Starliner Is Such a Disaster That Boeing May Cancel the Entire Project
futurism.com
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(At first I didn't think this could really work, until I realized the second craft could have been towed up by the first.)
Incredible kudos to SpaceX, when you consider its comparable competitors repeatedly fumble (Boeing), move slow (Blue Origin), lost their edge (Russia), fidget spinner themselves out of relevance (ULA, Arianespace, Orbital Sciences), whiffed (Sea Launch), or very "successfully" build, launch and discard fortunes (er, flights) for the purpose of justifying those same flights (er, fortunes) (NASA).
Kudos to China too for some prolonged and relatively rapid progress. It will be interesting to see how that progress continues given the "Coolish War" we are now in.
Every single success and victory that SpaceX achieved, from the fourth flight of Falcon-1 to the latest Starship test flight bears his name too.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/08/27/despite-rare-profi...
also, many (maybe most?) privste companies deny employees who have options access to complete company financial statements.
The SLS just isn't one of them. It is a temporary Frankenstein resulting from the complications of adapting to a sudden uptick in private space transit, while necessarily maintaining congressional demand/funding continuity. A special dance well known for not being strictly reality based.
So my criticism of SLS isn't criticism of NASA leadership. I cannot imagine how difficult their job is. The nature of the beast is some waste is unavoidable.
In the meantime, lots of NASA projects are stellar.
in settings, you need to go to Safari and there in extensions, in there beyond enabling imgpls there's also a menu at the bottom where it says "websites content and history" and you should find both imgur and reddit. Instead of ask, switch both to "allow". It will work then!
SpaceX has had the same exact cost overruns as Boeing....
Its a repeat of the space shuttle argument...which failed dramatically bigger in both costs and human deaths.
What we do know is that NASA awarded contracts to both companies in 2010. Crew Dragon worked perfectly on their first crewed flight in 2020, and has taken astronauts to ISS half a dozen times.
NASA paid SpaceX the originally agreed amount of $3.1 billion for six flights, and SpaceX seems happy to continue the arrangement. Boeing has spent $6.7 billion so far.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/boeing-warns-of-more-f...
9 times so far, and it'll be 10 times in about a month.
More detail for others: SpaceX and Boeing each signed contracts as part of the Commercial Crew program for six operational manned missions. After SpaceX fulfilled its six, NASA awarded another contract for eight more. Meanwhile, in addition to Boeing being paid substantially much for its half of the program, the company received a $300 million special, uncontracted payment in 2016 (not disclosed until 2019) to further accelerate development.
The current Starliner flight in abeyance at ISS is a pre-operational manned test mission (SpaceX's equivalent was done in May 2020). In other words, Boeing has not yet begun its six operational missions!
Tell me when SpaceX had to repeat an entire ISS test flight on their own dime because the first one was such a disaster?
Boeing charged twice as much as SpaceX,[1] but at the time it was justified because Boeing was considered the "safe" option. How times change!
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/boeing-warns-of-more-f...
SpaceX received fixed price contracts at lower prices than Boeing's and then delivered on those contracts, ferrying 7 full crews and one test crew to and from ISS with an 8th full crew about to return and a 9th soon launching, all with no additional charges.
Boeing has charged hundreds of millions above and beyond the fixed price contract and has yet to deliver and return astronauts from ISS on a single completed mission.
SpaceX absolutely has had lots of test failures - they've probably blown up more rockets then many recent players - but their cadence is super quick, and their cost per item far far lower and they seem to be able to fix stuff.
You can do some napkin math and guess that their flights for NASA are profitable, along with all the other commercial work they do. We don't know if SpaceX as a whole is profitable, but, I'd assume it's not given how heavily they're into R&D at this point. What is reasonably certain is that they likely will be profitable once they're not spending crazy amounts of money on development if their cost per kg is actually realized.
For all anyone actually knows, Elon is willing to lose a ton per launch just to gain mindshare, kill the competition, and become the only game in town. You know, the Amazon playbook.
For all anyone knows, the Boeing quotes are reasonable and SpaceX's are unsustainable. Nobody actually knows... yet so many are willing to confidently assert SpaceX is obviously cheaper.
