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.
The process ship of theseus exchanges all components within a generation. It now even replaced its culture and is unable to ship. History of ability can not be interpolated to current disability .
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.
Yes making the actual product is very very secondary to successfully appeasing Congress, produce 'jobs', and follow the litany of rules in place about now the money is used and paperwork after to check boxes.
These aren't businesses operating in a competitive market with pressure to produce the best things quickly. Their goal is simply to be the best gov lapdog vs the only 1 or 2 other gov lapdogs.
Being extremely late and extremely over budget is standard practice in that world and worst case is usually the project gets cancelled for budget reasons then restarted 5yrs later doing the same thing.
This is the environment the gov fostered, they made Boeing etc critical to national security and industry while having a total aversion to risk, and zero forethought into long term investment in legitimate competition. All we get is the same growing monster that becomes the living embodiment of The Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Sure the government can create some inefficiencies but trying to blame them removes culpability off Boeing. If it was truly our government then many more government contractors would be delivering broken crap and that doesn’t seem to be the case. Example NOC stock seems to be doing just fine over past 5 years while Boeing..,has not.
Those government inefficiencies are a great source of profit. Cut the FTEs today because the contractor's unrealistic low bid looks better on the budget. Make sure to hire a woman or minority owned for-profit road construction company, or hell just let the roads get so bad a pizza company can make it into a very effective ad campaign. I think we are a country hobbled by capitalism, afraid to do anything because it might hurt profits, even if it will hurt people.
Early NASA was the sum of the private companies and the smartest nerds pulled from academia that they absorbed and turned into an organization. These people brought their culture of production and research from where they came from and built something great. Now NASA is merely a legacy gov agency whose culture is that of every old gov agency. Risk adverse, checkbox focused, political pawns, professional budget wranglers, etc.
Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.
Public-private partners is a good idea because public orgs that need to produce IRL things are very flawed, but you still need national interests beyond market interests so this is the compromise that has worked many times.
But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.
Boeing has no risk and neither does NASA because they can just keep choosing the safe choice, Boeing. What a lovely market.
We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old. And we need to force any public-private arrangements to legitimately foster competition, which means lots of compromise beyond a VC type situation, like reducing the litany of special interest checkboxes (jobs, geography, diversity, etc) and paperwork for small companies.
>Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.
I'm blaming capitalism 100% for the hollowing out of NASA. I never said early NASA was perfect.
>But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm blaming capitalism of doing.
>We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old.
I really think if we just didn't let this happen constantly we'd have a better system. It's going to shift the litany of special interest because the goal is profits, but barely, existing contractors will just open up a bunch of subsidiary companies.
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.
Blackberry's revenue peaked in 2011, and things didn't really appear to be hopeless in 2014, with the iPhone 6. Apple had gone through roughly 3 major hardware revisions (3G, 4, 6) before RIM's hopelessness was reflected in their yearly revenues.
I'm not unconvinced that organizational rot in a slower moving company like Boeing took 3 decades to fully spoil the org.
Blackberry failed because they didn't spend 5+ years building a complete mobile OS that carried all the amazing stuff that desktop OS had at the time (top tier, networking, graphics multi tasking etc.). By the time the iPhone launched, all the competitors were already screwed.
I think the point is that "Internet experts" (derogatory) believe they are being knowledgeable and clever when they ascribe any and everything that goes wrong with a Boeing product to McDonnell Douglas.
I believe there's also an element of "MBA bad, engineer good" resentment of management at play.
But the real truth is much more nuanced, no matter how satisfying it is to drop pithy one-liners about the MD merger.
I worked at Boeing. The reason people attribute McDonnell Douglas is because it caused a fundamental shift in leadership expectations.
It was clear as day on the ground that something had switched, suddenly every conversation was about minimizing cost. Every meeting was about maximizing value. Efficiency above safety.
I cannot overemphasize that it really did fundamentally shift the language, the incentives, etc. I started having to prove I needed vms to two different business panels.
Sometimes you are right, the root cause is too simple, but I was there for this one. It really was that simple this time.
