NASA freezes Starliner missions
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
For the fall/winter 2025 rotation they're going to plan with it being a Crew Dragon flight for now, subject to change depending on how Starliner's fixes go.
They also somewhat misleadingly say that NASA will also rely on Soyuz because of Starliner's unavailability, but that's just about the seat swap arrangement which helps to ensure that both the US and Russia can maintain a continuous presence if either side's vehicles have trouble. IIRC the agreement is expiring and NASA's interested in extending it, but Roscosmos hasn't agreed yet. I say misleading because I think they intended to extend that agreement regardless of Starliner's status.
I think this is a soft cancellation of Starliner. System certification is indefinitely paused.
No. The ISS is decommissioned in 2030 and Boeing is losing money on the programme. It makes sense for nobody to continue this charade.
The bigger question will be whether it's better for Boeing to take the relatively low cost option of fixing the propulsion system which to some extent is their third party supplier's issue, in a funding environment where operating actual missions is more favourably funded than R&D, or whether that's sunk cost fallacy when SpaceX is clearly ahead of them.
For the ISS? Based on what? It’s most likely to remain where it is.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-...
It’s possible, not probable.
It would take an act of the Congress to keep the ISS funded. There is zero indication that status quo will change nor a strong constituency for changing it.
In response to your other point, I am very skeptical of microgravity experiments becoming a big industry. I think NASA (as an organization, I'm not talking about individuals in NASA) is mostly interested in continuing human space flight simply because it keeps the public interested in space, which makes NASA's funding more secure.
Agree. That’s why Starliner should be killed. To open those resources to someone who actually intends to compete with SpaceX.
We see similar situation in automotive. Other companies do allow to keep Tesla in check, so there's less opportunity to force "Cybertrucks" onto the market as the only option.
No, they don’t. Starliner is a paper competitor. The money NASA sends it ensure SpaceX maintains a practical monopoly.
Boeing is the “competitor” everyone wishes for. Sucking up the oxygen in the room a real competitor might need while doing absolutely nothing to contest your market share.
> they've built the vehicle with no drama
Late to launch, billions over budget and strands its astronauts but has a CEO you can’t remember because their planes kept falling apart is a weird way to spell “no drama.”
Starliner does not even attempt to compete on the commercial market, it has a fixed number of Atlas V's stored away for the NASA contract, and then someone will have to cough up money to try to put it on another rocket.
So, they aren't even in the market, let alone doing anything to even appear to compete.
Despite Musk's… what, breakdown? Radicalisation? Temper tantrums? Whatever that is, SpaceX is still astoundingly fast at both launching stuff to orbit and also making new and better rockets than almost everyone else on the planet combined.
I'd like to see the money that was given to Boeing, instead given to another space startup that might do something interesting.
Spin-launch, perhaps.
Problem is, quite a lot of the weird stuff looks like defections in the IPD sense.
People buying into that stuff are morons, but useful to the republican party all the same.
What you describe is still a defection in the iterated prisoners' dilemma sense.
If so, she's a miracle worker given all the rest of what we're seeing.
That said, the way he talks about the rockets? Sure, he's ambitious, but he does seem to act like he recognises the laws of physics don't respond to "screw the rules I have money".
[...]
>no drama
Come again?
There are no competitors that are even remotely close to competing with SpaceX and Boeing without first spending tens of billions of dollars like SpaceX and Boeing have done.
Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?
Then it killed 7 astronauts.
Then it worked again they said.
Then 7 more died.
> Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?
Well that's just a straight up lie.
Due to their nature they're sensitive and easy to compromise. Which is also why NASA knew from day 1 that icing was going to be a huge issue on the shuttle. They were retrofitting the vehicle, the launch platform and even the software to reduce heat shield risks very early on.
Some of their earliest flights included EVA experiments where the astronauts translated themselves to the thermal tiles, did inspections, and even did mock repairs to test the feasibility of the idea and of the quality of the adhesives in near total vacuum.
After the final accident they started doing something they could have and should have been doing since the beginning. That was simply taking up a camera that could be attached to the Canadarm, swung "underneath" the shuttle, and used to take a comprehensive survey of the thermal management system immediately on orbit.
In any case, point is, human rated space flight will always require this level of attention to detail and ongoing effort to derisk every possible aspect of every mission performed. NASA management did an outright terrible job at this. From incentivizing the wrong behavior, falling in love with paper targets, and completely failing to audit their own internal risk estimations for errors.
First shuttle launch, Columbia STS-1 12 April 1981.[0]
The Canadarm was first tested in orbit in 1981, on Space Shuttle Columbia's STS-2 mission [1] (12 November 1981)
So, not exactly since the beginning
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_missions
They didn't call it "flying the arm" for nothing:
https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-sts077-307-017-19-29-may-1...
In any case, STS-1 was an insane test flight, and had it's own share of thermal tile problems.
> Well that's just a straight up lie.
I'm guessing they're confusing the expected, catastrophic explosive "failures" on experimental Starship prototypes with payload-carrying F9/FH flights.
