home from ISS to Earth, the probability threshold is 1-in-1000. Likewise, it is 1-in-1000 for the journey from Earth to ISS.
The riskiest part, which increases the probability from 1-in-500 to 1-in-270, is the ISS stay – the extended stay in space is faced with a continuous risk of micrometeoroid damage.
Well it seems like it is routine thing now and spacex seems like routinely launches without a flaw.
But going up there and making it back is still huge feat that is possible only by collaboration of huge numbers of super experienced and highly trained professionals.
I am going a bit over the top - but still travel even to low earth orbit is something far outside of any human being reach - on his own or his group of buddies.
If there was a fair chance I’d die on the trip, damn straight if be in my super hero undies too.
As we've seen these past few years, Boeing is perfectly capable of royally screwing things up on its own without the government's involvement.
SpaceX remains a private company solely focused on their mission undeterred by outside influence which allows engineers the space to do what they do best.
There’s a difference and anything that’s truly critical to our lives or human livelihood should consider delisting. Once shareholders demand your company to stray from excellence and quality in the name of raising the bottom line, it’s time to give it a hard look.
Any company solely motivated by profit would probably be destroyed in this system, because the incentives created do not reward competence.
much of the billions for a charger network for EVs has made <10 chargers, they could have provided that to Tesla. similarly the EV tax credits provided to private companies has fueled EV proliferation
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/08/trump-misleads-on-the-cost...
> Just looking at the $5 billion program dedicated to building charging stations along major highways, Nigro said updated data from 10 states shows the government’s share of building each port is $150,000, on average. That works out to more than 30,000 ports and as many as 7,500 stations, assuming each has four ports (Nigro said the station number will likely be lower, since many stations will have more ports). Even more charging stations and ports can be built with the other $2.5 billion.
They did Tesla an enormous favor by pushing the other car manufacturers to adopt their standard. A good use of government power, IMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Charging_Standa...
The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years. He said most will be coming online 2027+ but seemed to admit that the expectation was for more to be online by now. While I agree the "9 stations for $7.5B" there are reasonable concerns here that the money will be well-spent. I can't even find anything on how much has been actually allocated to far and how many chargers are expected.
https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/02_22_24_Letter_to_Sec...
Yes, it is. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger... "Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure package into law in 2021 with $7.5 billion specifically directed toward EV chargers, with an eye toward achieving his goal of building 500,000 chargers in the United States by 2030."
> The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years.
Yes, to hand out to the states. Who then get to spend it on projects. Allocation is the start of the project, not the end.
https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/12744
"FHWA must distribute the NEVI Program Formula Program funds made available each fiscal year (FY) through FY 2026, so that each state receives an amount equal to the state FHWA funding formula determined by 23 U.S. Code 104. To receive funding, states must submit plans to the FHWA and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation for review and public posting annually, describing how the state intends to distribute NEVI funds. The FHWA announced approval of all initial state plans on September 27, 2022, and FY2024 plans were approved in 2023."
> https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/02_22_24_Letter_to_Sec...
You'll find me fairly unconvinced by a letter from Republican House Representatives to Biden. (You probably would find a letter from Democratic reps to Trump similarly useless as evidence.)
The number of stations does not appear in the bill.
https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf
The 500,000 charger was a campaign promise in 2020 not directly connected to the funding allocated in 2021
https://grist.org/energy/biden-wants-to-build-500000-ev-char...
https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2023/building-the-2030-nat...
Not certain if that is any better. If an organization can't execute, it can't execute. It doesn't matter if it is some frankenstein of Boeing prime contractor and Rocketjet subcontractor or Federal and States.
I think that’s unlikely.
Phase one is “submit your plans”. Phase two is “we review, approve, and fund your plans”. I’m not surprised these have taken a while to coordinate across 50 state governments.
Incidentally this was the inception of the Tech Right. Before that, Elon exclusively voted for Democrats.
