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.
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.
To what end is the government obligated to "notice" Starship? It's not enough that its FAA works with SpaceX to get launches certified (and coordinate air/sea restrictions, etc.), its NASA has already agreed to fund part of Starship's development (and be its first customer with a historic crewed mission) / routinely flies Falcon missions like Europa Clipper this week, and its DOD is a huge customer? I see no reason for a government agency to do media for an event outside one of their missions.
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)
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.
Our current administration is damaging to the country. This anti-Musk insanity started pretty early when Biden invited all EV companies to the EV summit, except Tesla. Which, at that time produced more EVs combined than the rest.
And now people are wondering why Musk doesn't like current administration. What a mystery.
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.
I've noticed some negative comments about Elon Musk.
However, let's focus on the issues at hand.
Boeing's track record, including Starliner and commercial planes, raises legitimate safety concerns.
It appears they've compromised safety for financial gains. Should we prioritize supporting Starliner despite these issues merely because of personal opinions about Musk?
Even after everything that's gone wrong for them, Boeing is still a $140B enterprise value company, of which ~$55B alone is debt, so even if their stock drops by another 50% they're still worth somewhere close to $100B... I doubt it's going private any time soon
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.
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.
As soon as a company ceases to be cool it is game over. Professional management takes over and works in managing costs. Fine if you are a REIT, otherwise = death for most businesses.
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.
Boeing, a corporation facing criticism for its CEO's $20+ million compensation package and involvement in fatal airplane incidents and skimp out on safety because of its greed needs a break.
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.
One is a qualified engineer with a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Aeronautical Engineering and demonstrated hands on ability designing and building complex new designs, the other manages Engineers with a "Physics for Business Majors" unit and a Homer Simpson approach to practicality.
Hats off to the Engineers Engineers that Engineered the chopsticks catch, there were quite a few getting into the technical weeds:
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's an interesting take. My take is that SpaceX shows the enormous benefit of privatizing space activities, and of a vertically integrated provider.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this not a replay of the competition that happened between US homegrown Redstone rockets versus von Braun’s rockets for getting to orbit and moon?
> 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.
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.
To what end is the government obligated to "notice" Starship? It's not enough that its FAA works with SpaceX to get launches certified (and coordinate air/sea restrictions, etc.), its NASA has already agreed to fund part of Starship's development (and be its first customer with a historic crewed mission) / routinely flies Falcon missions like Europa Clipper this week, and its DOD is a huge customer? I see no reason for a government agency to do media for an event outside one of their missions.
Edit: Plus, here is NASA Administrator Bill Nelson publicly congratulating SpaceX after the catch anyway: https://x.com/SenBillNelson/status/1845461454977196294
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)
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.
Our current administration is damaging to the country. This anti-Musk insanity started pretty early when Biden invited all EV companies to the EV summit, except Tesla. Which, at that time produced more EVs combined than the rest.
And now people are wondering why Musk doesn't like current administration. What a mystery.
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...
It wasn’t good while it lasted ;)
If it's Boeing...
The answer, my friend,
Is Boeing in the wind.
Twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.
...or coming back....
Iv seen the word Boeing used as a verb.
"He got the Boeing treatment"
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?
I've noticed some negative comments about Elon Musk.
However, let's focus on the issues at hand.
Boeing's track record, including Starliner and commercial planes, raises legitimate safety concerns.
It appears they've compromised safety for financial gains. Should we prioritize supporting Starliner despite these issues merely because of personal opinions about Musk?
Maybe Boeing should be allowed to go bankrupt as whoever buys the pieces would definitely do a better job.
Also, isn’t this how capitalism works or supposed to work?
Might as well start calling it McDonnell Douglas Starliner ;)
> 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 :)
Even after everything that's gone wrong for them, Boeing is still a $140B enterprise value company, of which ~$55B alone is debt, so even if their stock drops by another 50% they're still worth somewhere close to $100B... I doubt it's going private any time soon
I’m all for Elon buying it and trusting that he makes the necessary changes.
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.
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.
It's something when a ball of talent manifests in such a way that a forum of scholars and engineers look for someone to blame.
That's what you get when you give control to MBA kind.
As soon as a company ceases to be cool it is game over. Professional management takes over and works in managing costs. Fine if you are a REIT, otherwise = death for most businesses.
Boeing really needs to get a break pretty soon.
Feels like they broke a mirror and have 7 years of continuous bad luck.
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.
Boeing gets a break every day there is a jet duopoly, and both are booked years out on orders.
Poor Boeing and their billions and billions in guaranteed government defence spending. They’re fine.
>Boeing really needs to get a break pretty soon.
Boeing, a corporation facing criticism for its CEO's $20+ million compensation package and involvement in fatal airplane incidents and skimp out on safety because of its greed needs a break.
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.
[dead]
It's too bad that Elon Musk and Kelly Johnson never met. Both are engineers' engineers doing impossible things, and I bet they would have had a blast.
One is a qualified engineer with a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Aeronautical Engineering and demonstrated hands on ability designing and building complex new designs, the other manages Engineers with a "Physics for Business Majors" unit and a Homer Simpson approach to practicality.
Hats off to the Engineers Engineers that Engineered the chopsticks catch, there were quite a few getting into the technical weeds:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2...
I'm really surprised people still think he's doing the work and not just a salesman.
One of them is a real engineer, the other one is a back seat engineer.
Imagine if this were a trip to mars.
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?
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.
[dead]
divide et impera.
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”
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.
> 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.
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.
That's an interesting take. My take is that SpaceX shows the enormous benefit of privatizing space activities, and of a vertically integrated provider.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.