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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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_...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That's an interesting take. My take is that SpaceX shows the enormous benefit of privatizing space activities, and of a vertically integrated provider.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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-...
It is unhealthy to not have competition to SpaceX.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It wasn’t good while it lasted ;)
> 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 :)
I’m all for Elon buying it and trusting that he makes the necessary changes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is absolutely a 0% chance Elon goes to jail.
> 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.
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.
At least then we'd get all onboard Starlink and tweets warning us when the door's about to fall off.
I think I saw recently that SpaceX is worth about 2x Boeing right now.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Nah, sell Boeing to Bezos.
I eagerly await my boeing prime membership to start out good and get increasingly overpriced and junk rapidly over time.
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?
Every second part in the rockets would be counterfeit inside of 5 years.
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
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.
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.
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.
NASA might need to redo the tender for the 2nd supplier of crewed missions, regardless of the (even further) reputational hit to Boeing.
ISS is not going to stay up there for long enough for a new second supplier to make sense.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Original NASA blog post:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2024/10/15/nasa-update...
If it's Boeing...
The answer, my friend,
Is Boeing in the wind.
Twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.
...or coming back....
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
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.
Does Boeing still have any reputation left worth saving? Seems like they gotta start from scratch regardless.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn't it also supposed to go to the moon station for Artemis? Or is that also a non-starter if Starship works out?
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...
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.
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.
You're probably thinking of Orion which is being manufactured by Lockheed Martin and Airbus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)
divide et impera.
Boeing really needs to get a break pretty soon.
Feels like they broke a mirror and have 7 years of continuous bad luck.
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.
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.
Poor Boeing and their billions and billions in guaranteed government defence spending. They’re fine.
Boeing gets a break every day there is a jet duopoly, and both are booked years out on orders.
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_...
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...
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?
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.
> 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
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.
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.
That's my whole point. It's the management/possibly board, not the shareholders.
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.
This is the company which famously asked its engineers to put the shareholders at top of mind when making all of their decisions.
And moved its headquarters 2,000 miles away to not be close to those annoying "engineers".
So what? That doesn't mean anything. The shareholders didn't say this, the management of the company did.
The shareholders are supposed to fire management when they are being stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since the shareholders elect the board, I guess there might be a lesson for democracy in here too.
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.
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.
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.
Cost plus contracts are an absolute disease that atrophies any company's ability to ship on a budget
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That's an interesting take. My take is that SpaceX shows the enormous benefit of privatizing space activities, and of a vertically integrated provider.
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.
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?
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”