I didn't realize the impact back then: https://x.com/mualphaxi/status/1817562306764566824
- Starship and Starbase, no lauch approval
- Tesla FSD, no regulatory approval
-Starlink version 2 upgrade, the competition is still fight. Again, no approval
and many more.. all this projects a massive like really massive.. True Elon is a government project.
SpaceX just happens to be the best in every aspect.
However their commercial launch business is still considerably larger than what US gov gives them and always has been , it is possible and quite likely they would have existed as a successful commercial space launch company without government contracts , albeit smaller and perhaps slower to reach many milestones .
I can also argue reasonably that many things US government wants is not useful (or simply restricted) for other customers and building those features were and are a distraction.
No different for a startup to have a very large customer who has all sorts of customization needs that no other customer will focusing on that can kill the company as ULA and Boeing space are feeling today.
SpaceX is successful because they don’t need government support not because of it, they can build starship without waiting for a nasa mission and not even using VC money but just money from their revenues .
Even Musk doesn't make that claim.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex...
"“I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. And fortunately the fourth launch, which was, that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1. That fourth launch worked. Or it would have been — that would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that day. So, the fourth launch worked,” says Musk."
Flights one, two, and three all involved government funding (Air Force and DARPA payloads).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RatSat#Aftermath
"Even though SpaceX finally has achieved a successful orbital flight, Musk only has $30 million left and was unable to support both SpaceX and Tesla for two months. Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts. Through 2008, SpaceX launch manifest at the time only consisted of RazakSAT. Rather, it was NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services and subsequent Commercial Resupply Services contracts that provided SpaceX much-needed fund to save it from bankruptcy."
Give the credit where it's due, as they say.
No; SpaceX received DARPA (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060048219/downloads/20...), Air Force (https://www.space.com/2196-spacex-inaugural-falcon-1-rocket-...), and NASA funding (COTS, in 2006) prior to their first orbital success with Falcon 1.
The mission carried a $6.7 million price tag covered by the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
This was the claim of OP I replied to, Are we not moving the goal posts here? Government support for early stage startups is absolutely not what OP claimed
DARPA AND USAF funding is important and also available to many companies before and since, the size of them is however not significant in comparison to what it takes to run a rocket company or even R&D.
> Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts ...
> Even Musk doesn't make that claim.
In the alternate reality where Falcon 4 succeeded but there were no COTS and CRS , would SpaceX have survived? Yes I think so, Musk would not have been able to keep it funded personally yes, but it is hard to see the first private rocket company with a functional rocket not being able to raise any money from investors at all.
We can of course argue how much Musk loosing partial control would have affected the trajectory of the company, quite possible they won't be where they are today without singular focus he was able to drive in the company, who is to say ? but they would likely be still here. It is also possible that Musk is talented and effective enough even with constraints external investors would have been still able to achieve the same kind of things, keep in mind SpaceX does have lot of external investors and raised outside money heavily in the last 15 years including a $1Billion from Google in 2015, Musk has been able to operate with that so not that far fetched.
---
Nobody is denying that US Gov has been instrumental in the success of SpaceX and rocketry in general. After all even with zero government support, SpaceX would still need the rich talent pool US Gov developed and allowed to work in the private sector to build a rocket at all.
The point is how much the revenue from Government launches helps/helped not how they has helped at all. US Gov is a large customer but not so large that loosing those contracts would make the TAM impossibly small, there is enough business outside to make it viable business not just attractive but viable nonetheless.
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So, two flights to the Moon - ~$4B. SpaceX already spent around that on the developments in Boca Chica, each flight - expendable - is estimated at $0.1B, we already had 4 and they are surely more costly. We still have to have 2 HLS to fly and 20-30 Starship flights to refuel them, and that's the lower bound in expenses.
Big chunk, likely. But definitely not nearly all the money.
