Boeing was awarded more money for their vehicle, had years of extra time and two previous demonstration flights. This flight should have been close to flawless given the additional time Boeing had for remediation and testing. Boeing engineers should have understood their systems well enough to convincingly demonstrate the vehicle met NASA's safety requirements. Even after much additional testing during the flight they couldn't make their case. Starliner will probably complete its third uncrewed return intact and people might question if NASA was being overly cautious but perhaps Boeing should have supplied a crewed vehicle with reliable thrusters and avoided this embarrassment.
And don't forget that SpaceX had to sue the government/Boeing/Lockheed/ULA, multiple times, just in order to be allowed to compete for these contracts rather than having it locked down to the usual suspects.
Near flawless is an unreasonable expectation. SpaceX had the advantage of running years of cargo missions. The error was simply not using the same successful model with any new vehicle.
It is subjective language but for me "near flawless" is a reasonable expectation for a qualification flight. Not perfect because that is unreasonable. A leaking toilet would have been fine if Starliner had one. It isn't a critical system. An off-nominal thruster or two would also be acceptable. They have redundancy for a reason.
The helium leaks were not desirable but helium is difficult. Boeing engineers could demonstrate the rate of the leaks did not threaten the mission so it was manageable.
The thruster issues are completely different. Boeing couldn't present NASA with a convincing model of how the thrusters would perform. If they can't characterize such a fundamental part of the vehicle it is impossible to make an informed decisions which is a huge fail.
In hindsight a cargo first experience would have been valuable for commercial crew whether the winner was Sierra, NG or Boeing however that would have disqualified Sierra and Boeing. Boeing's involvement in commercial crew legitimized it politically. Boeing directly, via acquisition and through their suppliers including Aerojet have decades of experience in space flight far beyond SpaceX at the time. Boeing were not the underdogs.
What a weird argument. Boeing has the advantage of building things for space and NASA since the 60s - orbiters, rockets etc. They had a 40 year head start and some of the best engineers in the world. Near flawless compared to a 20 year old company I would say is a very reasonable expectation.
I wonder if there are books or articles that analyze how and why Boeing declined so fast and so spectacularly. Boeing used to be able to build 747 under budget and ahead of schedule, just like Lockheed could dazzle the world by creating U2 ahead of schedule and under budget with fewer than 200 people (or < 100?) in 15 months with the cost of a few millions. It can't be just the change of geopolitics post Cold War, right? It can't be just that the fixed-margin structure imposed by the government, right? It can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the leadership, right? It can't just be that Boeing is in the phase of accelerated decline as any old-enough company, right?
I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
It reads like a plea to not turn into McDonnell Douglas (this was only a few years after the MD and Boeing merger), which we all know it essentially has. The last couple of sentences fire shots at Douglas Aircraft directly:
"The fate of the former Douglas Aircraft Company, which was reduced to a systems integrator in the early 1970s by excessive outsourcing of DC-10 production, is a clear indicator of what will happen to other companies which fail to sustain the conditions under which it is possible to launch new products. It is hoped that this sacrifice can save the new and expanded Boeing from a similar fate."
The trouble is that government contracts always strongly incentivize ‘excessive outsourcing’, and Boeing’s absorption of MD increased the dependence on government contracts, though Boeing was already on that road (especially after taking on Rockwell). Government oversight (almost) always discourages large profit margins, which makes increasing low-risk costs very appealing. In addition to that, there are strong political incentives for ‘distributing’ contracts widely, with the Space Shuttle being a famous example of this, having parts made or assembled in 48 different states.
Last paragraph is a bit melodramatic. Here's what's publicly known:
- Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation with a significant source of revenue coming from the government. 40% in 2024¹, billions of dollars of public funds! Just a bit more and it would be mostly state-funded.
- They're the 4th biggest American defense contractor, so they're likely seen as vital for securing state power by many in the government.
- The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
Using Ockham's razor, here's my guess what happened: To get in this position in the first place, there will have been a fair bit of lobbying and "greasing the wheels" involved. Boeing eventually found themselves in a position where they got government contracts, no matter what. Leadership got complacent, they didn't really compete anymore because they didn't have to. This was when Musk came in and disrupted the space industry. But at that point, company culture was likely already too far down the drain for quick fixes. The situation would already be much worse for their space division, if not for the fact that they have such good relations with NASA and the government. NASA basically covered for them and played down the seriousness of the issues for weeks. And even now, they're not having SpaceX rescue the astronauts immediately, which would be even more embarrassing for Boeing. Instead they're bringing them back together with the already planned SpaceX Crew-9 flight next year. Boeing keeps getting away with black eyes, there aren't enough consequences despite all the serious issues.
> - The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
This is irrelevant here; the only people buying most of the products that Boeing makes are governments or airlines (many of which have government backing, because countries find it advantageous to have an airline). Without government, there's just no Boeing, or SpaceX, or Lockheed Martin, or Airbus, or...
