I don't get that logic. So what if they have liabilities?
They also had experiance, proprietary knowledge, tested supply chains, tooling etc. etc.
I think the problem is that everyone is buying into the Musk==SpaceX story, which I think is wrong. He is a marketing gimmick that secures funding and cheap labor (through hype) and maybe some clients.
If you ask me, from what I've seen the actual person responsible for SpaceX is it's president/COO: Gwynne Shotwell.
"Idiot boss/genius lieutenant" pairs don't work in real life. The idiot boss will always get fooled by politickers and before long the genius lieutenant will be replaced by an upwardly charismatic lieutenant. There's no way to conquer the principal agent problem without enough domain knowledge to understand what the agent is doing, even if the domain knowledge is never used to do anything but understand what the agent is doing.
Just because the straight man is a genius doesn't mean the partner is an idiot. Can you say who was more brilliant between Abbott and Costello? They each had different roles. Which Smothers Brother was the brains of the outfit? Why not both?
Well, those are both examples from fiction. "Idiot principal/genius agent" is a very funny fictional trope that has seen use in satiric works from Catch-22 to Yes Minister, and there's no debate that it's not effective. I'm just saying that setups like that tend to be very unstable, usually ending in tears with a manipulative agent under the idiot principal. (In fact, that happened in Catch-22 and Yes Minister - so the instability is even represented in fiction.)
This makes no sense? You can compare SpaceX and Boeing performance on the commercial crew contracts which have very similar deliverables and nothing to do with other businesses.
Boeing received considerably more money for commercial crew and delivered worse results, they'll refly the demo mission at their own cost putting them ~1 year behind SpaceX.
Even if we consider the two funding amounts equal for the sake of comparison (which is a real stretch), crewed Dragon has already delivered while the recent Starliner test flight was riddled with defects.
Being as optimistic as I can without being an idiot: it’s abundantly clear that they are still farting around with welding techniques, but in a complex project of this scale, somebody is always running behind schedule, and if it’s something new, then lots of people are (I worked on support software for the 787, and even among our cohort, my division was the only one that was only slightly behind schedule) and sometimes it’s enough for those people to be sort of scaffolding for everyone else.
If Conway’s Law has any flex in it, you bend the mandate of each group to shift some of their responsibilities to teams that are getting better results and eventually something ships. I suspect this is how they get anything done. It might even be their organizing principle, a sort of self organizing system.
The same might be true for SpaceX, I couldn’t say. What we do know is that they just accepted delivery of welding robots, and I don’t know if that was Plan A all along or they’ve given up on training people to consistently make a clean bead that’s 53 ft long.