Pretty much this. Polaris Dawn is happening because Jared Isaacman wanted it to. And my point is that SpaceX has gotten the price down to the point where he was able to afford multiple trips.
relax! i am not saying Elon isn't the greatest engineer ever, and SpaceX is not a great company.
space flight is a dangerous business.
Rich people being willing to spend buckets of money on an experience is not evidence that it is "safe" or "cost effective", it's just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with.
Jet set was a thing in 50/60s Jet travel was viewed as a play thing for the extremely rich . Even today there is staggering 80% of the world population who have never flown in airplane ever in their life[1].
From the perspective of that 80% they can say airplanes are "just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with".
It takes a long long time for transportation to become affordable. What SpaceX has done so far is just make it a bit cheaper to make it possible for civilians to be able to even pay any money and do this. No innovation will be ever enough, that doesn't mean we demean it.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-percent-of-peo...
> we still haven't figured out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient way
We need more than one musk. Unfortunately that’s like one in a century.
This was literally debunked by nasa but I’m so glad HN is so captured by anti musk narratives it’s impossible to post anything good about him with getting downvoted.
Pretty sad state of affairs.
I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference from today, and today we're already doing things that were unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).
https://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=0...
Political propaganda?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_F...
Certainly the next few hundred years. There's just no real point. Ten thousand years hence, who knows?
I'm absolutely rapt following SpaceX's journey, but then when I mentally scale that up to 'something useful' for localspace living (eg. a useful percentage of current daily aviation volume), I realise how utterly unsustainable it fundamentally is.
The older I get, the less of a Paradox Fermi's idle thought becomes. Sadly.
The world is not mobilizing towards these big "civilization advancing" goals, we're all just faffing about solving the next tiny little thing infront of our faces. That plus we're breeding mediocrity and not promoting excellence through meritocracy. This is purely cultural, and it's right infront of us every day to see and participate in (or not).
Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
The original STS design looked a lot more like late-game KSP1 (possibly depending on the player).
The Saturn V could get 44.5 tons to the moon.
So instead of the shuttle program we could have had whatever amount of moon base you'd get with just under 7500 tons on the moon.
And that's assuming a very expensive Saturn V, in reality the system would have become cheaper over time due to optimization and amortization.
You learn to do things better by doing it repeatedly. The best way to build up to weekly launches is to do it more and more and more often, which is exactly what SpaceX has done.
Stopping the funding that NASA was getting at the time is the reason we lost those institutional muscles and stopped building them up.
Possible bad wording on my part. I meant that the cost was hardly sustainable in a long run, so that once it was clear that the US had won the race to the Moon, the lack of significant incentives doomed the project because of high cost compared to the return. Back then there was no or very little interest in placing commercial satellites in orbit and nobody cared about Mars. The shuttle was different as it served as a lab and carrier to put satellites in orbit, and more importantly (replying also to avar here) disasters aside one would still have the shuttle returning after each launch, while every single Saturn V had to be rebuilt. I believe the move to a reusable carrier was obligatory to make short term launches feasible economically, which is what the Shuttle started and now SpaceX is continuing.
The per launch cost was the same when dividing the overall cost by the number of launches. Saturn V launched 13 times, the shuttle 135 times.
There's just no way to rationalize the whole project not being a terrible idea from beginning to end.
The story that NASA was too expensive during Apollo sounds like political spin to me.
It was wildly successful.
You're just under the mistaken impression that the goal was to go to space cheaply or whatever.
But the success of the shuttle program pales in comparison to the SLS and Artemis.
Now they're spending more money in all the right places, without that pesky distraction of launching the thing into space.
You're way off in the wonderland considering the goals and achievements. Just remember who's the actual goal setter is. Don't fool yourself.
But so what? I don't care about that measure of "success". I care about reliable, reusable, cost-efficient space launches, and all the technological and scientific advances that can bring. By those measures, the space shuttle was a disaster of a failure. That's what we care about.