The problem ultimately goes back to 1996 when Boeing was more-or-less taken over by McDonnell-Douglas management, and quality engineering took a back seat to quarterly results. Everything, from bad QA to "greasing the wheels" with lobbyists, ultimately goes back to someone with an MBA deciding that those behaviors were worth it for the stock price increase.
And to be fair, they were... until they weren't. But by then, the guy with the MBA has either left or divested, and it becomes someone else's problem.
SpaceX's success can be in a large part contributed to the fact that they don't have a bunch of retirement and pension funds demanding a chunk of the profits every quarter regardless of actual market space performance.
The fact that SpaceX demonstrated, without a doubt, that reuse of a first stage was viable in December 2015, and that we still do not have any clearly reusable first stage from anyone else tells you the whole industry is complacent and juiced up on the fat margins of launching a first stage up, then chucking it in the ocean, and then asking for money for another first stage.
Your say that believing the downfall of Boeing is reflective of the downfall of all of society is "melodramatic", and then spend the rest of your post explaining how Boeing's failures are exasperated by failures in government and other organizations. You defeat your own argument.
There US Army generally has one tourniquet that it’s deemed best. The CAT by North American rescue. Every Soldier is awash in these things. They hand them out like candy on Halloween. And rightly so.
But the Government has to buy them from businesses that meet certain characteristics. Woman owned, etc. That’s a great thing, right?
In this case however, that female owned business is the guy who invented the things wife. Who he sells them to at a mark-up. Who then sells them to the government.
Economy of scale? Ya! They are the number one buyer and pay the most. Honestly, who cares though, it’s only a couple million a year. Drop in the bucket.
How did Boeing fail? Death by a thousand cuts. That same story probably plays out across the entire supppy chain. Every part, every product, every supplier. Compounded over and over again.
> - The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
Government aquisition is a monopsony (market dynamic where there is one purchaser who wields all the power) which means "free market competition" doesn't exist. This causes lots of negative consequences. Here's a discussion of the topic in the context of defense but a lot of the same surely applies to space.
In the late 00's there were billions on the table of junk contracts for parts service training with crazy pricing to the USAF.
I would speculate that when those got shaken out, (and likely some space contracts sniped away by SpaceX) Boeing did not make any adjustments for the revenue loss and simply tried to continue on their original bloated trajectory but instead cutting every corner possible along the way.
> Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation with a significant source of revenue coming from the government. 40% in 2024¹, billions of dollars of public funds! Just a bit more and it would be mostly state-funded.
SpaceX (as of a year or two ago) was getting 45%+ of its funding from the US government.
And then there's the $900M in subsidies SpaceX asked for to provide rural internet access via starlink...
> The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
That doesn't explain why their civilian aircraft aren't just not the best product, but have gone completely to shit over the last decade or two. The 737 max is the most notorious example here, as it's their most recent development and has never been good from the start - but reporting suggests that the engineering on their formerly-good lines has been going downhill also, and it's only the fact that they started out as good products which means they've taken longer to fall as low.
And there's very little government revenue for the civilian aircraft design and manufacturing side of the business. It's all free market competition.
My more thoughtful reply: I think "too big to fail" gets a bad rap on HN. In my view, for any sufficiently large country+economy, at some point, your top 3-5 defense contractors will be considered "too big to fail". No way around that. Depending upon the size of your country+economy, this is true for steel manuf also, but probably just the top 1-2.
Has anyone with great expertise in Boeing considered the effects of a break-up? I'm not sure why Boeing needs so many different industries under one roof -- space, civil, military, plus others.
I'm trying to find an article from circa 2007 on the changes at Boeing but I can't find it right now. Read those two and follow their various links and you'll get more information.
The long story short version is that post McDonnell Douglas merger, Boeing's management culture was replaced with MD's management culture and things have only declined since.
1. MD merging with Boeing and taking over management, basically. Management gurus hate this being pointed out
2. Moving headquarters to Chicago - part of the MBAs taking over
3. Losing the engineering first mindset - this is really the core of what happened there.
When the company kept focusing on stock returns and "financializing" the company, and did things like spinning off Spirt airplane assembly company, that was the real visible symbol of the problem. In the past few months they gave up and rebought them to join with Boeing.
The solution for being will be a multiple year transition of the company into being much more technology and engineering focused. They will have to eject the MBA type "reducing cost is the goal" type leaders. The problem is those are completely the leaders of the company today.
Absolutely MBAification. But also complexity crisis.
My two most major issues with the world today.
Boeing got some but worse, and also made their products so complex that humans can’t understand it as a whole let alone communicate it to others.
It’s not just Boeing. It’s everyone, everywhere. All systems in every market require so much extra “stuff” that we’re on a spiral.