> What is reasonably certain is that they likely will be profitable once they're not spending crazy amounts of money on development
This is a space race. The day when SpaceX no longer needs to spend "crazy amounts of money on development" may never actually come.
1. Being a viable sustainable business is a requirement for some of SpaceX's NASA and the Space Force's contracts. NASA & the Space Force have access to SpaceX's books and SpaceX has passed these audits.
2. SpaceX has very obviously been spending many billions to build Starlink and Starship and to pay >14,000 employess. SpaceX has not raised significant money for over 18 months, nor have previous raises been enough to cover their fairly obvious expenditures. That money is coming from somewhere, and process of elimination says "profits".
Now, that may just have been the case for IT infra, but, their impression was that at very least their facility had a blank check and costs didn't really matter.
Ironically, they left after getting a promotion while stiffing them on a raise. That, understandably, didn't sit well with them in the light of the rest of the situation.
They do tests on production vehicles too, e.g. the static fires that precede just about every launch, but those aren't directly comparable to the stuff they deliberately blow up to see how that happens.
Why do you believe this is the case?
Numbers?
Boeing's partially accounted for cost overruns are quite hard to read. Their meter needs a pause button.
Anyway, the relevant issue is net cost. SpaceX is currently going deeply negative unbounded. I.e. net profitable for customer launches.
I don't see the value to Boeing, or its traumatized shareholders, in continuing the losses.
Starliner isn't fully reusable, so unlikely to ever be really profitable. It is a very poor start to any wider space ambitions.
If I was Boeing's CEO, I would have confidentially got the conversation rolling too. But this is off the record, deep background. No attribution on those statements, please!
Neither is Dragon. Upper stage and service module are discarded. Only the booster and the capsule are reusable.
Dragon has a more integrated design. It has a "trunk module" which is a kind of service module lite.
So presumably, Dragon is not completely reusable (the trunk is discarded), but more reusable than Starliner in that greater functionality is preserved in the reusable capsule.
If a faulty pod could be detached, the sane EVA would be to close the docking hatch, depressurise the capsule, open its side hatch, detach the pod and put it inside the capsule in a way it wouldn't bang on everything (it'd still contaminate everything with its remaining propellants), close the hatch and let it come back to Earth with the remaining functioning propulsion pods.
Quite an adventure.
Perhaps the value is to show that they can actually stick with, and follow through, on things.
If they become known for cutting-and-running, why would anyone trust them for anything?
It will require quite a significant investment to fix the project, while Boeing is already loosing money on this fixed price contract.
The SpaceX leadership has goals that can be opaque and need not align with NASA's. Recently, in the context of X and Tesla, they've bordered on deranged and even anti-American.
If Boeing can get out of the learning phase, even as an imperfect company, it can provide a most valuable service even if its platform is nominally second best.
1. Orion -- heavier than Dragon so you need a bigger rocket, but it should be able to dock with the space station, and it's already flown uncrewed
2. DreamChaser -- Currently being developed uncrewed, but it was originally supposed to fly with crew, and Sierra says they still want to do a crewed version. It's been moved to Cape Canaveral and is supposed to fly next year.
3. Blue Origin is rumored to be back working on some sort of orbital capsule.
Capitalism doesn't work if you don't let companies that aren't delivering fail. IMO what's probably happened at Boeing's space division is that they're not able to recruit and retain top people anymore given the explosion of new space companies.
This argument only works in competitive markets. This market is more or less a natural monopoly due to the massive upfront R&D investment and learning-by-doing requirements. NASA has to constantly wrestle with this 'force' in order to keep it an oligopoly.
If it fails to do so, it should stop the experiment and go back to in-housing everything. Only with an oligopoly (or better) does the American public benefit at all from privatization.
Hope they'll continue.
Also I'm not sure if Boeing's goals are more aligned with NASA's than SpaceX's ones with those of general public - and that public would probably disapprove such things as SLS.
As for NASA "in-housing" everything, that's always been a continuum. Mercury is probably the last spacecraft that you could really say NASA designed internally that flew. Even operationally, for the last part of the Shuttle program, most all of the operations were done by the United Space Alliance.
That said, I agree that NASA has a role to play to encourage diversity and competition, and IMO they've done that with Orion, Dragon, and DreamChaser. Just because SpaceX could use some competition doesn't mean it has to be Boeing.
