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Comment by imoverclocked | Hacker News Reader

The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep which leads to committees and then decision by committee.

If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find them.

My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.

Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.

Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

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I think you might have the chain of causality mixed up. From what I've seen, the sheer scale of the company creates large committees because you've got lots of managers and they all know that getting involved in the project is essential to their career advancement. And then that creates scope creep. Partially due to design by committee effects, but also because the manager in charge of flobnix realizes their opportunity for career advancement by shoehorning problems that need to be solved with flobnix into the requirements.

I also suspect that, if the folks leading this effort at Boeing are smart, they will sit back and let it happen. Large bureaucratic organizations like Boeing are ruled by office politics and largely run by people whose individual priorities are not particularly well-aligned with large scale company priorities. Pushing back risks making enemies (a dangerous thing to have in such an environment) and tends to have no real immediate upside.

Concrete example: why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo? Many reasons have been given, but I suspect the real one is that 2020s NASA has a lot of people who specialize in space stations on staff and 1960s NASA didn't.

>why is the Lunar Gateway such an essential part of the Artemis project's mission architecture when we didn't need anything like that for Apollo?

The explicit reason is: Why would we pay another $200 billion to just do Apollo again? People were bored of Apollo before it even finished its original set of missions.

Gateway is also a trial run for conducting operations at a Mars/Phobos/Diemos station.

But then you've got to ask why would we want an orbital Mars/Phobos/Deimos station?

Because Elon.

Snark aside: the goal is Mars because it might be possible to colonize the planet and to have a place that acts as a reserve for humanity should shit really hit the fan (i.e. WW3).

The moon isn't suitable as much for that purpose due to a complete lack of any atmosphere and because it's too close to Earth.

That’s not Elon’s plan. He’s too smart for that shit and wants to aerobrake down to the surface where there is abundant CO2 and probably H2O somewhere to make fuel for the return trip.

That's surface habitation, not an orbital station around the planet or one of its moons.

The problem with using a space station as a waypoint on the way to and from the surface of a remote body is that it make the mission more expensive. For example, the Lunar Gateway increases the delta-v requirement by 15-20% (can't remember exact number) compared to a more direct mission. Which then, all else being equal, increases the total mission cost by much more than 15-20% because the rocket equation always wins. And that's just the actual visit, we're not even considering the cost of putting the station there in the first place.

So I keep going back to, why a space station? If we're going to spend all that extra money on turning hydrogen and oxygen into hot water, why put it toward a space station out in the middle of nowhere instead of, say, more time or more equipment on the surface of the body?

Also, IIRC, none of Elon's proposed mission architectures for going to Mars involve an orbital station. And, while SpaceX did get the Artemis lander contract, they weren't involved in the decision to have a Lunar Gateway.

The Lunar Gateway exists so that SLS and Orion have a way to get to the Moon, because with it SLS can’t get into LLO and return to Earth, so they need another craft to finish the trip and a place to meet up with that craft. A reasonable question might be why not make Starship HLS act as its own gateway but then you start getting into why is SLS and Orion even needed.

Mars isn’t exactly habitable either. Not to mention the myriad of issues we face even getting there, let alone thriving.

Read the book A City On Mars recently which had a lot of interesting concerns not widely discussed in the pro space colonization community : https://www.acityonmars.com/. Highly recommended.

That is a terrible book that starts with the premise that it isn’t possible or desirable. d then arranges its arguments to come to that conclusion. But it turns out that making solar cells on the mean is feasible.

Yes, the book has a clear point of view. That said, it's not subtle at all, and they're very clear about their bias. I'd rather a clearly defined bias than one that is hidden from view or some half-hearted attempt at "bothsiding" the argument.

I felt they had some very good points, though, and I don't see any progress on the major blockers to any sort of large scale extra-planetary colonization. I hadn't considered the issues with procreation discussed in the book, for example--that's kind of a huge issue if we want to have any sort of self-sustaining population outside of this earth!

If any faction is on Mars during WW3, there’s a nuke landing there 6 months after the show is over here.

Only if WW3 happens during a transfer window.