Compound that with MBAs that insist things “run lean” and “the core competency group you aren’t in found X, so meet your target of Y or find somewhere else to work” to “We need that BlackRock money, so do whatever the govs of NY, IL, and CA say to do because their trillion dollars speaks”.
Wasn't the U2 a skunkworks project where they just did it vs opening it up for input from committee whether from corporate or bureaucratic? Starliner was far far from that. From day one, everyone's fingers were in the pie.
U2 was Skunkworks, they started with an existing airframe (F-104?) and worked from there. Significant compromises, for example the wings droop so much they skid on the ground on landing and it's use was limited by the improved anti-aircraft missiles that became available around the same time.
Companies serving the military and companies serving the population at large should generally be separated.
Boeing's fall (thanks to the reverse McDonell Douglas takeover) was mostly as their defense arm grew. Huge margins, a very different type of working. Boeing stopped giving a damn about it's civil aviation business, as is exemplified by moving their HQ from civil manufacturing hub Seattle first to Chicago and now to Arlington County, Virginia literally to suck up to Washington and lobby 24/7.
That's a very different type of business.
If Boeing was forced to make money with a successful civil aviation business alone it would be run very very differently.
There's a lot of theory about this. Look into strategy theory. A few well know concepts as entry points; Feedback loops, path dependency, disruptive innovation, group thinking. Other related concepts needed to analyze the Boeing story completely to understand their strategic position and defensibility could be; Core competence, Blue Ocean, Porter's Five Forces. More macro and fundamentally I'd look into Austrian school if thought and "destructive innovation", and core concepts such as division of labor.
Without knowing the details it makes a lot of sense that Boeing ended where they did (Boeing/SpaceX fits a lot of theories above). What may save the US is not the ability to save companies like Boeing - that would more likely hinder progress on a mid to long term scale - it's the ability to come up with new companies/innovators to overtake the incumbents.
In my interpretation. Fundamentally it goes all the way to the quality of institutions and culture. Time will tell, but I'm feeling more worried about those than the current ability to innovate.
Probably mostly of the "do the opposite of whatever this guy says" variety. ;)
The top review on this book says:
The author credits James McNerney for turning around Boeing. He
neglected to say which way they were turning. For example, he
credits JN for outsourcing so much of the 787 -- which included
the wings, perhaps the thing Boeing did best. The 787 ended up
way over budget and three years late. That's good management?
Any organization that seemingly operates poorly typically just has bad incentives. Congressional funding for space became a feedback loop of pork for states (jobs program) from Apollo, continuing to today with SLS. Commercial crew demonstrates how stunningly dystopian over-specific congressional funding is. The solution is simple: Congress should take a giant step back from NASA involvement so NASA can have more commercial programs like commercial crew.
Unfortunately, the way we structure, fund, and manage modern corporations creates tons of poor incentives all on its own, no legislative influence needed. (unless your goal is to maximize short term profit signals at all costs)
I think that they’re looking for intelligent, insightful analysis. As opposed to the myriad parroted HN comments on the subject, written by developers that pretend that their expertise is somehow transferable.
> I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
Markets cycle. Companies cycle. People cycle (actually just die unless you consider their offspring their continuation).
All systems do cycle; including the USA. It doesn't mean it's the end. If China doesn't rise and crashes it, there isn't really any other serious challenger and it will likely be the "rising" empire again.
Eh. Maybe. My money’s somewhere in between. The US is an empire in decline, but it isn’t clear that China is the replacement. If China can somehow survive demographic collapse, then I’d put my money on them, but that’s a big if.
SpaceX is a US company too. The government has to be comfortable letting the incumbents fail, so that companies like SpaceX and Anduril can take their place.
Stock buyback for investor gratification enabled the most optimal way for executives to keep meeting kpis in the short term rather than long term investments
> I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
I’m tired of this hyperbolic, melodramatic angst about the general decline of the U.S. Did you not read the part about the crew being returned by SpaceX? A company that just made landing rockets a reality only 9 years ago, not even 10 years has passed and reusable rockets are as boring as smartphones. NASA identified an issue on the Boeing Starliner, and a cutting edge company (SpaceX) stepped up for a non-emergency rescue mission. There was no loss of life, or equipment, there’s been no injuries, just mild inconveniences. This isn’t a nation in decline, this is a nation that has even begun to peak yet.
I'd be extremely happy to be wrong, as I invest my life and my family's in the US. As for the concern, it's not about this one particular incident, but about the pattern that other countries have experienced: the government and the society has so many entangled interest that no one knows how to move things forward. As a result, the country perishes. I'm not saying that the US is in that trajectory, but I did see some aspects of institutional decay, like the cost of canon shells is 6X of Russian's, despite that Russia is a much more corrupt country, or like the country is so divided and many people simply accept that election is about telling stories and personal attacks instead of logical discussion of policies. Like it would take billions to build the next-gen battleships or planes, and we couldn't have good enough supply chain in the US. Like our medical system is so much more expensive than other developed countries, and the list can go on.