In other words, a lot of such government-backed projects utterly fail in their objectives, not so much due to lack of prophetic foresight, but due to inability to re-evaluate when it becomes clear that the previously chosen approach can no longer lead to the envisioned outcome. ITER is another fine example of this.
To build reliable, economical rockets and spacecraft (at least those burdened with the task of escaping Earth's gravity well), you need to be able to intensely specialize and streamline them to the greatest degree possible, with what complexity remains pulling its own weight several times over. They need to be really good at one thing, with any other use cases coming as a bonus.
It took SpaceX to slash costs, accelerate development, and choose an approach that really made engineering success to push partial reusability over the finish line. SpaceX was not subject to the perverse incentives under which NASA is forced to operate.
The true problem is that the US government stopped funding space in a serious way and so NASA did not continue pushing the envelope at the rate they did before. We've had some pretty great robotic missions in that time though.
I wouldn't say they do too much though.
In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful. Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5) We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.
So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.
Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in place of those several companies which are building orbital stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the problem?
Right, but to be practical, those commercial crew spacecrafts should exist in sufficient numbers to ensure the orbital stations are supplied, preferably without exorbitant price tags, which an insufficient supply could result in.
X-33 was a thing, Venturestar by Lockheed. It seemed tantalising in close, a few mishaps and it was cancelled, but surely that would have been worth picking and taking that bit further.
Rocket lab is launching electron a bunch, working on Neutron which will be a falcon 9 competitor, and is building spacecraft for their customers (e.g. they built some Martian orbiters that should get launched later this year).
Intuitive machines, the folks who built the most recent US lunar lander.
Blue origin is not exactly speedy, but they do fly their rockets semi-regularly now and New Glenn is supposed to fly later this year.
Northrup has a human-rated rocket that flies periodically.
And of course there's ULA.
And those are just the successful ones.
There's also: Astra ABL Firefly Relativity Sierra Space
And probably some more that I'm not aware of.
That's a pretty long list of places that are working on these problems and paying American engineers to work on and think about these problems.
Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.
(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)
> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.
We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth and then a few billion more in the future. We simply choose not to. It isn't a technological or logistical issue, but cultural and political.
Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.
Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.
Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.
It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.
Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)
But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.
"NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew"
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
@dang this seems like a better link, could it replace the current one?
https://www.adastraspace.com/p/boeing-spacex-spacesuits-comp...
I'm not really sure what point your question is attempting to get at
This one is from yesterday, maybe it will receive an update? https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/as-nasa-nears-major-de...
I don't have a positive opinion of Ars, but he's absolutely one of the best sources for space news and reporting.
(Bottom line: they couldn't tell what was up with the thrusters, and didn't want to bet anyone's life on it not getting worse.)
That's what's making it harder to trust the thrusters I think.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1f062o0/boe...
OR
https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1f062o0/boe...
But I bet the market will have some things to say on Monday, unless Boeing can do some damage control before then.
Even at the best of times space travel is risky, why tie your career to that?
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
Practically nobody was asking "how are they bringing back starliner?"
Practically everyone was asking "how are the astronauts returning?"
Obviously, they're not gonna just count out the humans involved, but it make sense they want to focus on the core mission.
At least that's how I understood it from listening to the press conference for the last half hour or so.`
Blackwater
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Xe Services
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Academi
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Constellis Holdings
Look at this shit. Just look at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AXnMlxK22A
It's amazing how many people, whether sympathetic to SpaceX or not, believe that NASA built its previous spacecraft in-house or something. The main differences between Commercial Crew and previous US manned space programs are that a) two different vehicles were built, not one, and b) NASA does not own or operate the vehicles; their builders do. Everything else is the same: NASA provided specifications for what it wanted in a manned spacecraft capable of reliably carrying people to ISS, various companies bid based on the specifications—their designs varying greatly from one another—and NASA chose the winning bids.
I think there is a big difference you haven't mentioned.
