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Comment by mactunes | Hacker News Reader

According to this article Boeing beat SpaceX.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2014/09/16/reports-boe...

I'm curious what the implications of that are. My emotional reaction is disappointment that "the old guard" is winning because of NASA's risk aversion. But is that really the case or am I just living in the Musk-worship echo chamber? Is Boeing still something to get excited about? How much cheaper would a Space-X solution be per astronaut trip versus Boeing (if at all)?

But is that really the case or am I just living in the Musk-worship echo chamber?

It's probably not the Musk echo chamber, your assumptions carry the telltale scent of the "large corporations can't do anything right!" echo chamber. They're slower, suffer from inefficiencies caused by scale, more risk-adverse, etc... But they're not outright incompetent the way startup-fellating media leads you to believe.

Boeing could have just delivered better. Or they delivered worse but Boeing's track record covered the spread in a reasonable way. Or in a nepotistic way. The fun part is that unless they blew SpaceX out of the water, you'll never know which of the three it is!

It's not large corporations per se, but traditional government contracting where the implicit incentive is to deliver minimum value at maximum cost.

The most (potentially) exciting part of this news would be the joint venture between Blue Origin (who has been developing engines for the past decade) and Boeing to make this happen.

If Boeing are responding to competition properly then it's something to be excited about, as it means SpaceX and others will have more to compete and co-operate about.

SpaceX has a lot in common with Tesla, where the real winning plan is not to compete over slices of the pie, but to radically grow the pie.

That was a big if though, and if all this is is old guard cronyism then it's a step backwards.

The Washington Post is saying they both won contracts, with Blue Origin on subcontract to Boeing to replace the Atlas V engine.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/09/16...

This makes the most sense. Two companies offer competition to help drive down costs and a backup plan if one can't deliver.

This is a ridiculous article based on completely illogical assertions. It states that Boeing and Blue Origin are the "low-risk option", when the Boeing CST-100 and the Blue Origin BE-3 rocket have had precisely zero test flights, zero completed missions, and zero qualification tests.

Conversely, the Falcon 9 and the Dragon have flown numerous successful missions for both NASA and commercial customers.

This is just nonsense, and I doubt NASA would be stupid enough to give the contract to an undeveloped vehicle vs. a vehicle with a proven track record. Ironically, this is the same argument Boeing and ULA have used against SpaceX for years.

According to the article, "Industry experts" say that is the safe bet (and I agree). However, nothing has been announced, yet.

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