[HN Gopher] NASA freezes Starliner missions
___________________________________________________________________
NASA freezes Starliner missions
Author : rntn
Score : 156 points
Date : 2024-10-17 19:56 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Boeing really needs to get a break pretty soon.
|
| Feels like they broke a mirror and have 7 years of continuous bad
| luck.
| tiahura wrote:
| Boeing gets a break every day there is a jet duopoly, and both
| are booked years out on orders.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| And if you try to compete you will be hit with a 300% tariff
| which was removed once bombadier was sold to airbus for $1
| (the eu has the ability to push equivalent tariffs and also
| has assembly facilities in the us which Canada does not
| allowing it to avoid such tariffs). https://www.reddit.com/r/
| todayilearned/comments/192dfwh/til_...
| barbazoo wrote:
| Poor Boeing and their billions and billions in guaranteed
| government defence spending. They're fine.
| namaria wrote:
| Nah. The families of the people killed in avoidable crashed of
| the 737 max after Boeing misrepresented training requirements
| and hid data about new mission critical automated systems.
| Those include pilots accused of Boeing of incompetence to try
| and cover up this issue.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| My comment was directed to they have to show that whatever they
| build actually works in the near future. And not that they
| don't have money or they'll go out of business anytime soon.
|
| 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.
| elintknower wrote:
| That took long enough. Insane that the gov was entirely silent
| after this week's starship launch as well...
|
| 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.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| One way to read the delay was that the technical teams were
| working against a deadline clock that started as soon as the
| vehicle landed, to analyze and propose remedies for the
| thruster failures and helium leaks. And now they've hit that
| deadline, having found no good fixes.
| verzali wrote:
| I suspect it's more at a program level. Boeing have lost a
| lot of money on Starliner, may lose a lot more, and already
| seem lukewarm on continuing with the project. It's actually
| NASA that's keener on keeping it running, so that they are
| not entirely dependent on SpaceX for human spaceflight.
| justinclift wrote:
| NASA might need to redo the tender for the 2nd supplier of
| crewed missions, regardless of the (even further)
| reputational hit to Boeing.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| ISS is not going to stay up there for long enough for a
| new second supplier to make sense.
| elintknower wrote:
| Yes, because they're an inferior option to supply launch
| services to the ISS.
|
| 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.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| I wish I had any idea on how to deal with the Elon situation. I
| genuinely believe SpaceX wouldn't be achieving nearly what it
| is without him, but he's obviously also going way off the deep
| end these days and it's uncomfortable to watch one man with
| that much power getting increasingly unhinged.
|
| 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)
| Mistletoe wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-employees-
| denounce...
|
| 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.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Having read the Isaacson biography, Elon's management style
| is essentially to be hands off then show up in "surges" of
| extreme work. It makes sense that most people would be
| happy when surges end.
|
| There's also essentially zero chance his organizations
| succeed in spite of him. This is just wishful ignorance.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| > I strongly believe we should be taxing the absolute shit
| out of people and working hard to flatten society.
|
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's not just "the gov". Elon was a controversial figure just
| last year, but now the entire Internet is giving Musk-related
| everything a transparent child treatment. It's almost
| unsettling how fast the hype is going down.
| agiacalone wrote:
| If it's Boeing... ...I don't think anyone is
| going...
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| ...or coming back....
| euroderf wrote:
| The answer, my friend,
|
| Is Boeing in the wind.
|
| Twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.
| schiffern wrote:
| Original NASA blog post:
|
| https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2024/10/15/nasa-update...