True, the flight duration will vary depending on conditions. :)

Even if WW3 were to happen, I'm not sure it could let Earth be in a worse state than Mars for supporting human life.

It won't be. Even an extinction level asteroid or comet impact will be easier to handle on a planet with breathable atmosphere, water, and other resources. Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that. Still, Mars would require much more self-sufficiency than we've ever attempted. It's worth the effort to expand human exploration.

> Colonizing Antarctica is a few orders of magnitude easier than Mars and we've barely progressed with that

I hear this somewhat often, and I find it a bit disingenuous since it's not like we're trying that hard to colonize Antarctica, we're mostly preserving it as well as we can, no? And the existing Antarctic bases aren't total hellholes or anything, AFAIK the larger ones are relatively normal spaces with power and normal food and heated water.

I do agree with the overall point though for sure.

The same considerations apply to Mars.

Hence the "Reds" vs. "Greens" in the KSR Mars trilogy.

I always found it amusing that KSR's Greens were the side that would have in effect have destroyed the natural environment of Mars (by terraforming it), unlike our Greens who in general want to preserve the environment.

I think that's the point? :-)

The Reds want to preserve the environment and the Greens want to completely change it...

It's kinda poetic that, on Earth, Greens are sometimes accused of being Reds in disguise ;)

We'd pay $xxx billion to have a permanent moon base, something Apollo never had. If that can't efforts excite people enough to keep funding flowing I doubt a space station in lunar orbit will move the needle

To add another data point: the Chinese lunar program also plans to land humans on the moon and later establish a manned research outpost on the surface. But there don't seem to be any plans for an orbital stations, despite China having very successful space stations in LEO

What does a moon base get us, though?

It was cool to get bragging rights by being the first to land and come back - in the ultimate show of “soft power” against the Soviet Union. But a permanent moon base? We can’t even fund the ISS.

Frankly, a moon base might be cool, but nobody has sold me on it is worth having for any other reason. Some smart people have given good arguments that it isn't worth having.

And here I'm sitting in my basement not working on space projects and realizing money spent on space is money I don't have for something else I want (even it is is only $.10 that is still money that adds up).

A moon base gets us a platform to test what long term low gravity does to a human body, and an environment to test ISRU for various materials like water, oxygen, iron, titanium, etc...

Being able to prove that people can live in an environment like the moon long term and develop materials that can make their stay there sustainable by reducing consumables and developing replacement parts from lunar material is a great stepping stone.

Being able to demonstrate the doubling of usable pressurized space by building and burying modules that can be stocked with equipment brought from Earth would be a remarkable accomplishment.

Stepping stone to… what exactly?

We couldn’t even handle a closed source experiment on earth (see biosphere 2), why would one on another celestial body fare any better?

It's a stepping stone to building very large spacecraft/space stations that have rotating habitat rings that would be used to colonize the solar system.

These kinds of things can be put into cycler orbits around the Moon or Mars[0] which would allow relatively comfortable and cost effective journeys to these locations. As the scale of these kinds of craft expand they could eventually become destinations themselves akin to massive cruise ships in the sky where some people live out their entire lives.

Biosphere 2 was obviously a flawed experiment but it seems that Mir, the ISS, and Tiangong have shown that long term habitation in micro-G is possible, it seems like the extension of that is to try long term habitation of a body with gravity and material to experiment with.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler

Less Money went into biosphere 2. You could probably have automated everything and lowered the workload and bioload significantly.

OK great, how much do you think is necessary to spend? In the 1990s the billionaire Ed Bass spent $150 million to operate Biosphere 2 with an expected mission time of two years. Even after spending $150 million in 1993 dollars, the experiment shut down after only 6 months. [0]

So let's say we spend a little more money ($150 million would be approx $335 million today, so maybe $0.5 - 1 billion). That's a lot of money but still a LOT less than establishing a moon base. And by doing it on Earth we can solve for more closed-loop system problems here without also coping at the exact same time with an environment actively trying to kill the participants and a multi-month lead time for any resupplies/"oops"es.