I like this: "MBA bad, engineer good". As a joke: If you ask an LLM trained on HN discussions to describe, in its best "cave man speak" how to HN views MBA vs engineer, you will get exactly this phrase.
It is also crazy to me that people speak as if Boeing is "falling apart", but managed to produce many successful models since the MD merger, including the amazing 787.
This is Hacker News; I assume we're here to have thoughtful, curious discussions concerning topics of business (YCombinator, after all) and most things computers ("Hacker" News).
Dropping the McD one liner meme is neither thoughtful nor curious and it certainly doesn't explain anything.
It's like saying a McDonald's Big Mac is made of bread, beef, lettuce, and some mayonnaise like that's some conclusive end-all be-all. That's cool, but are we actually going to speak about something worth the time of day?
"It certainly doesn't explain anything" is some irrational hyperbolic bullshit. You're talking nonsense. Of course it explains something. Listen to people who actually worked at Boeing. One of the dudes who worked there just replied in this thread. This is not a stupid internet meme. This is reality. I recommend you watch the documentary: "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing".
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.
That's true but it also speaks to the fact that Space X is incredible. Not nearly as bureaucratic and innovating like crazy. The new Raptor engine alone is mind boggling in it's simplicity.
China has at least one Falcon 9 clone in testing stages (that one that accidentally launched during static fire a while ago) and many new-space rocket companies have reusable vehcles in pipeline (eq. Rocketlabs Neutron). Even Europe is going to do that - eventually. :P
That is exactly my point. It has been 10 years and aside from some small baby steps, no incumbent has declared clearly and vocally that reusability is the future. They're all in denial. The Russians, the Chinese, Europe.
Maybe at one point really early on the external tank was planned to be reused, but it was expended in every launch of the shuttle with no provisions for re-usability. They even stopped painting it within a few launches.
I'm sorry this was downvoted. It is probably a bit too pithy for HN.
I think you raise a good point even if there are some "technicalities" about it.
Real question: I'm not an aerospace geek. The term "first stage" has probably changed at lot in rocket science in the last 50 years. From the NASA Space Shuttle to SpaceX Falcon 9, has the definition changed? From my elementary school memories, the Space Shuttle used a giant center rocket and two booster rockets that we expendable, but you are definitely right that the Space Shuttle "thing" (no idea how to call it) was used over and over again, (somewhat) safely. Something that I don't know: Where Apollo programme capsules reusued? I assume no.
The space shuttle had three main components - the orbiter (white and black space plane with the crew and cargo), the external tank (rust brown on all but the first few flights), and a pair of solid rocket boosters. The orbiter had three engines and received its propellant (oxygen and hydrogen) from the external tank. At launch, the solid rocket boosters (SRB) and the main engines were all running so technically they can all be considered part of a “first stage”. The SRBs would expend their propellant in around two minutes and separate. They dropped into the ocean, slowed via parachute, and were recovered by boat and refurbished. The three space shuttle main engines would continue to burn for several more minutes until the external tank was depleted. The ET would be discarded and burn up on reentry. Then the orbiter would use two small rockets with internally stored hypergolic propellants to boost up to its intended orbit.
Apollo/Saturn had a much more traditional staging design where the first stage booster would run then drop off, then the second stage booster would run, then drop off, etc. There exist other rockets like the Atlas which had what they called a “stage and a half” design where the center stage burned for a long time and there was an outer “ring” stage that dropped off after a shorter time while the center stage kept going.
After going to the moon, the only part of the entire Apollo/Saturn rocket that came back was the command module capsule with the astronauts and moon rocks. These were completely torched and affected by salt water and were not designed to be reused. Reentry from the moon is significantly faster than reentry from low earth orbit.
The shuttle orbiters were refurbished and reused. It was a very difficult, expensive, and time consuming process to get an orbiter ready for another flight.
All of that is to say that the picture is blurry for the shuttle regarding first stage reusability. Yes the SRBs and orbiters were reused and were lit at launch. The ET was in use at launch but discarded. In my opinion it’s sort of not that interesting to argue what is and isn’t first stage on the shuttle because the elements just don’t map cleanly.