I dont blame NASA, who knows what else is wrong with that capsule.
I feel bad for Boeing. Though to be honest when I worked on a project where we were a Boeing sub (defense)we didn’t really care for them..
Competition is good, and it’s sad they can’t get their act together. Hopefully someone else will, though it will take years. The problem with Boeing is they seem to treat all their projects like the non competitive defense space..
I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about? That the executives made the wrong decision?
I think they meant they feel bad for the people actually doing work, not the people strategizing around wringing out the company for short-term profits so they can move on and do it again someplace else. At least I really hope that’s what they meant. You never know on HN.
Boeing is made up of a lot of people, some who have done their absolute best. They don't deserve the failure that their leadership caused. I feel bad for Boeing employees, but I don't feel bad for their management.
Treating Boeing as a single entity is absurd. The people there have done great work and their collective contributions to the people of the US and world at large is very much appreciated by many (including myself).
It is a tragedy that what was even greater has been so badly diminished by the greed and incompetence of a few. Hating what’s happened to Boeing (and perhaps those responsible for it) is very different than hating Boeing.
They didn’t really try to optimize for maximum profits.
That memo from 20 years ago talks about how Boeing management was optimizing their earnings to capital expenses ratio by selling off factories and manufacturing lines to their contractors. The idea was that this would make Boeing more efficient. In theory they would have the same profits but lower capital expenses. The memo points out how fallacious this is, because while it does improve _this year’s_ numbers, next year’s profits will drop because they no longer own the factory that makes the profits. The memo points out that the contractors will now be earning a larger and larger share of the profits that Boeing used to collect, while Boeing keeps all of the risks. When you buy a whole fuselage from one supplier and a pair of wings from another, you take on all the risk that they won’t fit together properly while the suppliers pad their profits by making you pay extra for every change you ask for.
>“between 2013 and 2019, Boeing spent 43 billion dollars on stock buybacks (a hundred and four per cent of its profits) rather than spending resources to address design flaws in some of its popular jet models,”
There are still some, even many, people there that are doing their jobs as well as they can at the expense of bad executive decisions. I’m sure morale there is not great. I don’t feel bad for the executives at all, or the company really, but there are likely some great people that are just getting kicked around based on the crisis of the week.
The Boeing of today is merely a husk of its former glory. If the U.S. had another viable domestic airplane manufacturer I bet we’d see a lot more pressure on them. That can still happen. I hope it does.
Breaking up businesses that are “too big to fail” is good for the economy in the long run, and for defense firms is arguably an issue of national security. It seems to me an incredibly bad idea for a nation to have all of its defense eggs in a single, increasingly fragile basket.
NASA failed to communicate the seriousness of the issue from the beginning. Their press conference mentioned all the work they've been doing for MONTHS. Who knew? Everyone thought things were 'fine'. Huge huge huge failure by NASA here. They can't be trusted.
Maybe NASA still wants to get something for the money spent launching Crew 9 and get some science done, not just be a rescue mission. They don't want to cut that mission short.
I'm unsure of the specifics of the Dragon capsule, but I know that on the Soyuz even the seats themselves are custom molded to each astronaut. You've gotta keep in mind that the capsules are designed for failure scenarios. That includes things like extremely high g force ejections (pushing close to 20g) from a failing rocket, depressurization scenarios, and so on.
It all seems a bit over the top when things go well, but especially as we start to up the rate of sending people into space - things don't go well quite often. The Space Shuttle only sent people to space 135 times, and there was a complete loss of life on two of those missions. If aircraft had that sort of failure rate then you'd see a plane dropping out of the sky about once a minute, literally.
Don't spacesuits typically have some umbilical connection to the capsule life support systems? It's easy to imagine that these connectors might not be standardized between different capsules, and that sending up a new space suit might be easier than designing an adapter.
Easy to imagine but there are so many details to nail down that it's hard to do in practice.
In the words of someone in the industry who tends to be on the laconic side:
"It is not as simple as a 'common connector'. There are different pressures, mixture ratios, comm gear, seat interfaces, etc. A requirement for commonality flows requirements upstream to the suit, seat and spacecraft. "
Some where recently, I read something about this being an accepted thing. If you have 2 separate capsules that both use the same connector where there is a fault found with the connector, then both capsules are grounded because of the one connector.
I believe that's still the contingency plan in the unlikely event that they have to evacuate the ISS in the period between Starliner undocking and Crew-9 docking.
From the press conference today, they stated that there is already an extra SpaceX suit on the ISS. Both astronauts have tried it on, and it fits. They will be bringing an additional empty suit up when Crew launches.
I think you underestimate space travel to space station.