Then we can take those lessons learned and apply them to the much harsher environment of the moon. In other words, it's a lot cheaper and faster to learn some lessons here on Earth first before having to tackle all that plus things like keeping yourself alive.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/07/nx-s1-5442529/biosphere-2-ear...

> We couldn’t even handle a closed source experiment on earth (see biosphere 2), why would one on another celestial body fare any better?

Because (1) the project would be designed seriously and (2) you don't need a completely closed loop. Just one that's mostly closed.

Who will design and execute this “seriously”? Given the current state of our government (shutting down as I type), I don’t foresee any “serious” projects from the feds any time soon. Even when there are serious people - everything will get politicized. So nasa is out.

Ok so maybe a multibillionaire. Perhaps Elon musk? Yikes. Or Bezos? Maybe.

The EU is kinda busy increasing their defense spend, preparing to engage in Ukraine so I don’t see them super excited to do this.

China or India perhaps?

Also, why shouldn’t it be completely closed loop? If you’re designing to address the myriad of scenarios that can unfold in space, I’d say you’d want that experience under your belt. Its already easy mode doing this exercise on earth you might as well give yourself a little challenge to capture lessons learned.

> Who will design and execute this “seriously”?

NASA.

> why shouldn’t it be completely closed loop?

Because it doesn’t need to be. Engineering an ecological carbon cycle is hard. Putting in long-lived CO2 scrubbers is not.

I'd argue that you need a loop that's capable of operating without Earth support for a significant length of time - vastly beyond what they managed with Biosphere 2 - for margin of safety reasons. Possibly also with a very different, scaled down design - maybe not growing all their own food, for example - because 13,000 square meters is maybe a bit much for a first off-planet base. And the best place to start working out how to do that is right here on Earth. Because it's an immediate cost reduction of at least one and probably several orders of magnitude, and because you can much more easily iterate on the design while you're still working out the kinks.

And then, once you've got it working well here on Earth, then you have a go at doing it on the moon.

This idea that the best place to get started on working out how to do these sorts of things is on the moon makes about as much sense as suggesting that the Space Shuttle program should have had astronauts rushing to work out the kinks of EVA missions in space instead of doing everything they could to test and practice procedures in swimming pools in an effort to learn as much as possible before you blow half a billion dollars on trying it out in orbit.

> need a loop that's capable of operating without Earth support for a significant length of time

Agree. A moon base lets us test this out with real-world constraints as opposed to simulants.

We don’t know how to build ecological closed loops. But every failure mode of Biosphere 2’s was almost trivially solvable with expendable components. (The CO2 cascade being the simplest among them.)

> idea that the best place to get started on working out how to do these sorts of things is on the moon

It’s not. It’s the best next step. We’re doing a lot of pre-colonisation lab work already. And we will need to do more before establishing a moon base. The moon base is the interim goal—you don’t put astronauts in swimming pools without a plan for a Shuttle. And Biosphere 2 is a terrible swimming pool for anything we’d do on the Moon or Mars.

Can you see a future for humanity where the moon isn’t colonised?

Yes? Why do we need to colonize the moon with squishy meatbags with billions of years of evolutionary optimization for life on Earth?

All these dreams of star-trek like interstellar travel (or even interplanetary travel beyond taking a selfie and going home) require major advances in the physics tech tree. Might come, might not.

Would you not like to see major advances in the physics tech tree? The way you get those advancements, is to have a goal. And funding.

A moon colonization program provides both.

To use video games as an analogy: You can't invest all your resources racing up one tech tree; you have to build the whole economic engine to achieve those later levels.

"Moon base that produces positive economic benefit" is about 10 steps up a very expensive tech tree and we don't even know what the rungs are.

I also don't think this is very imaginative. If you want to colonize the moon, why send a man in a can? How about genetically engineering a human-ish that's better adapted to that kind of environment? That's the kind of technology advancement that makes manned interplanetary missions reachable.

> You can't invest all your resources racing up one tech tree; you have to build the whole economic engine to achieve those later levels.

The exact opposite of that has been the meta in most 4X games I've played.

