Boeing Starliner, leaving its crew behind, lands in New Mexico
cbsnews.com
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Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then? Is Boeing genuinely this bad?
Not to sound too cliched, but we put a man on the moon. We put a CAR on the moon. Why can't the successors of those same companies be trusted to retrieve two people from LEO?
First a company builds good products to build a band, then sells the brand.
I think SpaceX has been doing a great job of that, with Crew Dragon.
> Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then?
Yes, but also fewer options. This is the first time NASA has ever had a choice between two completely different American spacecraft to return crew on. It is like if you own two cars, and one is having mechanical problems, so you decide to take the more reliable one for a long trip; but if you only own one car, you would just have risked it with your only car, since you don't have much choice
> Is Boeing genuinely this bad?
Boeing has really struggled in making the cultural transition from old style cost-plus government contracting – in which cost overruns are charged to the taxpayer – to the new world of fixed price contracts. Not just with NASA, also with Pentagon projects such as the KC-46 aerial refuelling tanker.
By contrast, SpaceX is a much younger company, so it never had that cost-plus culture. Plus, it has the advantage of being privately held – so no stock market to satisfy – and investors who are confident in its long-term prospects, so it isn't afraid to lose money on contracts in the short-term, expecting to make it back in the longer-run. By contrast, Boeing is tempted to cut corners in the development process to limit their losses on the contract.
According to the rumour mill, part of how this whole fiasco happened: Boeing gave Aerojet Rocketdyne incorrect requirements specs for the thrusters. Boeing then sent Aerojet updated specs, but Aerojet refused to redesign the thrusters according to the new specs unless it was paid more by Boeing, which Boeing didn't want to do. So instead Boeing just decided to risk it with the incorrectly designed thrusters. They cooked up some analysis to justify that doing so was safe, but obviously that analysis was wrong.
> Did we have a higher risk tolerance back then?
NASA lost enough people during their "higher risk tolerance" epoch that they don't want to go through it again. Challenger and Columbia were such huge traumas each time...
The contractual requirement was for max 1-in-1000 probability of loss of crew on re-entry.
Let's suppose, for the sake of the argument, that due to these thruster issues, the actual probability had increased to 1-in-100.
In that scenario, it is totally expected that Starliner made it back to earth in one piece – there was a 99% chance it would happen. Yet simultaneously, 1% is 10 times riskier than 0.1%, and NASA absolutely made the right call in not putting astronauts on it when they had the choice.
The real issue, apparently, is NASA wasn't even confident in calculating that probability, since there were aspects of how the thrusters were behaving which nobody could explain. Although ground-based testing replicated some similar issues, the issues reproduced on the ground had some key differences from those occurring in space, and nobody had a convincing explanation for the differences.
Due to the flawed design, Boeing was pushing components past their certified thermal limits. And how they behave when you do that isn't well understood, because the industry standard approach is to not do that. Due to safety margins, you can get away with it to an extent – but exactly how far you can get away with it, and how exactly they will fail when they eventually do – those aren't questions people have a lot of experience in answering.
How is this old style? At least in software development / IT-consulting in Europe cost plus is done all the time now, since there were too many legal battles about fixed price not being finished according to spec.
For NASA, it is old style: why offer cost-plus contracting when companies like SpaceX are willing to accept a firm fixed price contract and actually deliver on it?
There is no way that SpaceX is making a profit on their lunar lander contract (Starship HLS). But SpaceX doesn’t care because they are betting the company on Starship and returning humans to the moon after over 50 years is an amazing opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities of their platform to the world. Boeing isn’t betting the company on a spaceship. Taking a multi-billion dollar loss on a contract today and hoping you’ll make it back somehow some years down the track is not the Boeing way - at least not nowadays
> since there were too many legal battles about fixed price not being finished according to spec.
Maybe in space it helps to have clearly defined success criteria - either it gets there and back in one piece, or it doesn’t. In software the criteria for success are often a lot less clear.
So in essence SpaceX is subsidizing the government and taxpayer, while the usual rhetoric is that SpaceX is getting government subsidies, not sure why folks cannot understand the different between a government contract to deliver something and a subsidy.