Well it seems like it is routine thing now and spacex seems like routinely launches without a flaw.
But going up there and making it back is still huge feat that is possible only by collaboration of huge numbers of super experienced and highly trained professionals.
I am going a bit over the top - but still travel even to low earth orbit is something far outside of any human being reach - on his own or his group of buddies.
For years I would fly with Sponge Bob Squarepants themed underwear so in the infinitesimal chance of a catastrophe someone cleaning up the wreck might get a chuckle.
Acceptable loss of crew event is like 1 in 250 (can't remember the exact number). They can't quantify the probability of failure, so not putting them in Starliner is the right call.
It's crazy to me that while we've been fantasizing about lunar bases, Mars settlements, asteroid mining and colony ships, now, 60+ years after our "space" era started, we still haven't figured out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient way. We all need a collective reality check on our spacefaring hopes.
We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
> We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.
(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)
> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.
> Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
I wouldn't say they do too much though.
In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful. Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5) We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.
So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.
Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in place of those several companies which are building orbital stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the problem?
Given that SpaceX is about to launch four people on what is more-or-less a joyride (Polaris Dawn), it's really only the government and boeing that seem to be having problems.
SpaceX exists because of that government's significant funding of the company and the prescient decision to award multiple (fixed-price!) Commercial Cargo/Crew contracts.
It'll include the first commercial space walk ever. Calling that a joy-ride either trivializes an epic accomplishment or correctly describes a joy-ride of the gods. Helios' daily commute, but faster.
The government (NASA with their commercial space effort) is the reason there's a SpaceX and a dragon to be available as backup. The government seems to be doing alright here.
OceanGate launched three people on a joyride to the bottom of the ocean and the sub imploded.
Rich people being willing to spend buckets of money on an experience is not evidence that it is "safe" or "cost effective", it's just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with.
You seem to be unaware that the Soyuz system has been safely moving people back and forth to LEO for decades. SpaceX has been doing it since 2020. This failure should only be taken as a comment on Boeing's broken engineering processes and incompetent management. It says nothing about our society's spacefaring capabilities.
This is an absurd statement. There are currently three operational spacecraft that have been safely and reliably ferrying people back and forth from LEO for years now: Soyuz, Dragon, and Shenzhou. This is a test flight for a fourth spacecraft.
We get people to and from low earth orbit safely and (relative to the 60’s) cost efficiently all the time. One failure isn’t an indictment of the whole industry, any more than one broken down car negates how much better cars are today than in the past.
And it wasn't even a real failure; they contractually have to provide something like a 1 in 200 chance of failure or better, and in the state the vehicle is in they haven't or can't prove that they're meeting that safety margin, so NASA is choosing to go with an option that does have that safety margin. That's it. If they were to come down in it anyways there's still likely a 1% or less chance of failure.
I agree. It reminds me that it is now 6,000+ years (at least) since our agricultural era started, and we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.
> we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.
We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth and then a few billion more in the future. We simply choose not to. It isn't a technological or logistical issue, but cultural and political.
And that a brand new company offers the only U.S.-based method for doing so, when NASA and these other companies have been at this since roughly World War II!
It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.
Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)
But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.
This is like the difference between electrical engineering and software engineering. It’s just so more expensive to create and test anything in EE so development cycles are much longer. Compare that to software engineering where people are trying and making new paradigms like every week.
Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.
The same goes for secure and bug free software development (while the cost of errors in software rise all the time)
Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.
Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.
I fully agree. Personally I don't think we'll ever have an extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon. We might visit Mars in the next century, maybe, but a colony surviving there is pure fantasy.
It's been 63 years ago since the first human visited the orbit around earth. Since then, development and research happens faster and faster. We now even have commercial companies who are developing space crafts for humans.
I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference from today, and today we're already doing things that were unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).
I'm with you. Unfortunately. The older I get, the more I realise just how hard, far and pointless existing beyond the Earth's atmosphere will be, for the most part.
Certainly the next few hundred years. There's just no real point. Ten thousand years hence, who knows?
I'm absolutely rapt following SpaceX's journey, but then when I mentally scale that up to 'something useful' for localspace living (eg. a useful percentage of current daily aviation volume), I realise how utterly unsustainable it fundamentally is.
The older I get, the less of a Paradox Fermi's idle thought becomes. Sadly.
Given how much future is left (a whole lot), I don't really understand why some people seem so confident that humanity is just going to stay on Earth forever. Are you assuming industrial civilization will collapse? It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's a given.
We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been focusing on since the late 60's.
The world is not mobilizing towards these big "civilization advancing" goals, we're all just faffing about solving the next tiny little thing infront of our faces. That plus we're breeding mediocrity and not promoting excellence through meritocracy. This is purely cultural, and it's right infront of us every day to see and participate in (or not).