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > The space agency will now judge how the Starliner could be
| eventually certified to fly
|
| Methinks this will require firing all Boeing management, and
| taking it private :)
| butterlettuce wrote:
| I'm all for Elon buying it and trusting that he makes the
| necessary changes.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I think I saw recently that SpaceX is worth about 2x Boeing
| right now.
| Loughla wrote:
| Spacex is at 180bn
|
| 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.
| Pedro_Ribeiro wrote:
| Airplane companies are worth surprisingly less than
| expected for how crucial and important they seem at first
| glance.
|
| The market is also not as big as you'd think.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It says a lot about the profitability and certification
| costs in the commercial market.
|
| 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)
| wongarsu wrote:
| SpaceX is dominating the space launch industry and is
| responsible for just under half of all rockets launched
| last year (or 90% of US launches). They also have an
| extremely successful satellite internet service. And most
| importantly in both sectors SpaceX is innovation leader
| and rapidly growing.
|
| 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| That would probably mean the end for Starliner.
|
| 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
| wyldfire wrote:
| I suppose this might be a joke? But it would be a ludicrously
| anti-competitive move that the government (as one of the main
| customers) would certainly block.
| solardev wrote:
| At least then we'd get all onboard Starlink and tweets
| warning us when the door's about to fall off.
| butterfly42069 wrote:
| Nah, sell Boeing to Bezos.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| I eagerly await my boeing prime membership to start out
| good and get increasingly overpriced and junk rapidly over
| time.
| uoaei wrote:
| Every second part in the rockets would be counterfeit
| inside of 5 years.
| notahacker wrote:
| But when you get the comingled aircraft in your fleet,
| will the Chinese knockoff 737s be more or less defective
| than the next generation Boeings?
| Karellen wrote:
| Part of the benefit of having Starliner and SpX is
| redundancy. Having multiple vendors to choose from/have
| compete each other/use as backups if one is grounded, is a
| large part of the point. Having anyone, including Musk, have
| control over both defeats the purpose of redundancy.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Soyuz already provides redundancy, albeit not exactly
| commercial competition. The whole point of the ride sharing
| agreement with Russia is to prevent both countries from
| having the other rely on a single vehicle, to ensure the
| station can continue to operate if either America or Russia
| is grounded.
|
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the benefit of having Starliner and SpX is redundancy_
|
| 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
| threeseed wrote:
| Elon is under investigation by the DOJ/SEC so there is the
| possibility he ends up with jail time given his record.
|
| Also he should probably focus on Tesla and X given how poorly
| both are doing right now.
| BadHumans wrote:
| There is absolutely a 0% chance Elon goes to jail.
| threeseed wrote:
| > How long do you think my prison sentence is going to
| be? Will I see my children? I don't know.
|
| Elon Musk at least thinks it's a greater than zero
| possibility.
| watwut wrote:
| Elon Musk is pretty skilled at manipulating masses. What
| he says is what he thinks will make his fans react how he
| wants it. It does not mean he thinks he will go to prison
| nor the opposite.
|
| 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.
| airstrike wrote:
| Even after everything that's gone wrong for them, Boeing is
| still a $140B enterprise value company, of which ~$55B alone is
| debt, so even if their stock drops by another 50% they're still
| worth somewhere close to $100B... I doubt it's going private
| any time soon
| gchokov wrote:
| It wasn't good while it lasted ;)
| aSithLord wrote:
| divide et impera.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been
| delayed to at least around a year from now.
|
| 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.
| closewith wrote:
| > Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been
| delayed to at least around a year from now.
|
| I think this is a soft cancellation of Starliner. System
| certification is indefinitely paused.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Would be clearer to say that its return to flight has been
| delayed to at least around a year from now_
|
| No. The ISS is decommissioned in 2030 and Boeing is losing
| money on the programme. It makes sense for nobody to continue
| this charade.
| notahacker wrote:
| Would think that timeline is more likely to be extended than
| shortened. There will be successor missions, and other space
| use cases for which derivatives of an astronaut transfer
| vehicle have value.
|
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _that timeline is more likely to be extended than
| shortened_
|
| For the ISS? Based on what? It's most likely to remain
| where it is.
| lupusreal wrote:
| It probably won't be extended, but there isn't no reason
| for people to think otherwise. It has been extended in
| the past, and NASA's own white paper from this year says
| that extension is a possibility if there are no
| commercial LEO stations suitable to NASA by 2030 and if
| Russia agrees to continue their participation. This is
| despite the contract for the Deorbit Vehicle already
| being awarded to SpaceX; it would simply wait until
| later.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-
| deorbit-...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there isn 't no reason for people to think otherwise_
|
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| This basically. Either there's a functional commercial
| replacement which is theoretically also a use case for a
| properly functioning Starliner or the ISS gets extended.