That kid who got 1% on his test? He passed, if you redefine the threshold for passing to mean something that everyone else would consider a failure.
1. They were not unexpected. They very very clearly communicated months ahead.
2. "Catastrophic" is a bit much too, as they were indeed expected and planned for. In fact, the biggest failure in the Starship development was that the rocket did NOT explode fast enough once.
3. "Failures". Well.. no. These are prototypes intended to learn from. Experiments if you will. A scientist that never has a negative result is a fraud. Same here.
How do you know how serious the issue was?
NASA wasn’t saying that they know for certain that the Starliner will have a catastrophe on the way back. What they said is that they cannot be certain that the probability of it having a catastrophe is lower than some decision threshold.
Using the russian roulette as an analogy NASA has a revolver with a barel for a million bullets, and they decided they are fine to pull the trigger against the astronauts heads if there are less than 5 bullets in it. But due to nobody really understanding the mechanism of previous anomalies they don’t know how many bullets there are in the barrel. There might be six or more so they are not willing to pull the trigger. (The number of bullets, and the number of chambers is merelly illustrative. I don’t know what is the real number NASA uses.)
Was trying to put this 1/500 number into perspective for myself. It sounds like it is rougly similar to the mortality of having appendicites. [1]
1: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstrac...
Therefore the decision to not use it until the causes for all such malfunctions are understood was completely justified.
Problem: "one of the Starliner’s reaction control system (RCS) thrusters did not function".
Why it was not serious: "there are plenty of backup RCS thrusters".
Even if the redundancy ensured a successful return, the causes must be understood, because otherwise at a future return more than one thruster could malfunction and the redundancy may be insufficient.
There has been one, a second stage that failed to relight the engine due to a sensor issue that was quickly fixed. Since then they have had more successful launches than most companies fly in entire years. The other failures were:
- A booster that failed to land after the most flights any booster in the fleet has had, a problem only SpaceX is capable of having right now
- A second stage where the engine shutdown during a deorbit burn was a few milliseconds later than expected.
On the other hand, the "minor issue" on Starliner had Boeing burning hundreds of millions of dollars trying to replicate the issue on the ground, after so many years of waterfall-style development.
What?
We all make mistakes, but some mistakes are being made due to shoddy work. It was thankfully not a capsule destroying mistake, but on something high stake such as a human rated capsule, shoddy works shouldn't be tolerated, especially with corner cutting such as removing entire capability in software.
We don't know if it was serious or not. If Starliner managed to land this time, will it be able to do it repeatedly, or it was just luck this time?
If we are trying to deduce seriousness of the issue from data, then one point of data is too low. Boeing needs to launch a few dozens more of test flights to gather the data needed for this kind of reasoning. But if we are relying on causal reasoning, then we have no clear understanding of causes, Boeing engineers are still unable to explain how their thrusters fail exactly, and what they could do to make them robust.
This in fact is a shining vindication of Musk's "Waste metal, not time." philosophy.
Boeing is operating in the old school "Spend lots of time planning, go for a hole in one." philosophy, so if they proceed to fail they need to spend lots of more time planning and going for more hole in ones to demonstrate sufficient statistics.
SpaceX? They wasted metal instead of time and got statistics out with sheer numbers before Boeing even got a number, because the only way you get numbers is by getting numbers.
Boeing should be fired and ideally bankrupted, and everyone else needs to get with the times so they don't become the next Boeing.
Consider that just the Apollo programme had twenty one (21) launches in a span of about just 8 years before Apollo 11 landed the first men on the Moon.
Gemini had twelve (12) launches in a span of just 2 years, and Mercury had twenty six (26) launches in a span of just 4 years.
Contrast 4 launches of N1, 6 launches of Voskhod, and 13 launches of Vostok from records we know of.
If anything, Musk should waste more metal.
That’s why it’s critical to maintain a regulatory environment and supportive infrastructure so that scrappy innovative new competitors can rise up. To do that, the dead standing wood needs to be felled.
Despite Boeing doing an admirable job of falling down on its own, it would probably still be useful to not keep feeding the decay.
The aviation industry is seeing massive growth in new Asian markets, their only competition has a massive backlog and STILL Boeing is sinking.
God knows if they could survive an actual recession.
You can’t innovate when you have to justify every cost. That’s not how innovation works, and in Boeing, engineering was a profit center… but leadership thought Boeing was a manufacturing company, and engineering was a cost center.
So, You cut corners to make manufacturing cheaper, stop innovating, try to fix aerodynamics problems with software, try to pretend like the big changes you made aren’t, underplay the need for training pilots on what are substantially new aircraft because you don’t want to admit they are actually a lot different than the good selling previous models, etc.
All just bean counter shenanigans instead of focusing on what Boeing was actually great at: delivering value through superior engineering.
So, all the engineers that actually wanted to engineer left to do interesting things, and you’re left with the ones that want to do as little as possible, along with the bean counters that want to minimise ‘spensive stuff like actually innovative projects.