You always rush specific techs because you understand the ROI for the specific empire you're going for. That involves specialization.

Apollo allowed America to demonstrate its ability to land a rocket with pinpoint accuracy on the Moon, implying it would be easier to land an ICBM on the Soviets.

The USSR got a large PR boost through launching Sputnik and then a person. It convinced many people communism was a superior ideology for advancing science and technology. Turning it into a "Space Race" allowed the USA to reframe the discussion for the world in a way that let America catch up.

A lot of manufacturing processes are easier without an atmosphere. Also low gravity makes it easy to launch completed product out to space for future space missions

Which manufacturing processes are easier w/o an atmosphere? We've placed objects in planetary orbits for 75 years now. If there was an obvious economic benefit to a manufacturing process outside of 1G, then we'd have had a business actively exploiting that opportunity for profit.

ZBLAN, a high quality optic fibre, can be made in space with fewer defects. A process that is in the process of being exploited.

Though the rather limited space on the ISS and its imminent decommissioning complicate that a bit. I think the current plan is to launch satellites for commercial production

Maybe, but the shipping costs are killer and physics puts a hard minimum on the price.

We have plenty of earthbound motivation to solve the "energy too cheap to meter" problem. We're nowhere near that. Adding one more big energy consumer (moving cargo to/from orbit) does not make a material difference.

What's your hard minimum on price?

Starship is supposed (Musk hype warning!) to be 1/10th to 1/100th the cost.

We haven't done skyhooks or launch loops or launch cannons, which are large upfront projects but once built are semi-permanent economic gamechangers.

> A lot of manufacturing processes are easier without an atmosphere. Also low gravity makes it easy to launch completed product out to space for future space missions

I always felt like that was a backwards justification for going to space (we want to go to space, how do we sell it), rather than a real need to that would push people to go to space.

Unless the raw materials are also on the moon, putting the manufacturing equipment on the lunar surface instead of in low Earth orbit might actually make sending it further out more expensive, not less. Because of the Oberth effect.

The raw has to be on the moon at least the heavy stuff. Otherwise you are right makes no sense

> Why do we need to colonize the moon with squishy meatbags with billions of years of evolutionary optimization for life on Earth?

Given current American politics, I'm honestly divided on whether we should colonise the Moon. That someone will do it seems pretty obvious.

The Azores wasn't exactly instrumental in the colonization of north america.

What's the future for humanity if the moon is colonized? What does the moon provide us that the Earth does not?

One interesting (admittedly small in scope, but huge in impact) thought experiment is the following- let's say that the doomsayers are correct. The Earth has been destroyed and inhabitable, leaving just our extra-planetary outposts. How do we supply the necessary high-tech manufacturing capability to survive?

Have we spun up all of the supply chain to reproduce the state-of-the-art technology required just required to sustain life on that celestial body? As an example, even with all our experience on Earth, we have exactly one physical location on our entire planet that can crank out the most advanced chips used in our modern technology we take for granted. That build-out took massive investment of deca-billions of dollars plus a massive, deep supply chain to build, even with all the advantages we have here on Earth (things like, oh, breathable air, access to vast carbon energy storage, access to millions of humans and existing factories... just as a start...)

Are we expected to replicate all of that on our next celestial body? If not, how do we expect to replace failing parts and continue progress?

What about even more basic concerns about things like... literal population growth? We understand ... a little... about how very healthy adult human bodies react to prolonged periods in zero-g (hint: not well, where "prolonged" == 437 contiguous days [0]). What about pregnant women? Babies? Spaceflight crews are required to exercise two hours every day to counteract muscle and bone atrophy [1]. How is that expected of say... an infant?

Don't get me wrong, I find spacefaring fascinating. I idolize the Apollo era. But we haven't even scratched the surface of how we can sustain any sort of population off this planet. We need to find ways to get along here, because ... this is all we've got, folks.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_longest_spacefligh... [1] https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/07/16/muscle-an...

Well, we'll never achieve anything if we don't try. But I think as terra starts to become inhospitable the required urgency will arrive. Hopefully after I'm gone, though.