| Plausibly both. It doesn't have a fixed life limit,
| hasn't stopped working, hasn't stopped being used for
| experiments, and a commercial space boom era when
| microgravity experiments started turning into businesses
| would be a weird time for the US to decide it was a waste
| of money and give the space station monopoly to China...
| lupusreal wrote:
| The ISS may not, but Starliner does have a fixed life. It
| is meant to fly on the Atlas V, which is end-of-life.
| Once those are gone Starliner would need to be integrated
| and recertified to fly on a new rocket, probably Vulcan,
| but it's doubtful Boeing would want to spend the money to
| do this.
|
| 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.
| dchichkov wrote:
| It is unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX_
|
| Agree. That's why Starliner should be killed. To open those
| resources to someone who actually intends to compete with
| SpaceX.
| dchichkov wrote:
| As long as there's competition, it is fine. Boeing fits
| at least that role easily. Plus, they've built the
| vehicle with no drama and without purchasing Twitter in
| the middle. This is worth something.
|
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Boeing fits at least that role_
|
| 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."
| dotnet00 wrote:
| One of the benefits of the commercial crew program was
| supposed to be that NASA would just be one customer of
| many, thus justifying why the company takes on the risk
| of making a fixed price bid.
|
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| The only positive thing I can say about his purchase of
| Twitter was that it finally stopped me wasting time on
| the site.
|
| 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.
| Exoristos wrote:
| You can just say "he has a few different opinions than my
| peer group" and leave it at that. Heck, you yourself can
| even form your own opinions -- it's fine -- don't look so
| aghast.
| ben_w wrote:
| Different opinions is not the problem. My own opinions
| differ plenty from my peers. Even that the opinions are
| outside my Overton Window isn't itself a problem, because
| (as with most of my nationality) that window excludes the
| 2nd Amendment and yet I can be here on this American
| website.
|
| Problem is, quite a lot of the weird stuff looks like
| defections in the IPD sense.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Intends, and (more importantly) is able to.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Starliner works. It had a minor issue that turned out not
| to be so serious. It just happens to obscenely expensive.
|
| 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?
| renegade-otter wrote:
| But the shareholders have been taken care of, right? Is the
| sacred shareholder OKAY?
|
| 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...
| throw4950sh06 wrote:
| What do shareholders have to do with it? Why are they so
| different from shareholders of Microsoft, Apple, Google,
| Facebook...? Do you really think they are happy now? No-damn-
| body would trade enormous future profits from one of the
| biggest opportunities of the future for some measly one-time
| millions today, in today's dollars. Space industry is going to
| produce many trillionaires.
| tjpnz wrote:
| This is the company which famously asked its engineers to put
| the shareholders at top of mind when making all of their
| decisions.
| throw4950sh06 wrote:
| So what? That doesn't mean anything. The shareholders
| didn't say this, the management of the company did.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The shareholders are supposed to fire management when
| they are being stupid.
| throw4950sh06 wrote:
| It's not that easy with such a big company. Look at Tesla
| and Musk. A management-aligned board can put a stop to
| many things the shareholders would like to do.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Since the shareholders elect the board, I guess there
| might be a lesson for democracy in here too.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| I think the problem is that the shareholders do not care
| about _long-term_ profits either. They keep the
| management because the management prioritizes the
| shareholders and not the company or its customers.
|
| 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.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Thinking about shareholders in one broad stroke isn't
| useful.
|
| 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.