The fact is, space development used to be done on a cost-plus basis (old style) and is now moving strongly to a fixed cost basis (the current facts of life).
https://qz.com/elon-musks-spacex-and-tesla-get-far-more-gove....
Is that not “cost-plus?”
No it is not. From wiki:
> A cost-plus contract, also termed a cost plus contract, is a contract such that a contractor is paid for all of its allowed expenses, plus additional payment to allow for risk and incentive sharing.
Spacex has received money over the last 20 years because they were awarded different contracts and they provided different services to the government.
From re-supplying the ISS, to launching satellites, to taking people to orbit.
SpaceX received over US$15 billion in US federal government contracts, but the vast majority (maybe even all?) of them were firm fixed price. I’m not aware that SpaceX has any cost-plus federal contracts; Boeing has multiple cost-plus contracts with NASA (not Starliner; contracts like SLS Core Stage, EUS, ISS engineering support) and many more with the Pentagon. Cost-plus is the norm for Boeing and firm fixed price is the exception; for SpaceX, firm fixed price is the norm.
It seems rather reminiscent of their other problems of doing a hack on the 737 Max which caused the crashes and ignoring safety inspections which caused the panel to blow out.
It's kind of interesting if you see Musk talk about the rockets design it's evident he pretty much understands it all and controls the money and so is able to make sensible decisions to do this, don't do that - see this 2021 vid for example https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw . With Boeing you get the impression you don't really have that and you have an accountant type saying your budget for this is $x without undertanding they engineering they are paying for.
> "Boeing and Rocketdyne more or less hated one another," one person involved in the test told Ars. "Everyone was in super-defensive mode even before this happened. It had been classified as a risk, but the two sides weren’t talking openly and honestly about it."
> What was the source of the animosity? After Boeing selected Rocketdyne, according to sources, it asked for changes to some system specifications. This prompted Rocketdyne to ask for a change order fee, as is customary in government contracts. That infuriated Boeing, which thought it had a partnership with Rocketdyne, but the latter company saw itself as a contractor. As a result, the Boeing and Rocketdyne teams were effectively walled off from one another and did not iterate together toward a more effective propulsion system.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/the-surprise-is-not-th...
We can still redo it, but it is fairly complicated to restore the whole industrial base to match the past 1:1.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
What’s missing is we need better cultures. I’ve been in engineering cultures that are dominated by management desires to cut costs and deliver on schedule. Engineering excellence is never considered valuable, but it will be the only thing that makes you successful.
Boeing lost its culture of engineering excellence
> “Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company.
[1] https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2024/03/29/what-boeing-did-...
I wonder if the fear suppressed the natural behavior of Jim McNerney and others, keeping them from sowing division within the company because of the perceived danger from outside?
Here are some other examples, where today these might sound like an excuse for aggressive business behavior, instead of a unifying mantra --
Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive"
Dick Cheney, "Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose."
(Yes, yes, he's outing himself as unprincipled; I'm quoting him intentionally since people were still being people all throughout; does this show the larger populace wide zeitgeist?)
John F. Kennedy, "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
I think it's interesting how the same thought can sound different when my mind is set in different contexts.
This is not the first time something has not gone according to plan. Thankfully nobody died. Let's not look at the past through rose-colored glasses, and assume that things have gotten worse. Spaceflight has been full of mistakes from the start.
> During the 12.6-minute-long powered descent, there were a total of five unexpected computer alarms. These alarms all indicated that Eagle’s computer system was overloaded, but in each case, Mission Control concluded that it was safe to continue the landing. The last of these alarms occurred less than three minutes before landing, when the crew was less than 500 meters above the surface. Because of the navigation error, the computer was guiding the spacecraft towards an unsafe touchdown point in the rugged, boulder-filled ejecta field surrounding West Crater. Armstrong took manual control and flew to a safe landing spot beyond the crater. At 3:17 PM CDT, he announced their safe landing, “Houston, Tranquility Base. The Eagle has landed.” At the time of landing, Mission Control thought that the spacecraft had just 17 seconds of fuel left in the descent stage. However, post mission analysis showed that sloshing in the fuel tank during Armstrong’s search for a safe landing site caused the fuel gauge to give an inaccurate reading. Eagle actually had about 45 seconds of fuel left when it touched down.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_11
Apollo 13 had some very serious life-threatening problems, but almost crashing into the Moon was not one of them.