Even a relatively inhospitable earth is much, much more livable than the celestial bodies we can reach in reasonable time. Even living 100% underground would be easier than trying to establish bases on the moon or Mars, with a hope that we could find a way to clean up the mess that we created.

If we find some faster-than-light travel mechanism and a star group that includes a planet like our own, then perhaps there's a way out of here.

On the other hand, why not try to achieve something like ... getting along better here? We could find ways to create more clean energy here on Earth, clean up existing messes, better harness the 3/4 of the globe covered by water, etc.

Plus we have a lot of societal issues to try to address. How would living on another planet solve distinctly human problems like war, conflict, need to pollute the natural environment of a new planet, etc? Why not look at how we can improve our own self-governance? After all, if we do escape this rock, it's not like we're magically going to become more altruistic, compassionate, etc. We'll still suffer from the same problems we do here, just with even more stressors like "my body boils over if I dare step outside unprotected". Sounds super depressing to me.

In the 1980s I read articles in the “science fact” columns in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that told me that NASA sold out a much more ambitious lunar program for something that was little more than a stunt.

The reality was that Von Braun looked at dozens of mission architectures before discovering one that was much more feasible than any of the others and made it possible to realize Kennedy’s dream.

The moon is not far away in terms of miles but in terms of energy and momentum it is very far away if your goal is to fly there and fly back. Right now the best idea we have for a moon lander is to hope that SpaceX gets Starship to orbit and masters orbital refueling it’s not like they can fly 100 tons there and back, but rather they can land about what Apollo did with a much bigger spacecraft that’s really tall and tippy, needs an elevator, can get the ascent rockets smashed on rocks, etc. if they had a set of those chopsticks on the Moon or Mars they could land it easily but on generic inner solar system bodies covered with boulders, craters and stuff good luck. Plan B is basically the same from Blue Origin.

If you could refuel there the math changes, maybe you can, there might be usable ice at the poles but nobody has seen it, unless we have a Drexler machine we’re going to have to launch a huge number of missions with a marginally effective system until we have a system in place that can reliably deliver fuel.

So it’s tough, any honest analysis of space colonization makes you come to the conclusion that Drexler did, rocketry has very little to do with it, being able to pack a self-sufficient industrial civilization into the smallest package has everything to do with it.

That starts from the false premise that you have to go from zero to self-sufficient colony all in one go. The reason cheap launch is foundational is because your initial bases will need lots of resupply and will gradually migrate to needing less over time.

> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft? Like if you want more legroom you take a more expensive ticket from a company that doesn't try to cram as many passengers in each plane

Pretty much. You can outfit pretty much any airframe you want to be business class only seating but not enough people will buy when it pops up on Expedia at 2+ times the price of the alternative.

I don't love Economy on long flights either but I'm mostly not willing to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a more comfortable alternative for 8 hours or so.

I would buy an upgrade if it was twice the price. In reality it's more like 10x.

That is, in no small part, because business/first class is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the passengers in those classes are status upgrades).

So, yes, sticker price for upper class service is pretty expensive. In a world where upper class service was the norm on certain routes on certain planes it would probably be pretty expensive but probably cheaper than the upgrade on mixed class service.

Do you have a source showing $/sqft of economy vs business/first class? This video is basically saying the opposite of you: that business/first class subsidizes economy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc

It might be better to say that they form a system which is economically optimized as a whole. It is genius, for instance, that frequent fliers get upgrades from coach to first class when they're available because it means if a first class flier changes their plans or wants to fly on short notice an economy flier just says in coach and won't feel mad about it -- the first class seats are 100% occupied in terms of providing somebody a somewhat premium experience but are 50% occupied with full revenue customers and that 50% occupation is part of the completely premium experience because it means it is always available.

Yes, I was imprecise in what I wrote. There's a lot of cross-subsidization in various forms going on that makes all-business class at business-class prices tough for airlines even on routes like NYC to London--which have existed but not sure they do at the moment.