| throw4950sh06 wrote:
| Retail is _very insignificant_ holder of this kind of
| stock. Less than 10-30% total in most cases of S &P
| stocks. It's mostly the pension funds, and big investors.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| If we're talking institutional investors, logic suggests
| most of their votes would favour intermediate-term
| policies overall since their various interests encompass
| the whole breadth of short-, mid-, and long-term.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| Its not that shareholders dont care, its that ownership
| isnt concentrated enough in a shareholder that both cares
| and is competent. I wrote my undergrad econometrics paper
| on this, it was actually pretty interesting. You
| inevitably end up with board capture and short term focus
| unless there is an elon or group of elons with enough
| shareholder votes to threaten management because
| uninvolved shareholders tend to listen to the managent
| and management wants to capture the board so they can
| vote themselves higher comp which relies on short term
| performance for the payout, which is much larger for the
| ceo than longterm returns on existing comp holdings. It
| has likey gotten much worse since passive blackrock et al
| etfs gained such large market share because they vote the
| shares in ways that benefits them which is only loosely
| correlated with beneffitting the ultimate share owner.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| And moved its headquarters 2,000 miles away to not be close
| to those annoying "engineers".
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Any member of management, at any company, whose focus is more
| on their next-quarter or end-of-year payout (which seems to
| be most of them), will cheerfully trade enormous future
| profits for _other people_ for a short-term profit for
| _themselves_.
| throw4950sh06 wrote:
| That's my whole point. It's the management/possibly board,
| not the shareholders.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Sadly I expect the vast majority of shareholders would
| individually trade the future health and profits of the
| company for their own immediate benefit as well, were
| they in a position to make the same choice. You're right
| that since they collectively don't benefit from such
| short-sighted focus, they wouldn't make the same choice.
|
| 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.
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| We have a serious problem with corporate governance in this
| country. To be clear, it should NOT BE POSSIBLE to hollow out
| and destroy a company in this way and be rewarded for it by
| wall street. We keep blaming the bad actors, but the truth is,
| the regulators are at fault: It should be impossible to profit
| in this way. Changes to corporate governance rules would leave
| this still possible for private companies, but public companies
| would be judged differently and to a higher standard. Anyone
| here a public policy wonk who can explain how to change this?
| g-b-r wrote:
| > Anyone here a public policy wonk who can explain how to
| change this?
|
| Stop considering the bad actors legal persons that can buy
| off the regulators
| jfengel wrote:
| Yeah. You start by not electing a political party who hates
| government in general and regulators in particular.
|
| 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.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| If the aerospace industry doesn't have enough regulation
| for you I'm puzzled to think of one that does.
| zaphar wrote:
| You fix this by letting Boeing fail. They keep going because
| our government keeps bailing them out. We deem them too
| important to fail so we keep holding their corpse up Weekend
| at Bernies style and hope the voodoo music doesn't cut out.
|
| 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.
| tootie wrote:
| Honestly this feels like an indictment of privatizing space
| travel. SpaceX is a perfect storm of a benefactor with
| unbelievable wealth being able to hoard the best engineers money
| can buy. And now the advancements they've made are proprietary.
| Ideally Boeing and SpaceX could just collaborate and not have
| fight each other and waste a load of time and money. If the point
| is an open, competitive field driving space exploration forward,
| it seems we don't have that.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Boeing has (had?) more money than Musk ever did, so Boeing's
| failures are their own fault.
|
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's an interesting take. My take is that SpaceX shows the
| enormous benefit of privatizing space activities, and of a
| vertically integrated provider.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| But... that's the model of the US space program from the get
| go. We're just trading one private company for another. Apollo
| 11 was contracted out to Boeing, Rockwell, and Grumman. The
| Space Shuttle was the United Space Alliance (Rockwell /
| Lockheed Martin), the engines were made by Rocketdyne...
|
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| There's also the fact that companies like Boeing have grown
| fat off of blank check contracts from the government, such
| that they are no longer capable of doing the job.
|
| 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.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| Cost plus contracts are an absolute disease that atrophies
| any company's ability to ship on a budget
| TMWNN wrote:
| > SpaceX is a perfect storm of a benefactor with unbelievable
| wealth being able to hoard the best engineers money can buy.
|
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Plus, back when Musk and Bezos entered aerospace, a common
| joke was "how do you become a millionaire in aerospace? Start
| as a billionaire!", SpaceX was the exception to the trend,
| and had fewer resources than even other previous space
| startups.
|
| 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.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| This is an absolutely ridiculous take. Look at Arianespace:
| https://videopress.com/embed/DYF1wrn8?hd=1&cover=1&loop=0&au...