At this point it’s almost like a zombie brand, I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing boeing branded Chinese dollar store crap any day now.
Poor leadership will corrode anything including great workers who feel like they can’t get anything done.
What more could you want?
> downward spiral
Oh come on.
What would you expect them to do differently under this proposed scenario?
We all know why America (and the Chinese) want to go to Mars and it ain't for science.
I doubt Boeing could ever be that competition though.
Everyone knows Starliner is as good as dead. It's what Boeing wants even, since Starliner is a huge money pit.
The only ones propping up this continued "delay" fiction are the NASA and Boeing PR departments.
Letting Boeing walk away from a fixed price contract because they screwed up is going to lead to lots of future low-ball fixed-price “whoops, sorry” issues. Plusfrom an engineering standpoint, Boeing should fix it to prove their competency for future contracts
There is an important point here that needs to be emphasized. To fix starliner you need to build up personnel familiar with construction, operations, and build/test enough hardware to iterate kinks. This requires investment that Boeing being a publicly traded company cannot do for free (or they will get sued) and NASA is unlikely to pay them to do it. So this is catch 22, they will fix current issues, but given how long it will take, there is a high chance of causing new issues due to loss of essential personnel who would know how to integrate fixes with existing design constraints... so unfortunately charade characterization fits.
Especially when your stock price has returned back to where it was before a lot of divestment started.
Same mentality with their civil aviation business. Their failure to invest in the core of the company (making great planes) has led to spectacular - and deadly - failure.
The main reason they are still an important player in civil aviation is because Airbus can't make planes fast enough.
Even though I'm not an elon fan, pretending to not notice for political reasons (not to mention the insane halving of launches at Vandenberg AFB) is completely insane and damaging to our country.
Stop apologizing for a company that let their standards slip and endangered the lives of multiple astronauts not to mention wasting billions of tax payer dollars.
It's something I constantly wonder about, I strongly believe we should be taxing the absolute shit out of people and working hard to flatten society, but I also worry that we need insane people in power sometimes to get stuff done. Starship (hell, even F9) is an astonishing achievement and there's zero chance that innovation would be possible anywhere except SpaceX or another entity with very strong leadership (Valve or Steve Jobs' Apple if they made rockets)
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-f...
>SpaceX employees say they are relieved Elon Musk is focused on Twitter because there is a calmer work environment at the rocket company
He sounds like that kind of boss we have all had where you actively avoid interacting with him because his ideas will be stupid and get your project off track. I think SpaceX succeeds despite having to deal with current Elon.
There’s also essentially zero chance his organizations succeed in spite of him. This is just wishful ignorance.
But given the sheer number of projects at the companies he runs I don't find it hard to believe that he is largely not responsible for the technical successes. Again, I have no evidence for it, but it would not be hard to believe. Do you have anything other than faith for that statement?
We also have pretty detailed books on the history of SpaceX, written from employee interviews, which also indicate that Musk is fairly hands on. There's also this tweet from the designer of the Merlin rocket engine that is usually thrown around when these kinds of claims are made: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/15am9pl/t...
Isn't BYD a success?
Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, after revolutionizing e-commerce with Amazon.
Two years later, Elon Musk launched SpaceX in 2002, which has since surged ahead of Blue Origin.
Is that enough evidence?
He's not doing the nitty gritty engineering day-to-day, but he understands enough to ask the right questions, give his teams permission to try ideas that seem crazy at first, and sometimes come up with those ideas himself (e.x. supposedly catching Starship with "chopsticks" was his idea).
You have no idea what the future of Tesla is and it isn't cars....
https://qz.com/tesla-cybertruck-ford-f150-lightning-electric...
SpaceX is doing well because of Gwynne Shotwell the COO. She's been able to keep Elon out of the weeds and basically at arms length. Let's not forget Tom Mueller who basically created the entire propulsion platform.
When Elon gets involved he makes silly things like the Cybertruck. Completely useless, poorly engineered, and overpriced garbage.
I'm very curious about this mentality.. Do you beleive that meritocracy leads to better outcomes? Why do you think that the government is better positioned to allocate resources than the people who made the money?
If Elon would have been "Taxed the absolute shit out of" after his sell of Zip 2, he wouldn't have founded paypal. too much tax on the paypal sell, he couldn't invest in Tesla or start SpaceX.
Do you believe that being rich implies merit? I would argue most exceptionally wealthy people are likely to be at or above average intelligence, but the unifying element is luck. Being in the right place at the right time with the right amount of money, and knowing the right people to bring it together.
Very few people have the means to even try to build SpaceX, so it’s hard to say how the average person measures up.
> Why do you think that the government is better positioned to allocate resources than the people who made the money?
I don’t, but I do think letting private citizens fling around “space program” quantities of money is going to end poorly. The state depends on the monopoly on violence to function, and every day we move closer to that monopoly only existing because rich private citizens choose to allow it.
Building a Rods From God platform is not out of Elons reach. I don’t think he would do it, but the potential is concerning to say the least. It would be better to reign that in before it becomes a problem than to wait until it is a problem.