I heard only place where business + premium economy works is ultra long routes. Where people are willing to pay the premium of single leg over multi leg. So it seems people might be willing to pay for time, but not for comfort.

> That is, in no small part, because business/first class is being subsidized by economy (and a lot of the passengers in those classes are status upgrades).

That's the complete 100% opposite of truth. For most airlines, the economy class is just a nice addition to the business class.

There is a business-class only airline (La Compagnie) that flies from Newark to Europe and they're profitable. A little more expensive than 2x the price though, but less than 10x.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Compagnie

Never heard of this airline so I just checked: Over the next few months the cheapest flight from EWR to their base in Orly is ~$2,500 vs ~$365 for Economy (French Bee to be exact). That seems like its still a separate class and would exclude most Economy flyers.

Yup, as another poster noted, the seating density and comfort are decided by airlines. Aircraft manufacturers install standardized rails for seating and console selection, and allow for many different configurations.

> Isn't that something that's more the responsibility of the airlines, who decide how many seats are put in a plane, following the limits of the aircraft?

For pitch, yes. For width, no —- you run into quantization pretty quickly. The difference between sardines and standard economy is less than the difference between 3+3 and 3+2 — it’s not really feasible for most traditional airlines to choose a different number of seats across than the design point. And for a 3+3 setup, adding 6” to fuselage diameter makes a noticeable difference to (wider) passengers, which the airlines can’t really take away.

There's no incentive. Passengers rarely know what type they'll be flying on when they book, and prioritize it over price even less. For airlines, a bigger airplane is a distinct disadvantage though, as it's operationally more expensive (increased cross section equals increased drag equals increased fuel burn).

A fully loaded 747 is extremely profitable, the large size has economies of scale. That's why the 747 was very very popular with the airlines.

So, yes, a 747 burns more fuel. But the fuel burn per paying passenger is less.

The real issue with the 747 is people will take a point to point route if at all possible. Worse, flying a small plane point to point is cheaper for the passenger than flying 2 747s. If you live in Lincoln NE - sorry your city is too small to get direct flights to anything but close major hubs (even then odds are you drive to nearby Omaha thus further reducing demand options). However if you live in a Larger non-hub city airlines can undercut each other by just doing direct flights to other large non-hub cities.

The 747 was at its most efficient when flying long haul routes, like overseas. The 747 was immensely profitable for Boeing for several decades. Every sale was a giant chunk of cash dumped on the company. But none of that would have happened if the 747 wasn't also immensely profitable for the airlines.

True but small planes are profitable too even for long flights. They have to compete against the more profitable large ones but they do that by emptying the large ones. I want to get to a destination and if a small plane isn't much more money it is cheaper to not transfer at a hub and pay for the 2nd plane to where I want to be. More smaller planes can also fit my schedule which can save money.

there is a reason nobody flies the 747 anymore. It isn't profitable enough agaisnt the 777 and small planes which are cheaper to run.

> there is a reason nobody flies the 747 anymore

The reason is the aerodynamics of it are 60 years old making it no longer competitive with modern aerodynamics.

Compare your car with a 1965 Chevy Impala, for example.

Mostly it's about engine tech. A 777/787 or whatever can fit almost as many passengers as a 747, but has only two engines, burning less fuel and requiring less maintenance.

Back when 747 was designed engine tech wasn't there yet to build really big two engine airplanes. There was also the issue of ETOPS limits. The regulations on how far away from nearest airport you can fly with two-engine aircraft were stricter than today, so for many routes flying over oceans you needed more than two engines.

There's also the issue of cargo space. The 777-300 actually has a larger hold, about 11% more. Cargo is pretty lucrative so even passenger airlines like being able to devote some of their hold space to it.

Modern wings made a huge difference. Take a close look at a modern wing vs a 747 wing.

Modern wings could be retrofitted to the 747. Maybe not completely, but the more important features. However there are a lot of other parts of the 747 that don't make sense, and so not enough buyers (if any!) would exist if they did.

The 757 started out as a re-winged and re-engined 737. It turned out to be cheaper to design a new airplane.