No, that NASA article is mostly fluff. The original link to the ongoing press conference and Eric Berger's summary of it (https://x.com/SciGuySpace) are better.
Yes, permanent teflon deformation. Problem is, if the deformation observed in ground tests was permanent, why did the ones in space eventually seem to recover?
That's what's making it harder to trust the thrusters I think.
I understood what they were saying about the simulations as that the teflon seemed to have expanded slightly and disrupting the oxidizers input, meaning the thrusters wouldn't work as they should.
Readit News
The helium leaks were not desirable but helium is difficult. Boeing engineers could demonstrate the rate of the leaks did not threaten the mission so it was manageable.
The thruster issues are completely different. Boeing couldn't present NASA with a convincing model of how the thrusters would perform. If they can't characterize such a fundamental part of the vehicle it is impossible to make an informed decisions which is a huge fail.
In hindsight a cargo first experience would have been valuable for commercial crew whether the winner was Sierra, NG or Boeing however that would have disqualified Sierra and Boeing. Boeing's involvement in commercial crew legitimized it politically. Boeing directly, via acquisition and through their suppliers including Aerojet have decades of experience in space flight far beyond SpaceX at the time. Boeing were not the underdogs.
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I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-...
It reads like a plea to not turn into McDonnell Douglas (this was only a few years after the MD and Boeing merger), which we all know it essentially has. The last couple of sentences fire shots at Douglas Aircraft directly:
"The fate of the former Douglas Aircraft Company, which was reduced to a systems integrator in the early 1970s by excessive outsourcing of DC-10 production, is a clear indicator of what will happen to other companies which fail to sustain the conditions under which it is possible to launch new products. It is hoped that this sacrifice can save the new and expanded Boeing from a similar fate."
- Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation with a significant source of revenue coming from the government. 40% in 2024¹, billions of dollars of public funds! Just a bit more and it would be mostly state-funded.
- They're the 4th biggest American defense contractor, so they're likely seen as vital for securing state power by many in the government.
- The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
Using Ockham's razor, here's my guess what happened: To get in this position in the first place, there will have been a fair bit of lobbying and "greasing the wheels" involved. Boeing eventually found themselves in a position where they got government contracts, no matter what. Leadership got complacent, they didn't really compete anymore because they didn't have to. This was when Musk came in and disrupted the space industry. But at that point, company culture was likely already too far down the drain for quick fixes. The situation would already be much worse for their space division, if not for the fact that they have such good relations with NASA and the government. NASA basically covered for them and played down the seriousness of the issues for weeks. And even now, they're not having SpaceX rescue the astronauts immediately, which would be even more embarrassing for Boeing. Instead they're bringing them back together with the already planned SpaceX Crew-9 flight next year. Boeing keeps getting away with black eyes, there aren't enough consequences despite all the serious issues.
¹ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/why-u...
This is irrelevant here; the only people buying most of the products that Boeing makes are governments or airlines (many of which have government backing, because countries find it advantageous to have an airline). Without government, there's just no Boeing, or SpaceX, or Lockheed Martin, or Airbus, or...
The problem ultimately goes back to 1996 when Boeing was more-or-less taken over by McDonnell-Douglas management, and quality engineering took a back seat to quarterly results. Everything, from bad QA to "greasing the wheels" with lobbyists, ultimately goes back to someone with an MBA deciding that those behaviors were worth it for the stock price increase.
And to be fair, they were... until they weren't. But by then, the guy with the MBA has either left or divested, and it becomes someone else's problem.
SpaceX's success can be in a large part contributed to the fact that they don't have a bunch of retirement and pension funds demanding a chunk of the profits every quarter regardless of actual market space performance.
But the Government has to buy them from businesses that meet certain characteristics. Woman owned, etc. That’s a great thing, right?
In this case however, that female owned business is the guy who invented the things wife. Who he sells them to at a mark-up. Who then sells them to the government.
Economy of scale? Ya! They are the number one buyer and pay the most. Honestly, who cares though, it’s only a couple million a year. Drop in the bucket.
How did Boeing fail? Death by a thousand cuts. That same story probably plays out across the entire supppy chain. Every part, every product, every supplier. Compounded over and over again.
Government aquisition is a monopsony (market dynamic where there is one purchaser who wields all the power) which means "free market competition" doesn't exist. This causes lots of negative consequences. Here's a discussion of the topic in the context of defense but a lot of the same surely applies to space.
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/break-the-department-of-def...
I would speculate that when those got shaken out, (and likely some space contracts sniped away by SpaceX) Boeing did not make any adjustments for the revenue loss and simply tried to continue on their original bloated trajectory but instead cutting every corner possible along the way.
SpaceX (as of a year or two ago) was getting 45%+ of its funding from the US government.
And then there's the $900M in subsidies SpaceX asked for to provide rural internet access via starlink...