Maybe instead of pumping money into the husk of Boeing they could try to give some to DreamChaser?
Musk may be huffing the right wing nonsense too much, but I don't know if he has actually done anything anti-american(though supporting someone as obviously corrupt as Trump could be considered so I suppose), much of the headlines about him appear to be clickbait nonsense.
SpaceX can't do jack shit without Gov approval, so it wouldn't really matter if they had ulterior motives.
> According to DCMA officials, this is a high number of CARs [Corrective Action Requests] for a space flight system at this stage in development and reflects a recurring and degraded state of product quality control.
> Quality control issues at Michoud are largely due to the lack of a sufficient number of trained and experienced aerospace workers at Boeing
If this was to be a "jobs" program more than anything, I guess that makes sense. They just added more "jobs" but never actually bothered to train anyone. Doesn't Boeing worry how this looks on them? I would be terribly embarrassed if I was anywhere adjacent to that team's leadership.
Searching for "Principles" brigs us to this page https://www.boeing.com/sustainability/values
First item "Start with engineering excellence. A strong engineering foundation enables us to build and maintain our products with safety, quality and integrity in the factory and in service. Our customers expect it. That’s why we will always take the time to get the engineering right".
Well, they failed their very first principle, didn't they. At least don't put it right at the top, hide it down at the bottom to at least avoid being accused of hypocrisy.
Because the 0th principle is "Maximize short-term profits; disregard all other directives."
Meanwhile, SpaceX provides a solid tested path forward. Despite the single sourcing.
I see a negotiated retreat, favorable to all parties. Likely in some incremental way to minimize attention and backlash. I.e. delay, study, delay, negotiate, delay, close up shop.
Parterships operating under a legal gun don't really operate. And are not conducive to safety concerns.
It's business, nothing personal, right? Boeing can be welcome to bid on the next project - after siphoning and wasting lots of NASA's money on this one, and losing badly a solid chunk of its own because of internal problems. Why can't partnership continue?
Nobody wants Boeing to go out of business, just to pay what they owe to taxpayers.
It causes conflict between mutually valid but now competing priorities (profitability vs. contracted deliverables), demoralization, delays for analysis and consensus building around unpleasant decisions, key people moving on to better contexts, etc.
I am not talking about bad faith.
The primal cause could be failure by one party. But it could also be a market change, critical supplier loss, or other unrecognized reality surfacing.
If Boeing and NASA cut losses on Starliner, they could still work together in the future. Presumably, with both sides doing a better job of understanding their respective and joint risks.
--
Never mistake a good partnership contract, with a good partnership. More than a good contract has to come together for the latter.
And it is wise to have pre-settled terms for unwinding contracts at any time by either parties discretion, to reduce the time to correct a bad situation, and minimize the costs of mishaps and distractions for everyone.
Boeing got addicted to cutting and outsourcing to improve the stock same shit that kills every bigco
The 737-MAX saga was kinda the culmination of when profit-motivated shortcuts bump up against realities of engineering safety margins. I'm sure everyone has their campfire variation on this, tons has been written about it.
So yeah on the financial shenanery, but more culture/people-in-charge than conglomeration-megacorp per-se.
Shareholders are almost always best served by a product-first CEO who maximizes the long-term value proposition of the company.
The unfortunate reality is that those who implement policies that produce short term gain but long term costs that strike after they have moved on look better than those who actually look to the long haul.
Even if one agrees with the sentiment, it doesn't much advance the discussion, and there's ample shallow commentary on the thread already.
Boeing's problems come from the regulatory environment and congressional horse trading that created it. SpaceX doesn't have these constraints for now, but the moment SpaceX replaces Boeing all that scrutiny and backroom dealing that created Boeing will start to carry over.
It actually seems to be a systemic issue that has been affecting many American companies and slowly grown worse over the last 50 years. The management views themselves as increasingly indispensable and the lower ranks of workers as commodities subject to arbitrage, where 10 years experience at this company is somehow just as valuable as 10 years somewhere else - despite not having the same institutional knowledge and connections. We've seen this with traditional "American" companies, such as Ford and GM, and even with the more established companies in the tech sector.