With Apollo, with the Space Shuttle, with the US components of the ISS, with SLS/Orion – NASA owned the design and made the big design decisions. They hired contractors to do a lot of the grunt work of the engineering – analysing different options, fleshing out high-level designs into detailed designs, etc – but the big picture design decisions were made by NASA. (Or, in the case of SLS, dictated to NASA by Congress.)
By contrast, with Commercial Cargo/Crew and HLS, NASA is just writing the requirements spec and letting the contractors make the big design decisions. And then the contractors have to convince NASA's engineers that the design actually fulfils those requirements. But NASA isn't making decisions like "what fuel should the launch vehicle use"–so long as they can convince NASA that what they are doing meets the requirements spec, the contractor can do almost anything they like. Whereas, on earlier programs, NASA was making the final call on many of those high-level design decisions.
Thanks for the link. That is truly amazing to watch!
what do you define as "recently"? This Boeing/lockheed project has been a taxpayer funded disaster for over a decade and this is just the obvious end result. Boeing managed to siphon billions of tax dollars in the meantime
Boeing is the one who (yet again) let everyone down. First by making another unreliable vehicle, then by downplaying the seriousness.
It turns out Starliner is a fixed-price contract (for $4.2 billion). So when Starliner had an issue a couple of years ago Boeing was forced to do another test and eat the launch cost. We ened more of this.
SLS (and Artemis?), for example, is largely done by cost-plus contracts.
It's common for companies and governments to want to have more than one supplier so they can't so easily be price-gouged (which doesn't really work but that's a separate topic). SpaceX got a $2.6 billion contract for Crew Dragon and its launch cost has to be substantially lower than Starliner's.
So NASA will still push Starliner for this reason. But this whole debacle is deeply embarrasing for Boeing, so much so that people at the top may actually get fired. That's really rare for the executives responsible for a strategy to be held accountable for its failures.
Boeing is just not in a great place and I honestly don't know how you right the ship at this point. A fish rots from the head and I imagine Boeing has descended into warring fiefdoms where some VPs just try and increase their head counts so they can get promoted to SVP.
Saying "welp... guess we'll close up shop and ship those jobs somewhere else. Time to learn French and go work for Airbus (The ArianeGroup is Airbus and Safran)."
Wishing for the demise of Boeing represents an irrecoverable loss of industrial capacity for the US.
The kid gets a failing grade. Pick someone else that is a better candidate at mission success. Select someone that's serious about doing real work.
Maybe capitalism's competitor, whatever that may be, is better at heralding space travel and mass production?
> China's busy just trying to catch up. Everybody else can't seem to figure out how to pass econ-101.
edit: Getting to the frustration of realizing all reasonable options have been exhausted is an obstacle to climb over.
There is no magic sauce that will make economies work for everyone. Specialization is how we built civilization tens of thousands of years ago. It's how we get off the struggle bus today. But if nations can't rely on a global trade order then they all have to build everything.
Besides violating some sacred cow and norms, how does the "no true Scotsman" fallacy proposal relate to the fact that no true scientist would ever consider the Boeing aerospace company or Elon Musk anything close to engineering geniuses? Because, otherwise, you're just avoiding the objective commentary's point and discussion it leads to. Whether this evasion is intentional or not.
If the US takes their ball and goes home from space exploration, who's does it? China?
Just let them keep eating crackers in bed, or what?
aka "too big to fail"
I believe that this is a form of the Anna Karenina principle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle )
> All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
There is no scripted formula to repair a large organization. Each one needs to be addressed in a way that is particular to that organization, its culture, and its ultimate desired end state.
One could look at the Gil Amelio to Steve Jobs Apple - that was a turn around of a not small organization. However, what worked for Apple certainly won't work for Boeing.
That said, I too wish for this outcome (the final destruction of the US military and all of their too-big-to-fail supply chain).
Also if it lands okay then they are more likely to deduce and correct what the issues are for a possible future mission (though at this point I do not know the likelyhood that Starliner will get another chance)
Even if such an explosion happened the debris wouldn't be around for long, stuff in LEO will fall back to earth quite quickly without stationkeeping.