Smart people make their own luck. You don't get lucky posting on the internet.
> Very few people have the means to even try to build SpaceX
Musk didn't either - he created a series of companies, each one financed by the success of the previous one.
To some degree, yes. You don't get rich by being incompetent, and even if you get a headstart with an inheritance or endowment you're still going to end up broke if you can't keep making money.
>the unifying element is luck. Being in the right place at the right time with the right amount of money, and knowing the right people to bring it together.
In Japan we say that luck is just another element of your abilities. We also like saying that you don't wait for miracles, you make them yourself.
Considering that Japanese society has a fairly unambitious culture, them saying that should tell you something.
>every day we move closer to that monopoly only existing because rich private citizens choose to allow it.
The US government exists at the pleasure of the people, the US military serves in our interests at our pleasure. Government of the people, by the people, for the people as President Abraham Lincoln once said.
Americans choosing to allow the US government is the system working exactly as intended.
Calling the system of lobbied-for preferences and geographic quotas built into the US immigration system "meritocracy" is...amusing.
Society devolves to status hierarchies, and the people who climb those most successfully are narcissists and sociopaths.
So there's a default assumption that you have to be that kind of crazy, glib, abusive, exploitative, bullshitter/charlatan to do remarkable things.
Occasionally you get someone who is both narcissistic and exceptionally talented. They get shit done, but they leave a trail of human wreckage behind them.
Sometimes - often - it eventually turns out that it isn't even the right shit.
Meanwhile talent that lacks that narcissistic edge is overlooked and sidelined.
This is cripplingly inefficient, because so much ability is just wasted.
And it's very literally disastrous, because crazy people can't be trusted to have a sane relationship with the physical world or with other humans.
So the problem is engineering effective hierarchies which are reality-based, have enough incentive to reward drive and talent, but exclude - or at least strongly constrain - unhealthy and toxic Cluster B types.
Easy, isn't it?
Musk has not left a trail of human wreckage behind.
So for that amount of money, you just killed the startup economy and killed all grand vision projects like SpaceX. Nothing gets off the ground.
Sounds very much like the socialist paradise I live in called Europe. Where the smartest most ambitious people leave for the US.
In not too many years, the light of human ingenuity will be extinguished. Elon is just in a race against time.
This is a problem statement not a solution. If the stat above is true, then there is obviously something very wrong with that system if they still can't out innovate us.
Modern semiconductor manufacture requires tech from the entire world. China is aiming to replicate pretty much all of it because of sanctions.
While the US and Europe are killing themselves with regulation and DEI, China has been rapidly developing every year and eventually the US is going to get a rude awakening.
Hell, let’s do a true meritocracy. Zero inheritance, zero. High quality public schools for all, homeschooling and private schools made illegal. Public and free health insurance, no private options. Keep that line of thought and you might get close to an actual meritocracy.
Yes.
For example, I've missed at least 4 opportunities to become a billionaire, because I was too stupid to see the obvious in front of my face.
I am the son of a mid-level Air Force officer, and attended public schools. After he passed I sorted through his tax records, and discovered that I made more money my first job out of college than he was making at the time at the end of his career.
It might not be, mainly because it's corrupt. Secondarily, because popular causes are not always wise. On the flip side though, in theory, government works on consensus, and making money is not the same as merit. Oftentimes, making a lot of money means you took the low road and stole it from a worthy cause, like treating your employees or customers fairly and not swindling them.
People can be corrupt too - musk redirected Tesla resources to build his glass house
P.S. the citizens united ruling in the US opened the floodgates for political corruption on a scale not previously possible. It's been talked about but remains unresolved.
I think we should loosen up those rules so they can, but that does mean some people who aren't rich or sophisticated will lose their money on ill-advised startup investments.
We wouldn't have SpaceX or Tesla with that policy.
> I genuinely believe SpaceX wouldn't be achieving nearly what it is without him
It simply wouldn't have existed without him and the conventional wisdom would instead be that what he's accomplished is impossible.
> insane people
Musk is the sane one. It's the rest of us that are insane.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man," by George Bernard Shaw.
Neither you nor I have no idea what we’d have or wouldn’t have under a completely different set of policies.
So the homeless opiate addict living under a city bypass is better off than King Henry VIII?
Someone should tell them.
> opiate addict
Indeed, we don’t have the technology to save people from themselves, yet. I am sure kings of old didn’t either and addicts of their time fared even worse.
> Indeed, we don’t have the technology to save people from themselves, yet.
The plight of the poorest in today’s societies is far more of a social and political issue than a technological one. An issue America is particularly bad on, despite all its affluence.
It isn't enough to have resources in the ground. They are worth zero until extracted and turned into products and services. And for that you need technology, companies and entrepreneurs.
When you tax "the shit out of rich people" that's what you lose. You can do it exactly one time - next time you won't have what to tax.
Many other socialist experiments happened in the world during the last 100 years. Take your pick - they all failed miserably compared to the amazing increase in prosperity of the USA.