That doesn't explain why their civilian aircraft aren't just not the best product, but have gone completely to shit over the last decade or two. The 737 max is the most notorious example here, as it's their most recent development and has never been good from the start - but reporting suggests that the engineering on their formerly-good lines has been going downhill also, and it's only the fact that they started out as good products which means they've taken longer to fall as low.
And there's very little government revenue for the civilian aircraft design and manufacturing side of the business. It's all free market competition.
My more thoughtful reply: I think "too big to fail" gets a bad rap on HN. In my view, for any sufficiently large country+economy, at some point, your top 3-5 defense contractors will be considered "too big to fail". No way around that. Depending upon the size of your country+economy, this is true for steel manuf also, but probably just the top 1-2.
Has anyone with great expertise in Boeing considered the effects of a break-up? I'm not sure why Boeing needs so many different industries under one roof -- space, civil, military, plus others.
https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg... - 2020 article on the topic
I'm trying to find an article from circa 2007 on the changes at Boeing but I can't find it right now. Read those two and follow their various links and you'll get more information.
The long story short version is that post McDonnell Douglas merger, Boeing's management culture was replaced with MD's management culture and things have only declined since.
2. Moving headquarters to Chicago - part of the MBAs taking over
3. Losing the engineering first mindset - this is really the core of what happened there.
When the company kept focusing on stock returns and "financializing" the company, and did things like spinning off Spirt airplane assembly company, that was the real visible symbol of the problem. In the past few months they gave up and rebought them to join with Boeing.
The solution for being will be a multiple year transition of the company into being much more technology and engineering focused. They will have to eject the MBA type "reducing cost is the goal" type leaders. The problem is those are completely the leaders of the company today.
My two most major issues with the world today.
Boeing got some but worse, and also made their products so complex that humans can’t understand it as a whole let alone communicate it to others.
It’s not just Boeing. It’s everyone, everywhere. All systems in every market require so much extra “stuff” that we’re on a spiral.
Compound that with MBAs that insist things “run lean” and “the core competency group you aren’t in found X, so meet your target of Y or find somewhere else to work” to “We need that BlackRock money, so do whatever the govs of NY, IL, and CA say to do because their trillion dollars speaks”.
No one is ready to address either issue.
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That's a very different type of business.
If Boeing was forced to make money with a successful civil aviation business alone it would be run very very differently.
Without knowing the details it makes a lot of sense that Boeing ended where they did (Boeing/SpaceX fits a lot of theories above). What may save the US is not the ability to save companies like Boeing - that would more likely hinder progress on a mid to long term scale - it's the ability to come up with new companies/innovators to overtake the incumbents.
In my interpretation. Fundamentally it goes all the way to the quality of institutions and culture. Time will tell, but I'm feeling more worried about those than the current ability to innovate.
"You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing" - December 26, 2008
https://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Order-Change-Turnaround/dp/1...
Probably mostly of the "do the opposite of whatever this guy says" variety. ;)
The top review on this book says:
This seems like a good follow up book too:https://www.amazon.ca/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America_and/d...
I'm sure there's a number of books on the topic in the publishing pipeline.
> It can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the leadership, right?
It can.
https://youtu.be/URoVKPVDKPU?si=XAJggvhaCwbyPcZF
[0]: https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc?si=q4iv_SlqoHlXuJod
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCbHpJShoXk
Markets cycle. Companies cycle. People cycle (actually just die unless you consider their offspring their continuation).
All systems do cycle; including the USA. It doesn't mean it's the end. If China doesn't rise and crashes it, there isn't really any other serious challenger and it will likely be the "rising" empire again.
I’m tired of this hyperbolic, melodramatic angst about the general decline of the U.S. Did you not read the part about the crew being returned by SpaceX? A company that just made landing rockets a reality only 9 years ago, not even 10 years has passed and reusable rockets are as boring as smartphones. NASA identified an issue on the Boeing Starliner, and a cutting edge company (SpaceX) stepped up for a non-emergency rescue mission. There was no loss of life, or equipment, there’s been no injuries, just mild inconveniences. This isn’t a nation in decline, this is a nation that has even begun to peak yet.
Edit: and to those that do, SpaceX probably looks a lot more attractive.
They are not impressive at all on almost any subject you talk to them about. Not for Boeing engineers and definitely not as MIT grads.
I don't think they could handle the coursework at Cal IMO, and I thought MIT was even more difficult.
They do seem like a very good example of diversity DEI type admission and hiring. And these kinds of Boeing problems might be the result.
Peak air-travel.-
....no, that does in fact explain everything that led to the decline of American manufacturing and engineering.
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I feel bad for Boeing. Though to be honest when I worked on a project where we were a Boeing sub (defense)we didn’t really care for them..
Competition is good, and it’s sad they can’t get their act together. Hopefully someone else will, though it will take years. The problem with Boeing is they seem to treat all their projects like the non competitive defense space..