Why not just fly the crew back in it then? "likely to work fine" is not sufficient level of certainty for NASA (anymore, because of bitter lessons). They need to be able to quantify the risk. And this is not possible, because an uncertain amount of damage was already done inside the thruster dog houses when they overheated and some material in them melted, and they cannot be inspected.
What guaranteed the unmanned return was that when they did new ground tests with the equipment, the damage was not consistent between tests. This means they cannot model what happened, and they cannot inspect the current state of the dog houses, meaning that no sane engineer will sign off on it, even though the damage is probably not very large and they can prevent future damage by using a less aggressive flight plan.
It never was. If you trip into a known failed safe situation the mission rules immediately change. This has been true since manned space flight started.
Here's the problem: Starliner flies in the Atlas 5 rocket. Which is officially deprecated and all of the vehicles that will ever built have been booked. Which would mean that Boeing has to nicely ask Project Kepler for one (or more) or their remaining Atlas 5 slots. All of this also pushes back the final flight of the Atlas 5. Starliner already has 5 years where it's the only mission in that rocket, requiring hardware and operational knowledge to be on retainer just for Starliner. At least the pad that launches Starliner can also do Vulcan launches, so they won't be hogging a launch pad just for this problematic program.
All Boeing hate aside this is a learning experience for everyone involved.
But if you want to split hairs like this, get it right: companies. Boeing is the primary contractor, but others likely share some responsibility---for instance AJR, who supplied the problematic thrusters.
Boeing is cooked. SLS should be scrapped. There has got to be consequences for over spending, under delivering, and outright failing.
As late as July 28, flight director Ed Van Cise explicitly denied that the Starliner crew was stuck or stranded <https://x.com/Carbon_Flight/status/1817754775196201035>. Even if one quibbles about whether "stranded" applies in this situation (I believe that it does <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ekicol/not_stranded_...>), "stuck" definitely does.
Amazing that, even after today's confirmation of what we all expected, there are still those in denial.
>They've always had the option of coming down on crew 8
Yes, lashed to a jury-rigged harness in the cargo department. Right now NASA is in de facto violation of the ironclad rule of always having a seat for everyone aboard ISS, and for about three weeks between Crew 8's departure and Crew 9's arrival, the violation will be even greater.
>Saying they're not coming back on starliner doesn't mean that it's certain death if they do
As I wrote in the link in the comment that you keep seeing everywhere but never bothered to read:
>NASA has said that in an emergency the astronauts will use Starliner. That is not the same thing as saying that using Starliner (whether in an emergency or not) to return to earth is as safe as using Soyuz or Crew Dragon, and every day the return is delayed (hitting two months very shortly) is additional proof of this.
>Put another way, if there is an emergency on ISS right now, the two astronauts that flew on Starliner have to take Starliner back because there is no alternative. There are no extra seats on Soyuz or Crew Dragon docked there.
and
>In an "ISS explodes tomorrow and there is no Starliner" situation, of course Wilmore and Williams will be strapped in as tightly as possible as cargo in Crew Dragon. The ride might be bumpy, but should be survivable.
>The interesting question is, in an "ISS explodes tomorrow" scenario, does the above still occur? Based on all available reporting the answer would until very recently have been "No; Wilmore and Williams will use Starliner". I am no longer sure that this is the case.
Note the last sentence.
(From an alternate submission, I'd recommended that URL be substituted for the Twitter link.)
NASA and BOEING disagreed on whether it was safe for Starliner to depart to Earth with astronauts.....
I think it might be time to short Boeing stock....
The right thing to do now is to shutter the company and make all it's patents and designs public domain
I want "buy all S&P stocks minus Boeing" to be as easy and cheap as "buy Boeing".
I know it's overall pretty daft, but I've also had the 'personal ETF' idea.