|
| 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.
| dbrueck wrote:
| > Honestly this feels like an indictment of privatizing space
| travel
|
| 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.
| panick21_ wrote:
| You should consider first learning the facts before you just
| make up stuff.
|
| > 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?
| lupusreal wrote:
| Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin _before_ SpaceX started, and he
| was certainly a hell lot richer than Elon Musk at that time and
| many years longer. The narrative of SpaceX owing their success
| to Elon Musk being rich doesn 't align with the facts.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Seems pointless to keep persisting with it given the ISS is
| approaching EOL. There are also a finite supply of boosters left
| it can fly on.
| mglz wrote:
| Wasn't it also supposed to go to the moon station for Artemis?
| Or is that also a non-starter if Starship works out?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Nope, Starliner is not designed to go beyond low Earth orbit.
| You might be thinking of the commercial space stations
| intended to replace the ISS, where, yes, Starliner was
| proposed as the crew transport for Blue Origin's station.
| asau wrote:
| While I always knew what Starliner is supposed to be, when
| worded in this way:
|
| > Starliner is not designed to go beyond low Earth orbit
|
| It's actually hilarious they chose this name.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The name of the specific Starliner that got stuck at the
| ISS?
|
| 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.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| You're probably thinking of Orion which is being manufactured
| by Lockheed Martin and Airbus.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)
| perihelions wrote:
| That's Lockheed Martin's unrelated Orion [0] spacecraft
| (which launches on the SLS orbital rocket, which is
| contracted primarily to Boeing). It's been under development
| since 2004; spent $29.4 billion; flown twice without
| astronauts--in 2014, and in 2022; and still doesn't work [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/nasa-confirms-
| independ...
| dgrin91 wrote:
| I wonder if Boeing will cancel starliner since they already lost
| 1B+ and won't have a chance to earn on it for a while
| Vecr wrote:
| If they don't fix it, what will their reputation be like? In
| isolation giving up is probably the correct thing to do, if it
| wasn't so extremely public.
| solardev wrote:
| Does Boeing still have any reputation left worth saving?
| Seems like they gotta start from scratch regardless.
| panick21_ wrote:
| If they drop this program they basically fuck over NASA.
| And Boeing is still the prime contractor on SLS. Meaning
| that NASA could very well finally stop playing nice over
| SLS.
|
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| > 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?
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I mean, yes they might close up shop entirely but that's
| not really an outcome they want.
|
| 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.
| mshockwave wrote:
| NASA used to be nice over SLS was that they really didn't
| have a choice + congress pressure (hiring people who lost
| their jobs due to space shuttle cancelation) but now it
| seems like NASA _does_ have a choice to choose an
| alternative (and waaay cheaper) vehicle over SLS. Curious
| whether those senators will keep their pressure.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Boeing is still the prime contractor on SLS. Meaning
| that NASA could very well finally stop playing nice over
| SLS_
|
| NASA has been trying to cancel SLS for a decade. It's
| nicknamed the Senate Launch System for a reason.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Europa Clipper was supposed to fly on SLS. That not
| happening saved several billion dollars. SLS is a fat
| disgusting barrel of pork that should be canceled and
| hidden for the sake of NASA's own reputation, not to
| mention taxpayers. If they continue with SLS when
| Starship is in serial production and flying regularly, it
| will make NASA look like one of the most inefficient and
| corrupt organizations in American history. It will be
| NASA's own neck on the chopping block if they don't
| distance themselves from SLS soon.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| The contract is set up in such a way that there was initially
| some development money (that wasn't actually enough to cover
| development), but the bulk of the payments in the contract come
| from flying the actual operational missions, which Boeing is
| yet to fly any of.
|
| 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.
| mjevans wrote:
| I wonder how expensive a proper thruster redesign will be
| though? The lose less money depends on as is rather than as
| correctly designed and validated which they're at the very
| expensive last few percent to reach.
| ein0p wrote:
| Sanity prevails. A rare turn of events for US government whose
| main motto in life is "we don't care - we don't have to"
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