> The USA wouldn't suddenly turn into Venezuela
I never said that, please re-read my post.
> Netherlands, Finland, Norway [...] haven't turned into Venezuela
They haven't turn into the economic power house the US is right now either. In fact, the whole EU is waking up to the fact that they're being left behind.
And they haven't "taxed the hell out of rich people", just slightly more. But coupled with just slightly more regulation, turns out the more socialism you impose on your economy, the less competitive it is.
And we're talking about much smaller countries, too - but not that flat actually. Sweden is ahead and Norway is just 3 spots behind USA in the billionaires-per-capita ranking, with Finland and Netherlands not that far behind.
And literally nobody else has in the history of the planet. There’s zero reason to ascribe 100% of this to our socioeconomic system, particularly given how much that system has changed and evolved over the years.
We also might have overall wealth but that doesn’t mean much when the life of the median person is demonstrably worse than that of one in many other wealthy nations. Further, we are getting crushed on happiness in life. And isn’t that the metric we should actually give a shit about?
Literally every single western country who embraced free markets in the last 100 years did. Conversely their growth slowed the more they adopted leftist measures.
> zero reason to ascribe 100% of this to our socioeconomic system
My favorite A/B test was when Eastern Europe switched from communism to capitalism: we went from starving to plenty literally overnight.
> life of the median person is demonstrably worse
Please demonstrate it then. Statistics tell us the opposite.
> happiness in life. And isn’t that the metric we should actually give a shit about?
That is probably one of the worst metrics I can think about. How do you define it? How do you measure it? When do you measure it? How do you account for fluctuations? Delayed gratification? How to you account for the long-term vs short-term discrepancies? How to you account for self-induced unhappiness? Or artificial happiness through pills and other drugs?
The only worse metric I can think of is pleasure. Pursuit of either is a highly debatable individual strategy but for a society - it's deadly.
Elon Musk is a single man. There are a million "Elon Musks" on planet Earth crushed by the oppression of the system here, who weren't fed with a golden spoon of a rich family.
In a society that provided opportunities to people that are unconnected, we would have zero reliance on such personalities.
Simply because the general population lacks the vision to understand this and accepts these sort of hacks as extraordinary, does not make it true.
SpaceX and Tesla would thrive without such narcissistic leaders.
And now people are wondering why Musk doesn't like current administration. What a mystery.
Why would Tesla have been invited to a summit that was primarily centered around United Auto Workers? Tesla is non-union. “EV” was only a pretext.
The summit didn’t invite any non-US carmakers, who also make EVs. It was an event about UAW. Everyone invited was UAW.
The administration even said as much: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/05/white-house-answers-why...
UAW will be the reason why the big 3 are all bankrupt in 10 years.
If it was a UAW event, perhaps he should have called it that and not the "EV Summit". Elon Musk has every right to be annoyed that he was not invited to such an event, although he has taken it 100x too far. But Elon Musk isn't a public official and Biden is the president. He has public duties. He ought to have been smart enough not to snub the richest man in the world, who rightfully should have been invited, over a stupid PR event.
One side accuses govt of favoritism and corruption and are trying hard to make that true. The truth is most people try to do the right thing.
And your argument about non-US carmakers makes even less sense. We're discussing the top us EV manufacturer not being invited to the "EV summit".
Please stop being so dishonest, you're lying for political bias.
Edit: Plus, here is NASA Administrator Bill Nelson publicly congratulating SpaceX after the catch anyway: https://x.com/SenBillNelson/status/1845461454977196294
https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2024/10/15/nasa-update...
...I don't think anyone is going...Is Boeing in the wind.
Twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.
"He got the Boeing treatment"
He boeinged. Or he was boeinged.
Or let's boeing this whistleblower.
> Starliner is not designed to go beyond low Earth orbit
It’s actually hilarious they chose this name.
Calypso.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Starliner_Calypso
Who/what is Calypso?
>In Greek mythology, Calypso was a nymph who lived on the island of Ogygia, where, according to Homer's Odyssey, she detained Odysseus for seven years against his will. She promised Odysseus immortality if he would stay with her, but Odysseus preferred to return home. Eventually, after the intervention of the other gods, Calypso was forced to let Odysseus go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calypso_(mythology)
Yeah. Whoever named Starliner and that specific one are bloody geniuses.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/nasa-confirms-independ...
However, let's focus on the issues at hand.
Boeing's track record, including Starliner and commercial planes, raises legitimate safety concerns.
It appears they've compromised safety for financial gains. Should we prioritize supporting Starliner despite these issues merely because of personal opinions about Musk?
Also, isn’t this how capitalism works or supposed to work?
Methinks this will require firing all Boeing management, and taking it private :)
Boeing is at 96bn
I was actually prepared to call bullshit on you, but I stand corrected. I figured Boeing would be worth more with all the other things it does.
The market is also not as big as you'd think.
It's a critical long lead-time, institutional industry, for a nation. But a moneymaker, it's not.