"we think its gonna blow up"
Boeing still takes all the blame.
These organizations no longer exist for the purpose of building great products and pushing the limits of engineering. It's easier to operate on the tit of the state and rake in billions through sleazy backroom deals and lobbying with the state acting as an artificial intermediary between cause and effect.
And I was like...now I'm scared for them
But if there are no further incidents it may not end up with such a bad Carfax after all ;)
I'll quote one:
"It’s ridiculous. Only a few of the 27 thrusters had issues. The capsule is designed to operate with only half the thrusters."
(4 upvotes)
Obviously the reply to it straight up calls him out and exposes it, but it just shows that people around Boeing have no respect whatsoever for human safety, it's all dollar bills to them...
I do not think I'd trust my life to boeing anytime soon, I do not want to be guessing mid flight if the boeing I'm on was built in the last 20 years or not (newer = less safe)
See Chernobyl.
>For those who "More Engineers and Less MBAs", that's a dog whistle - Just so you know, Boeing is the most diversified aerospace and aircraft manufacturer in the U.S. Typically, Engineers are more arrogant and misogynistic, while MBAs tend to be more progressive, though they can also be more driven by profit. Want an example? SpaceX is a so called "Engineers driven" company.
>At this point, Starliner is actually safe enough (less 1/270 of failure chance) to bring those 2 astronauts back home. The only reason why NASA is not using Starliner, is because there is an election 3 months away. NASA administrator (a politician) made the final decision, so it's not up to MBA or Engineer, it's up to a politician.
>Vote Blue, Nationalize SpaceX and Pass it to Boeing to Run, everybody wins except Musk.
Utter bilge. I bet the author knows nothing about engineers or running a business.
See Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Fukushima, Enron, Theranos, etc.
With the cheap talking points out of the way, one could examine this question carefully and objectively now.
But it is preposterous to draw conclusions about state vs private enterprises from this N=1 example. There have been many successful government-run megaprojects (Panama Canal, Dutch North Sea dams, China's high-speed-rail). There have been many unsuccessful private ones.
Adjudicating this question would require careful enumeration and analysis across many instances, not just throwing out one example.
McKinsey, for example, states that megaprojects can fail "when big projects cross state or national borders and involve a mix of private and government spending."
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insight...
Private US health care is way more expensive than basically anywhere else in the world, while delivering worse outcomes than most places.
Want to trade anecdotes all day? We can do that. Or you can address the question at hand seriously, as I suggested before.
I think a stronger interpretation would be that Boeing's management/corporate culture needs a dramatic shake-up.
Short of letting the company fail completely if left alone, nationalization might well be the best measure out of a long list of not-great measures to shore things up.
Not saying that it's the measure that should be chosen per-se, but as usual it's often better to be pragmatic than ideological at least.
Come on NASA, place the blame where it's due.
I've read biographies of both - well worth reading for anyone who wants to read about great Americans.
I learned in that book that he actually returned money to the government for, I think, the U-2 project -- they made a few extra planes and had money left over. Amazing.
I'd love to read a longitudinal retrospective of failed skunkworks setups and see why participants thought they failed -- I bet it's a diverse list of reasons.
That plus his broad multilateral intelligence -- seeing design and implementation as one thing that one could expect to understand and possibly master -- stood out for me, reading about him.
Anyway, if a leader like Kelly is needed for a skunkworks, that itself may be quite difficult. I'd guess most large companies would take a functioning "almost as good as" Skunkworks any day, if they could tolerate the guy/gal running it.
He was tolerated because he got results. With the size of his budget, it would be a very, very rare CEO who would tolerate that.
I recently did a presentation on how genius code is code so simple that people dismiss it with "anyone could have done that!"
The Kármán Line is also generally accepted to be the boundary of outer space, set at 100 kilometers above ground.
The ISS orbits at something like 415km above Earth.