Two words: flight heritage.
Successful concepts are very often reused. For example, heat shields, parachute landings, sea landings, air bags for landings on hard land, etc.
Now, let me try to explain this in something similar: cars.
Cars are all pretty much the same. They have a steering wheel, 4 tires, transmission, engine, etc. The parts all do the same thing in different cars, but we don't always use the same engine, or the same tires, or the same frame for every car.
After making cars for so long, why do car companies still have recalls?
New models of cars usually either start from scratch or start based on a different vehicle already in production (new model year). But if you're starting from scratch, you've lost all the "little fixes" that go into making a car good. Like the difference from a new model EV car to a Toyota Corolla that's been in production for basically 10 years has a very different failure/recall rate. After many years of producing the same car, you fix all the little things and get your supply chains working well.
Now back to space ships. It's the same thing. You have made a new capsule and although the concepts are the same, think about all the little things: wiring, plumbing, controls, software. These are all new and basically untested. They lack "flight heritage" (proven working in space).
For the question as why can't we make Apollo ships or Saturn V's anymore, a lot of plans and drawings were lost. Key people making decisions, testing, or even building parts on an assembly line weren't there. Companies making specialized parts folded or went under, or just stopped making those parts.
Sometimes these can be small issues. Like for the Mars Climate Orbiter there was a problem where two different companies thought they were using the same units when they were not. Or when an accelerometer was installed backward on a different ship, making the chute not deploy.
Now compare this to the Soyuz, which is more like a Toyota Corolla of space ships. It's not the fanciest or has the most space or efficiency, but it has a lot of flight heritage and operational history. And from there, you can make small changes relatively safely.
This is true for all companies making space ships. Really it comes down to how well you test things and a good helping of luck on getting it to work the first time, or fixing it quickly.
We need more mass to orbit, more time on orbit, larger spacecraft volumes, less expensive mass-to-orbit, and less toxic materials in order to do the new missions that we'd like to do.
This is also the reason massive software rewrites often fail; you rebuild the general gist quite fast, nice code, lovely interfaces etc but it will have a trillion bugs which come from decades of adding an exception here, adding one there etc. So now you have a beautiful albeit worthless product. And often these get scrapped: I know of some tax system rewrites from mainframe to modern code that costed 10s of millions and were scrapped, multiple times for this reason.
"Know-how rot" is a thing. Actual people involved are literally dying off, and knowledge is being lost. It could have been a peak, the Apollo program.-
> The most obvious reason why productivity remained high after World War II, despite the end of the military emergency is that technological change does not regress. People do not forget. Once progress is made, no matter under what circumstances, it is permanent.
Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Chapter 16, p. 550.
Emphasis in original.
The best counterexample is the apocryphal quote, since adopted by many programmers: "When I wrote that passage, there were two who understood it.—God and myself. Now, alas, God alone understands it!"
<https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/24/god-knows/>
I've certainly been in that circumstance with my own code multiple times, as well as at organisations which no longer knew why, or how, certain things were done.
And people, cultures, do forget. The whole notion of "lost wisdom" or "forgotten knowdge" is legion (though unfortunately neither seems to have a Wikipedia article yet which I can conveniently cite here).
Psychology has the notion however of a "forgetting curve", based on the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus, and I'm pretty sure that there's a similar notion which applies at a cultural and/or social level:
<https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/24/god-knows/>
A related concept, and one that's given me pause for thought for some time, has been what the minimum sufficient level of continuation of cultural knowledge is, especially given the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge. The former is easy to codify and transmit via text or speech, the latter is hard to express, and requires direct experience, personal training, or otherwise greater-than-verbal or greater-than-textual instruction. "You can't learn to swim from a book" is one expression of this.[1] In a technological society which becomes ever more specialised, at what point is there no longer sufficient transmission of a concept for it to be considered still "remembered"? How many crafts today have only a single practitioner? Perhaps retired?