(Even Airbus, if I'm reading it right, is at a USD$120b market cap)
This is also suggesting to me that commercial aviation isn't going to be seeing that much advancement going forward, rather than incremental changes at a decelerating rate. Strong headwinds, say from the energy transition, may actually shrink it a lot.
Boeing is the third largest aircraft manufacturer in the world (behind Airbus and Lockheed), has been in an ongoing crisis for 6 years over the quality of an airplane that was rushed out of the door to react to Airbus's A320neo, is looking to sell ULA which is most of their space launch business, with few success stories about the remaining space-related products under the Boeing brand (like Starliner or SLS). And their defense arm has a decade of stagnating revenue (on the same level as their 2002 revenue).
Everything at SpaceX is pointing to growth, while Boeing's only saving grace is that customer lock-in, their size and importance to national interests (and national security) is slowing their fall.
The government deliberately chooses nore than one supplier for things with high risk to mitigate exactly these kind of issues. Merging them might not even be allowed
Anyway, Boeing isn't a serious competitor to SpaceX and the money should be given to another instead. This should have been done several years ago, but as they say, the second best time to plant an apple tree is now.
Starliner provides zero redundancy. It doesn’t work. If it did, it can’t spin up quickly enough. If it could, it has a limited number of shots for having been designed for an obsolete launch vehicle
Also he should probably focus on Tesla and X given how poorly both are doing right now.
Elon Musk at least thinks it’s a greater than zero possibility.
But, he is too rich, too politically connected, too good at making people outraged, so chances he goes to prison are very low regardless of what happened.
Enterprise value (the value of all of Boeing) is the sum of the two (plus or minus other things like minority interest and whatnot, also left out for simplicity)
And if Boeing wants to ever recover a chance on major NASA contracts, they can't let NASA down on this. Unless the want to just leave the space business.
Do they really have a choice...? I haven't been following this very closely, but it seems like SpaceX is eating their lunch regardless, and Boeing the overall organization is in crisis, isn't it? Will they even still be around in a year or two, much less continue to make space things for NASA?
Really, Boeing needs to have a come to jesus moment on several different things - they need to say "hey so clearly SLS is a mistake, we need to develop something like Starship, give us $5 billion we'll make it happen."
Although it also seems like they need to have a better engineering culture and organizationally they would prefer to retaliate against engineers trying to improve their culture. If they don't fix that, probably can't fix anything. But also if they had a good engineering culture they probably would've scrapped SLS 5 years ago.
NASA has been trying to cancel SLS for a decade. It’s nicknamed the Senate Launch System for a reason.
The reality is that large parts of NASA are extremely supportive of SLS. We know from reporting that this is true. It was NASA Johnson engineers who pushed the design. No NASA Administrator has ever dared to even question the SLS or publicly speak in criticism at best the have lightly pushed for solutions around SLS.
The neat part from government perspective is that it doesn't matter how much Boeing has already lost on the contract, whether it makes sense for them to go on depends strictly on whether they believe they can fly the remaining contracted-for flights for less than the payouts. And this is probably still true. Yes, they will lose money overall on the contract, but they will lose less money if they complete it.
Feels like they broke a mirror and have 7 years of continuous bad luck.
With the current state of affairs, it is not hard to believe that in 10-15 years they might be a shell of their former selves and they do only maintenance on existing airplanes.
Boeing, a corporation facing criticism for its CEO's $20+ million compensation package and involvement in fatal airplane incidents and skimp out on safety because of its greed needs a break.
Hats off to the Engineers Engineers that Engineered the chopsticks catch, there were quite a few getting into the technical weeds:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2...
P.S. I've read full length biographies of both, and am an ME/AE engineer myself. I think I have at least some grasp of what they have accomplished.
I dont know what the general solution is here.. make sure (organizational) Hierarchies are as fluid as the Recompense (including, by reputation) & Responsibilties, i suppose
nu_H = nu_RR
where nu has units of viscosity
Failing so, i’d prefer to defer judgement after we’ve had blood samples from both Kelly n Musk. (For lead, fluoride, other psychoactives etc)
(IMX rapidly expanding Hierarchies do not [pace Landau] relax on a negligible time scale)
Length scales are impt too, we are obsessed with highly localized organizations like Musk’s (other than X) & Kelly’s because they seem so effective but the most insidious ones tend to rely on (the discrepancy bewtween?) long (or even mid) range info/materiel exchanges..
(Wuz thinking how the revolutionary structures (i.e. artillery stds?) were mostly already in place for decades before NB)
Q: how did these not diffuse to french navy? [Boudriot-Berti]?
> Napoleon would dictate to his secretaries exactly what he wanted published in the Paris newspaper [p22]
> « Je redoute trois journaux plus que 100.000 baïonnettes. » (I fear 3 newspapers more than 100'000 infantry) —NB
There's a nice (but very long) soviet joke that concludes with Bonaparte admiring Pravda.
> the Emperor makes war not with our arms but with our legs [p28]
As in the days of the Renaissance Condottieri; oddly enough the same is true in fencing: whoever has the stronger legs controls the distance (I wouldn't be surprised if 膝行 had been meant as leg training in the land of 間合い).