I'm no lawyer but is seems plausible to say no, orbiting above 100km of altitude over the USA would not be considered entry into the country.
edit: I have to admit my reply was a bit dismissive but can someone enlighten me: Surely you have to be able to pay someone else to file your taxes for you, right?
The IRS stated that they could resolve the problem since anyone outside the United States on April 15 automatically gets a two-month extension. (Even though "legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States.")
Of course, Apollo 13 soon had problems that pushed aside any concerns of tax filing.
NY Times report: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/13/archives/apollo-13-coasts...
Mission transcript: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/...
At least the customs requirement has been resolved: https://www.flexport.com/blog/apollo-11-astronauts-cleared-m...
That gave me a good laugh. Shouldn't it definitely count? You're zipping over every country on earth while you're in orbit so you definitely left!
But if you take off and land in the US, did you _really_ leave? You don't go through customs and immigration for every country you fly over when you're in an airplane, and generally aren't legally considered to have "visited" them. So, wow, good question.
(As I noted elsewhere, they're treated much differently than Boeing, in that they're audited, stress-tested, and generally put under the kind of scrutiny warranted by that kind of role.)
You're right about the difference, though - they're stable, well-run, and with a solid balance sheet, and it's clear the tradeoff for being effectively the Bank of the US is they're regulated and stress-tested six ways to Sunday.
If that were the model being applied to Boeing, this'd be a different story, but I think there's been a clear decision made that Chase is critical infrastructure and should be treated & audited like it that hasn't been made about Boeing yet.
Fire all Boeing senior leadership, go through the remainder of the company with a fine toothed comb and fire anyone mid-level who did anything dumb, then conduct a search to replace everyone.
Make the government an explicit stakeholde (25%?) with board representation.
Dilute shareholders ($0.50 per dollar?) for investing in a bad company, but make any employee shareholders who are still employed whole ($1 per $1).
The problem isn't that management assumed that there would be no market pressure, the problem is that management assumed that engineering and production excellence "just happens". They're not dumb enough to believe that shoddy products won't effect their financial position - they just don't know how to make non-shoddy products while also posting decent financials.
I think virtually anybody who wants to see Boeing succeed long term, would get on board with this option.
At the same time, the FAA needs to be reformed (and funded) to bring it back to the enforcement agency it should be. They got into bed with Boeing and their lack of oversight in civilian aircraft let the corporate sickness fester and have a safe space from which to spread throughout the organization.
I agree with others here that think they need to be a quasi-government-run company, but in the US that is done through oversight, managing the manager rather than stepping into the management role directly. Of course we have to absolutely gut that awful management with extreme prejudice, to start.
Letting them merge with McDonnel-Douglas was a mistake.
Beyond that, the book makes a good case for how unrealistic a long-term colony on Mars is... at least in the short term (Short being the next 50 to 100 years).
My biggest take away is: for all his talk, Musk basically just wants to be the Uber to Mars: shuttling people there and back. He don't seem serious about _actually_ solving the problems of how to stay alive and thrive once we get there.
I found it sort of depressing as first, as I'd love to see people loving on Mars in my lifetime. But when I thought about it, I saw that they outlined a bunch of really important problems we should be working on as a society. The sooner we work on those problems, the better.
You could be right. My (limited) understanding is that SpaceX is doing most of their R&D internally, and therefore they don't have the same oversight requirements more NASA-centric projects require. But that was based on an article about Artemis, and not Starliner.
That significantly relaxes the controls compared to Boeing, which is structured around exploiting cost-plus contracting, so every bit of work needs to be tracked and billed, the more time it takes, the better. Starliner was fixed price and they had to put in their own money so they would've been doing the bare minimum to keep the program going. They've only built the bare minimum 2 vehicles they'd need to meet contract requirements, and can only launch on the few launches reserved on a now retired rocket, so no room to commercialize until someone pays them to make it work with Vulcan.
That book is full of bad science. Some of the silly claims are addressed here: https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-ii