It was an old airplane too and not as optimized as newer airplanes in terms of engines, aerodynamic design, weight and so forth.

The A380 was a step up in size and had additional problems such as there not being that many airports which had upgraded their gates and other facilities to support an airplane that big.

As aviation technology improved, the 747 could not improve its aerodynamics and so became relatively costlier to fly. It's longevity, however, was due to it's cost effectiveness for several decades.

That only works if you make the airplane enough bigger so that you can fit more seats and thus paying passengers. The parent comment was arguing to make the plane only a little bigger so that each passenger has more space, but not enough so that extra seats can be fitted.

> Passengers rarely know what type they'll be flying on when they book, and prioritize it over price even less.

Virtually every booking page gives you that information during booking, and I (and several of my friends) actively avoid any flight that has a MAX operating it, to the point that we'd rather fly longer and/or more expensive alternative routes operated with other models.

Seat and aisle widths are customer selectable options. Hence, a customer may order a 787 with 3-3-3 seating or 2-4-2 seating. The vast majority of airlines chose sardines instead of comfort. In a 737, customers only can get 3-3 seating, but they can choose wide (17.8”) seats and skinny aisles, like Southwest does, or they can choose skinny (17.1”) seats and wider aisles, like Alaska does.

... with wider seats and skinny aisles bringing more weight (-> more fuel consumption), and slower boarding/deboarding times (-> more time on the ground), both of which are cost drivers.

Sort of timely because I was on an Alaska Max 9 yesterday I couldn't believe how narrow the aisle was. I actually looked up whether a Max 9 fuselage was narrower than a traditional 737, it was that bad. Now, it's possible this plane had the wider seat option (possible ex-Hawaiian, if they used a different config?), but even so, I've been on a lot of planes, and this is the first where I felt like I had to walk down the aisle sideways.

I've only flown on Airbus planes and one of them had a middle isle that I must have been less than 18 inches wide. I felt claustrophobic.

Boeing is in constant communication with the airlines on new airplane designs, as they want to build the most profitable airplane for their customers that they can. This means the airline has a lot of input on fuselage diameter.

In airline parlance, this is called "buyer furnished equipment". Boeing sells the airframe (without the engines, even if there's only one choice) and the seats, lavatories, etc. are all provided by the customer. The certifying authority (e.g. FAA/JAA) will have a maximum passenger count for the type. I'm reasonably certain that the BFE has to be certified as well, as you couldn't evacuate the type limit if the aisle wasn't in the center or you mixed 3-2 and 2-3.

> The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.

I'd expect the handling characteristics to be pretty similar to the 737. The biggest change will be to raise the whole aircraft a few more feet off the ground (i.e. taller landing gear), which will let the plane use large-diameter high-bypass turbofans.

The short landing gear on the 737 was the root of the chain that led to the whole MCAS fiasco.

> Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.

Maybe you want a small team of big people.

With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket. They moan and complain about this or that, but they still do the same thing.

So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly.

> So, airlines structure and furnish accordingly.

By cutting the number of economy seats and increasing the number of business and first class ones?

Airlines don’t care about the economy traveller. They are there just to fill the space for a marginal profit.

They need both. They want the high-margin business and first-class passengers, but with those alone the volume would be too low and overall prices too high to make operating feasible.

The high-volume low-margin economy customers keep seats filled to prevent wasted potential space. On most commercial planes, flight is only profitable if nearly every seat is filled.

> They need both.

No. If they could fill the entire plane with business/first class seats and sell out >70% (maybe even less) of it, you bet they would.

The only reason why economy class exists is because they can’t. But the demand for more premium travel is steadily increasing, which will lead to shrinking economy cabins.

So yes, they do need to fill the space. But I wouldn’t say that they need the economy passengers.

> > They need both.

> No (...) The only reason why economy class exists is because they can’t.

in other words, in nearly all cases they need both

How would you explain discount airlines that don't have business class at all?

You also contradict yourself saying they only profit from business class but at the same time they can't profit from business class because there is no enough demand for it.

Your statement doesn't make sense and what the poster above you said is right - they need both and that's the reason there are both.