(I've posted previously about the art of scientific glass-blowing, which seems headed down this forgetting path.)
________________________________
Notes:
1. Though of course there are exceptions. Theodor Kaluza taught himself to swim aged thirty from a book: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Kaluza#Personal_life>.
Even if the drawings are there, they are often not as good as you may hope. It’s not uncommon to have missing specs, part numbers etc. Modern engineers have to fill in the gaps and sometimes build one-off small parts when the OEM is no longer in business (or no longer interested in building small quantities of some part)
> After extensive tests and analyses, Boeing engineers concluded the helium leaks were the result of slightly degraded seals exposed to toxic propellants over an extended period....
> The thruster problem, testing indicated, was caused by high temperatures that, in turn, caused internal Teflon seals to deform in poppet valves, restricting the flow of fuel.
> The high temperatures, the engineers concluded, were largely the result of manual flight control tests that caused the jets to fire hundreds of times in rapid-fire fashion while the craft was oriented so those same jets were in direct sunlight for an extended period.
Look at the last 5 decades of SW. Why aren’t we in an iterative utopia already?
Software from 50 or 30 years ago couldn't solve some of the problems current software is solving because the hardware wasn't powerful enough. Example: we had neural networks theory and a little practice but without the current hardware we could not work on them and advance the theory. Could we be confident that LLM could be as good as they are? We could not.
However let's go back 20 years or maybe 30 and more mundane tasks like word processing and spreadsheet were already a solved. We needed only to port them to newer versions of the OS. A Word from around 2000 would be OK for most tasks today.
>Flynn attributed this increase to better nutrition. Flynn continued his work and other scientists followed suit until they all noticed that children born in 1975 reached 'peak IQ' and average intelligence had been dropping ever since. This is called the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'.
Basically an IQ test, if you're lucky to never have been subjected to one, is in fact multiple different tests (for me it was either 4 or five, I don't remember, I know I scored under the mean in the temporal-spatial test, barely above in the verbal, and way above in at least 2 others). It's a 'proxy' for intelligence but, but an incomplete one, and different tests exists. According to Flynn (2012), the gains were mostly with performance-based mesures, and the gains in verbal tests (which highlight education, and imho, culture) were low or negative. The reverse-Flynn could very well be caused by a decline in crystallized intelligence (general knowledge subtest, vocabulary/verbal subtests), while performance-based tests (logic, adaptibility, spatial vision) plateau or stopped increasing. In any case, we should avoid making broad claims about IQ: tests aren't _really_ standardized, vary between countries (and psychologists tbh) and are a very complex subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
you have to pretend to be stupid, otherwise the bogeyman gonna come for you
it really is mind boggling, but here we are, we have arrived into the zone of full retardedness in 2024
youtube is full with "look how idiot I am, although I serviced this nuclear reactor, but still..." kinda videos:
I spent 55 days creating this "whatever"
I broke my new ferrari next day, that I spent 200 days repairing
...
and the list goes on
maybe the aliens are riled up that they will lose control over Earth, or smth like that, and they now beam the full retard signal :D
All these changes mean, pretty much, that we need a new capsule (or more radical design, e.g. Starship).
And if 50 years ago you mean the Shuttle, then that thing killed 2 crews. Not a shining beacon to emulate.
Glad it made it down in one piece, hopefully they'll be able to troubleshoot the problems better because of that.
Over on Slashdot, it was reported that the likely cause was: a “Teflon seal in a valve known as a ‘poppet’ expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters, significantly constraining the flow of the oxidizer”.
As Musk’s SpaceX team has stated repeatedly, every failure provides data for future success. At least they have a good idea as to why the thrusters failed, and the design can probably be modified and retested in a couple of uncrewed launches in 2025 or 2026.
The thrusters can be fixed. The question is whether Boeing can fix its culture.
I get that prior to the trip, the risk of failure was high enough to not make that call.
*landed safely