I wonder if the reliance on foraging for manoeuvre was part of his defeat by General Winter? Early canning (jarring in champagne bottles, I believe) had been developed under his version of ARPA, but I don't know if he had had that logistical element in 1812, nor if it would have been available much beyond metropolitan france.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia#Logi... suggests french planning had assumed russia would be nearly as dense as poland.
EDIT: when in high-functioning global teams, I've noticed how time zone diversity allows development to proceed nearly continuously; B's habit [p24] of sleeping from 19h00-01h00, in order to process yesterday's reports and get the new Orders of the Day out (~03h00) before his army woke up, seems similar.
EDIT2: (a) no such thing as foraging for a blue-water cruising naval vessel, (b) navies already operated with admirals using flag signals to coordinate their fleets, and (c) before modern comms, navies were already nearly "relativistic" in that news travelled about as fast as they did and so, eg if you sent a captain to the indies you had to have great confidence in them, because it'd take on the order of a year to close the accountability loop.
> ...j’espérais remplacer le général Dahlmann, colonel de vos guides. » L’Empereur répondit : « Quand le général Lasalle ne jurera plus et ne fumera plus, non seulement je le mettrai à la tête d’un régiment de cavalerie de ma garde, mais je le ferai un de mes chambellans. » Le général Lasalle s’inclina et dit à l’Empereur : « Sire, puisque j’ai toutes les qualités d’un marin, je demande à Votre Majesté le commandement d’une frégate...
(Lasalle hopes for a promotion, but the Emperor tells him if he quits swearing and quits smoking he'll not only get the promotion but become a chamberlain as well. Lasalle responds, "As I have all the qualities of a sailor, why don't you put me in charge of a frigate?")
More seriously, today I learned two ways to say "legacy code" in chinese, of which I suspect 问题代码 to be more polite, and 屎山代码 somewhat less.
Poking around in https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/三民主義/民權主義第五講 I found another trichotomy, just a little less cynical than Rao's:
SYS Gervais SYS example
------ ----------- --------------
先知先覺 psychopaths civil engineer
後知後覺 clueless foreman
不知不覺 losers workmen
> 都是靠這三種人，無論是缺少了那一種人都是不可能的。... 先知先覺的人要有一份，後知後覺的人要有一份，就是不知不覺的人也要有一份。
One of the people metioned was good at that kind of work, the other .. not so much.
1. hire and retain the top performing aerospace engineering team in the world 2. make suggestions for major engineering decisions that that team actually ends up using
I think my odds would be 0.00001% or less.
BTW, Musk took enormous personal risk on these ventures, betting his whole fortune on it.
Never mind that a famed company has been dismantled to pump the stock for a few years (and how long it took is a testament to its former excellence).
https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-Tragedy-Fall-Boeing/dp/0...
We live in the stupid times. After watching others get rich off of Bitcoin, GameStop, and companies with fantastical valuations, everyone wants it to go the Moon ASAP.
There are shareholders who care explicitly about long-term (at least 20~30+ years) profits. These are investors who are investing for retirement. The problem here is most of them hold index funds or have the money managed by a third-party, so they are indirect shareholders who may or may not have voting rights themselves and may not care to vote in the first place. Bogleheading is explicitly about not giving a damn, after all.
The shareholders who hold stocks directly may or may not care about long-term profits. Investors holding for retirement do, though whether they would vote is anyone's guess. Traders don't care who or what the stock is, all they care about is whether they turn a profit in the next second. Investors holding for income today (read: dividends) care about short-term profits, though again whether they vote is anyone's guess. Shareholders who hold for biased reasons ("I love <company>!") will probably vote, but whether they care about profits at all is anyone's guess.
Anecdata: I hold Boeing stock (BA) through SWPPX which is an S&P 500 index mutual fund. Most of my interest is returns in about 20 to 30 years' time when I reach retirement age. I do not have voting rights as far as I am aware, and frankly I can't be arsed to care about voting.
It's outside my bailiwick and I'm not quite sure how it happened, but it seems to me that over the course of a few decades (70s to 00s?) we went from a model of corporate management where the various mechanisms of "cripple the company for the short-term benefit of upper management (plus a few well connected others)" were neither sophisticated nor, well, thinkable, or at least not acceptable, to one where both the ability and the practice of doing so are near-ubiquitous.
Stop considering the bad actors legal persons that can buy off the regulators
Their opponents aren't always great shakes but it's no surprise that government functions badly when it's so often under the control of people whose existence is devoted to making it work badly. Maybe they could make a case for making it work better, but for decades they've said over and over that the only thing they want is to drown it in a bathtub.
I apologize for being political but surely people can see a connection between regulatory failure and management by an explicit hatred of all regulators.
Not precisely a policy wonk but I live surrounded by them.
Fix the regulatory regime but also streamline it so other companies can begin to compete. We'll be without a domestic Airliner manufacturer for a bit but I don't think you fix this without eating that pain for a while.