I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about? That the executives made the wrong decision?
It is a tragedy that what was even greater has been so badly diminished by the greed and incompetence of a few. Hating what’s happened to Boeing (and perhaps those responsible for it) is very different than hating Boeing.
That memo from 20 years ago talks about how Boeing management was optimizing their earnings to capital expenses ratio by selling off factories and manufacturing lines to their contractors. The idea was that this would make Boeing more efficient. In theory they would have the same profits but lower capital expenses. The memo points out how fallacious this is, because while it does improve _this year’s_ numbers, next year’s profits will drop because they no longer own the factory that makes the profits. The memo points out that the contractors will now be earning a larger and larger share of the profits that Boeing used to collect, while Boeing keeps all of the risks. When you buy a whole fuselage from one supplier and a pair of wings from another, you take on all the risk that they won’t fit together properly while the suppliers pad their profits by making you pay extra for every change you ask for.
But can feel sorry for the rest of the organization and the subcontractors. Blameless parties are going to suffer a lot of collateral damage.
Given that, the subsequent merger of McD with Boeing should not have been approved.
Good job bean counters.
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I'm still processing that sentence
- They'll reconfigure Crew-8 for 6 occupants for contingency evac between Starliner undock and Crew-9 arrival.
- Starliner leaving ISS autonomously early September
- Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2 empty seats
- Crew 9 coming back down in ~Feb 2025
Actually, they said no sooner than Sept 24th.
What shall we make of all of this should it succeed?
- returning Starliner empty is the correct decision
- a successful return doesn’t indicate they were wrong about the risk
- the experts will learn a lot more from poring over mission data
This was news to me tho, "and Dragon-specific spacesuits for Wilmore and Williams." The spacesuits are specific to the vehicle?
Changing my underwear so I can drive to hardware store.
It all seems a bit over the top when things go well, but especially as we start to up the rate of sending people into space - things don't go well quite often. The Space Shuttle only sent people to space 135 times, and there was a complete loss of life on two of those missions. If aircraft had that sort of failure rate then you'd see a plane dropping out of the sky about once a minute, literally.
The seats are standard, but each astronaut has their own mold, taken on Earth, which is put into the seat.
In the words of someone in the industry who tends to be on the laconic side:
"It is not as simple as a 'common connector'. There are different pressures, mixture ratios, comm gear, seat interfaces, etc. A requirement for commonality flows requirements upstream to the suit, seat and spacecraft. "
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2...
We are literally building the future, HTF do we keep getting into these situations?
Oh, good. Previous proposals included having them return in a Dragon unsuited.[1]
[1] https://futurism.com/stranded-astronauts-spacex-boeing-space...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LMwKwcMdIg
Well it seems like it is routine thing now and spacex seems like routinely launches without a flaw.
But going up there and making it back is still huge feat that is possible only by collaboration of huge numbers of super experienced and highly trained professionals.
I am going a bit over the top - but still travel even to low earth orbit is something far outside of any human being reach - on his own or his group of buddies.
If there was a fair chance I’d die on the trip, damn straight if be in my super hero undies too.
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Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.
(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)
> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.
I wouldn't say they do too much though.
In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful. Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5) We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.
So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.
Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in place of those several companies which are building orbital stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the problem?
As we've seen these past few years, Boeing is perfectly capable of royally screwing things up on its own without the government's involvement.
relax! i am not saying Elon isn't the greatest engineer ever, and SpaceX is not a great company.
space flight is a dangerous business.
Rich people being willing to spend buckets of money on an experience is not evidence that it is "safe" or "cost effective", it's just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhou_(spacecraft)
We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth and then a few billion more in the future. We simply choose not to. It isn't a technological or logistical issue, but cultural and political.
It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.
Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)
But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.
Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.
Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.
Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.
I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference from today, and today we're already doing things that were unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).
Certainly the next few hundred years. There's just no real point. Ten thousand years hence, who knows?
I'm absolutely rapt following SpaceX's journey, but then when I mentally scale that up to 'something useful' for localspace living (eg. a useful percentage of current daily aviation volume), I realise how utterly unsustainable it fundamentally is.
The older I get, the less of a Paradox Fermi's idle thought becomes. Sadly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_F...
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The world is not mobilizing towards these big "civilization advancing" goals, we're all just faffing about solving the next tiny little thing infront of our faces. That plus we're breeding mediocrity and not promoting excellence through meritocracy. This is purely cultural, and it's right infront of us every day to see and participate in (or not).
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"NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew"
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
@dang this seems like a better link, could it replace the current one?
This one is from yesterday, maybe it will receive an update? https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/as-nasa-nears-major-de...
(Bottom line: they couldn't tell what was up with the thrusters, and didn't want to bet anyone's life on it not getting worse.)
That's what's making it harder to trust the thrusters I think.