This is fundamentally caused by a shift how management has operated. The emphasis on market performance over dividends and increasingly public role of business leadership. With that, executive compensation becomes another signal of a company's confidence as a tool to drive market price. Businesses compete over lavish executive perks not to find the best talent, but as conspicuous consumption to signal their value to investors.
At the same time, human resources have worked to standardize and measure workers. Trying to turn them into interchangeable cogs, because it seems cheaper to think that way. But people are not cogs and reducing people to keywords on a resume loses valuable data. This is true when apples to oranges comparisons are made between the current employees and prospective employees. The precise nature of experience and how it maps to their company is lost so current employees are undervalued in the comparison. Likewise the value of proximity and relationships between management and workers and even local governments. This has lead to many off-shoring decisions that led to unexpected losses in the medium term, some of which were ultimately rolled back.
You not liking a company doesn't mean the federal government gets to nuke it from orbit...
[2] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015006391265&vi...
That's some high-grade fantasy...
The US has invaded countries for less.
Do you have anything to share with the class?
Using that power requires political support from the legislature and courts, I don't think we're there today, but if for example a critical fighter jet (or some other high visibility project) went south, boeing has been shitting the bed hard enough to support federal intervention.
If anything, it seems their defense projects are the most competent side of present-day Boeing.
That said, everyone the US would rather not know about does probably does.
The civilian side of Boeing almost doesn't even need to exist.
So we're going to lambast the entire company because one arm has stumbled with two projects recently... ?
Perhaps we should nationalize and shut down Google because Gemini hasn't turned out to be that great.
I think you meant that sarcastically, in which case - Welcome to Hacker News!
And as for the military side of thing, you wouldn't believe the stories I've heard about that. Between the hanger queens they sold and Cold War superiority stuff they're still trying to sell...If they weren't notionally an "American" company then I doubt they'd still be in business.
That's not an unfortunate development at all. The decision to not risk human lives is based on what's already happened, it's not a new happening. If Starliner comes back successfully/safely, that will be a plus, and if it doesn't, that will be a new minus.
Some more discussion:
NASA's Starliner decision was the right one, but it's a crushing blow for Boeing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41346778
Boeing employees 'humiliated' that upstart rival SpaceX will rescue astronauts
I know which one I'd rather get into.
So here we are where an 8 day mission turns into a 6 month mission because NASA (via SpaceX )doesn't have a backup? How did that happen?
It's also worth noting that Crew Dragon can be configured for 6 passengers. NASA uses a 4 passenger configuration because there's simply no need for a 6 person configuration... except for now.
It may actually end up being cheaper for Boeing to simply return the money (or negotiate a partial return) and throw up the white flag. Boeing is in such a terrible state. It's simply coasting on earlier successes and airlines being locked in to the 737 type rating.
There is no emergency here. There's no need to scramble anything so they will ride home on February having spent 8 months up sharing a Dragon ride down with a crew that spent 6 months up. No big deal. The ISS crew appreciates the extra help around the shop right now. Butch and Suni want to be in space -- that's why they're astronauts, so they're not suffering. The only people suffering are their families and Boeing stockholders.
Dragon cannot be configured with 6 seats. The 7 seat configuration was rejected by NASA because of g-forces and the vehicles are now solidly 4 seaters and you certainly can't add two more seats to the Crew Dragon that's already up there so you wait on the next one to arrive on its regular schedule minus two of its crew so Suni and Butch can use those seats. Also, they need to send up Dragon suits as the Starliner suits can't be plugged into Dragon so even if they sat on the floor of the already up there Dragon for the ride home, they still couldn't jack in and that's only going to happen if there's a genuine emergency -- which there is not.
You make a lot of seemingly confident, but wrong assertions here. I suggest moderating that certainty until you know more about the subject.
Aren't there some questions about its capabilities because they seemed unable to do certain unmanned tests and there was speculation that they may have removed some of the autonomous software capabilities.
Has this been disproven?
It cannot currently get back on its own, but the capability exists. It's a software fix. They will try, which might even work. If it does it might even salvage the project. If it doesn't...
That's...a long way away.
But yeah just keeps pointing to the same issue: pervasive culture problems. Can't fix that by cancelling projects
I wonder if Boeing has the resources to keep going until they fix themselves.