Air travel did not become one of the safest ways of transport out of the pure, intrinsic will of the industry to be better. it took decades of beating them into doing what's right.
Why don't we still have video recordings of cockpits for the Black Box? It would dramatically help in solving accidents, but the industry has been fighting this tooth and nail. "It's expensive!". "Safety" never comes up - that's the government's job.
When an entire fucking conglomerate including a substantial portion of the military industrial complex loses to a lone man, the problem isn't the lone man.
The only change right now is that NASA is no longer the only party designing missions, because entities such as SpaceX have enough integrated expertise to run their own show start to finish.
It's also the most successful space program in the world, so what's the benchmark we're comparing it to? The failings of the US space program had relatively little to do with private contractors, and a lot to do with politics and the voting public not liking risk.
Boeing has already openly stated that they won't bid on fixed price contracts anymore, and lately we have all sorts of other damning information like how repairs for the ground support systems for SLS are running so late they might cause Artemis 2 to be delayed further, while SpaceX effectively nuked their launch pad last year and was ready to fly, with upgrades, just 6 months later.
Musk began SpaceX with $100 million of his own cash, almost his entire wealth from having been the majority owner of PayPal when eBay bought it; lots for you and me, but not so compared to the budgets of the Boeings and Airbuses of the world. He and it certainly didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon and Dragon, and both came very close to bankruptcy early on. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars.
In any case, infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. He founded Blue Origin, his own rocket company, before Musk founded SpaceX, but Blue Origin has yet to send a single rocket to orbit. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
Part of the reason NASA was so doubtful of SpaceX at first was that they had previously heavily supported other space startups, only for them to fail to deliver.
Arguing that SpaceX is hoarding all the talent is also funny when considering that many other space startups are by ex-SpaceX employees, and SpaceX is often described as having a high churn rate.
Is there any world where any western government created reusable rockets by 2025 without space x? No chance.
And should we talk about the enormous dysfunction of NASA? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a...
This isn't because their best engineers get hired by space x, it's because the system is set up to fail and there's absolutely no accountability.
Are there some well-functioning organizations? Sure. Would they have been able to accomplish anything remotely close in cost, speed, or safety of space x? No.
NASA has involved the private sector for over half a century. Taking that out of the equation leaves you with SpaceX absolutely killing it and Boeing bumbling along despite getting bigger contracts from the government, so it's hard for me to draw this same conclusion.
> a benefactor with unbelievable wealth being able to hoard the best engineers
Hmm.. the implication here doesn't ring true at all. "Oh how I wish I could work at Boeing where all the real innovation happens, but here I am stuck at SpaceX due to these darn golden handcuffs". I hope SpaceX people get paid a lot, but I suspect the draw for most is what they are doing and the speed at which they are doing it.
> SpaceX is a perfect storm of a benefactor with unbelievable wealth
This is nonsense. Musk is rich BECAUSE OF SPACEX (and Tesla). When SpaceX was created Musk 'only' had 100 million $ and all of that was invested in SpaceX. After that, Musk never again put money in the company.
If you look into the history of this, you will see many other people with that much money that failed to get anywhere.
SpaceX is successful because they successfully executed on contracts and found many costumers.
> hoard the best engineers money can buy.
This is another completely made up statement. SpaceX did not go after the best established engineers. In fact SpaceX became famous for giving incredibly amount of responsibility to underpaid junior engineers.
Are you just making up stuff because you don't like SpaceX?
> And now the advancements they've made are proprietary.
And how much money does NASA save by using non-proprietary technologies? If they cost 10-100x more, what's the benefit of NASA owning things?
> Ideally Boeing and SpaceX could just collaborate and not have fight each other and waste a load of time and money.
Why would SpaceX collaborate with Boeing? SpaceX doesn't need anything from Boeing.
If NASA would have wanted to save money, they could have only given the Crew contract to SpaceX. This was unlikely, more likely would have been giving the contract to only Boeing.
Many large cooperation working together has a long history of not working. Consider the cost of SLS for example. Or the Orion. What bases of data do you take into account here that suggest NASA would have saved money if they had forced SpaceX to work with Boeing?
But NASA considered that it was actually cheaper to give two fixed price contracts rather then a single cost plus contract. And it seems to have worked for NASA.
> If the point is an open, competitive field driving space exploration forward, it seems we don't have that.
And yet the US has the most competitive most active space flight industry in the world. China and Europe would kill to have even 1/10 the amount of success.
So what are you basing your statement on?
> They caught lightning in a bottle and it may never happen again.
Sure but doing it the old way you all but guarantee that its not gone happen again.
In terms of engineering success, SpaceX didn't have some magical pill. Suggesting that these new processes could result in other successful companies. The recent successful moon lander in the CLIPS program is at least amazing as the Falcon 1 was.
> My hypothesis is there isn't room or capacity for more competition.
We have to differentiate the markets. Are you talking about human space flight only? Then you might be right in the short term. But NASA can at least guarantee flights if somebody else invests in it.
In other markets much more competition exists.