> With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket

With rare exception people just buy what they can afford. If people had so much money that they could afford to fly first class and it wouldn't impact their budget very few would get the lowest price they can find knowing that their experience in the air will be miserable.

> If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

In practice people in general vote with wallets for cheaper sardine-like flights.

(though more spacious seats typically can be bought)

It might be because of how airlines price tickets.

For a 10 hour flight that costs $500 (economy) it will cost +$80 1-way to pick a seat. Not a special seat, just a seat in general. An exit row seat costs +$160 1-way.

So why are business class seats filled if there's plenty of economy space left? Surely all those business men spending 5000$+ for an overseas ticket are voting with their vallets for the 500$ one?

Or maybe the reality isn't as simple as you make it seem?

I think the days of Boeing being able to make the plane with a small focused team is probably in the past. Way too much engineering talent has been outsourced and the R&D just isn't there. It requires a level of vertical integration that was long since divested for cost saving reasons. That's why it is so beathtakingly expensive to develop a new plane. coordination between literally thousands of contractors is a nightmarishly complex task that requires an enormous team of middle managers and lawyers. It may even be the case that modern planes are just plain too complex to realistically do the majority of the work in-house.

1. Modern airliners with fly by wire have capability similar to MCAS the difference is it is not half baked but has numerous degraded states it can run in when sensors are out and pilots are trained on all that. Any new airplane will have that under the name “flight envelope protection”

2. The circular cross section is anti-human and is the reason my neck knots up when I think of getting in any plane of that class. Embraer E-Jets and the A220 are smaller but feel like riding in a wide body because the cross section is squared off, you have to fly it to believe it.

3. Airbus has a A320 replacement, they bought it from Bombardier. It’s a little told story that aviation in the US is hamstrung by union scope clauses that forbid the 70 seat airplanes that would improve service at small airports, relieve congestion at large airports, and lessen some of the painful trends in regional geography that have made politics so toxic. (a) Planes like the A220 could be part of that solution.

4. What I don’t get is the involution (excessive competition) over wide body airliners coupled with poor competition in the much larger narrow body market, especially when narrowbodies have been increasingly doing wide body jobs

(a) when organizations in my town do a SWOT analysis they almost always put the bad state of the local airport as a disadvantage they have relative to competitors —- the county and state would spend money to improve what they can but it comes down to out-of-town airlines that have their own priorities, a pilot shortage, etc.

+1 on the Embraer. It's much more comfortable than a 737 or A320 while being much smaller. The advantage of doing a greenfield design completely to modern capabilities

> Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.

The 787 and 777 are already purely fly by wire. Their entire feel is made up.

Boeing simply has a different design philosophy on how much a pilot should feel like they are in command vs steering a system.

I think what parent was about is open vs. closed loop control, not fly-by-wire or not. Both their and your point stand of course.

The 737, like all large commercial aircraft, also requires an artificial control feel force feedback system in order to meet design requirements. It has always had one going back to 1967.

A question that has never been adequately answered: if MCAS was conceived of in order to meet the 14 CFR Part 25.143 requirements for a positive control force feedback gradient, why did Boeing not modify the existing Elevator Differential Feel Computer (a mechanical/hydraulic computer with no electronic components) instead of inventing a half-assed, undocumented, slow moving, open-loop fly-by-wire contraption using the trim tab actuator?

> design it without sardines in mind

Boeing already does that. The seat size and spacing is determined by the airline customer.

They will use a very small team and will mostly let AI design the plane ;)

Can’t wait to fly in the 737-AI.

All the executives first, please.

Doors can't fall off if they were hallucinated to begin with!

>If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.

The manufacturers don't actually have a ton of say over this. At the end of the day, it's the airlines who decide how many seats in what configuration the aircraft will use - not the manufacturer of the plane.

And airlines only pack so tightly because competition is fierce and flyers almost exclusively only purchase based on price.

The number of passengers you can fit in a commercial plane is based on how quickly you can evacuate them, with the doors being a major bottleneck. Many ULCCs in Europe have planes that are right up against that limit.

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