The design of the system with the SRBs, tank, and orbiters being adjacent to each other is considered by many to have been too dangerous in retrospect. This design was a factor in both shuttle disasters - the SRB shooting fire at the ET causing it to explode on Challenger and cracked foam falling away from the ET during launch and hitting the leading edge of the orbiter wing for Columbia. If they were stacked vertically rather than adjacent, those specific failure modes would not have been possible.
All this is irrelevant. The shuttle required so much inspection, refurbishment, and repair that it was little more than the world's largest and most expensive piece of political pork for a giant PR stunt. Contractors were selected so that every state had a contractor making shuttle parts in order to bribe congressional reps into supporting the massive boondoggle.
Each launch cost almost half a billion dollars in 2010 money. The Falcon 9 is reportedly $60-65M per launch.
SLS was just more of the same, welfare for all the states with contractors who grew fat and happy off the shuttle contracts. There was no technical argument whatsoever for reusing such ancient technologies.
Each RS25 engine cost $35M to refurbish for use in the SLS. For the cost of building TEN falcon 9 engines, NASA refurbished one RS25 engine.
And yes, of course it was absurdly dangerous to rely on not just one but two solid rocket motors of which there is no control whatsoever except for slight thrust vectoring...
I understand the costs were higher. Albeit, it could be called a political stunt, did it not provide a lot of employment? So, while inefficient was it not a good thing (in at least the short-term, the long-term could be debated).
My understanding of the federal government of the US is that it is mainly a subsidizer of their national military-industrial complex. Something I would call: military-industrial socialism.
With that said, it is just more of the same in a different era. 1930s and the Empire State Building: to re-invigorate the economy, Eisenhower and the interstate highway system: to provide a stronger national defense, etc
Even more stark, the raptor 3 supposedly costs <$500k to build, so you can get around 70 (almost two full starship stacks worth) for the price of refurbishing one of those engines.
> From my elementary school memories, the Space Shuttle used a giant center rocket and two booster rockets that we expendable
That's incorrect. The orange "giant center rocket" had no engines, it was an external tank which held the propellant burned by the orbiter's main engines. The SSMEs were on the "Shuttle thing" and were reused.
Let's be realistic though, it's nothing to do with the 'Silicon Valley mindset'. It's just the classical route to dethroning a poor-performing incumbant - hire good talent, throw lots of money at reasearch and stay focused on the smallest targets where you can demonstrate the biggest progress.
Despite his projected persona, Musk would love nothing more than to get to the position of being the bloated encumbant supplier with guaranteed government contracts regardless of results.
>Despite his projected persona, Musk would love nothing more than to get to the position of being the bloated encumbant supplier with guaranteed government contracts regardless of results.
I'm impressed you can keep saying this nonsense despite how SpaceX operates being pretty well documented.
We do have a large number of wealthy people who are all about that and I find it mind boggling. What kind of idiot decides that the most important thing to them after they already have over a billion dollars is to get more? Why not try to do new risky things that are unlocked by that money? How're they really just all about a "number go up" game?
Fortunately it seems that we also have quite a few wealthy people that actually want to use their money to fund and do new and innovative stuff.
Musk has done some impressive things for himself. Along the way he’s helped out society. Now it seems as though he’s done with that and cares more about changing it match his image.
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.
That sounds like embezzlement in the USSR but painted with capitalism colors. Quid pro quo siphoning at every layer, undetectable as a whole, but a giant boulder of dead weight for the system.
> - 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.
This idea of neverending public-private partnerships, where Congress dumps money into the same tiny group of companies for decades and gov agencies just sit around finding new things for these same companies to build (over budget and way too late), was always going to get to a breaking point of dysfunction. Whether it's military or infrastructure or whatever.
The gov created this environment and the private companies protect it because it's big money and grease it so it's the only option (like selling the bullshit idea "no one else can do what [Boeing] does cuz we huge staff counts and billions").
They both enable each other
And people are too scared to have a system that encourages new smaller companies take part because they don't have fancy sales pitches or fail early prototypes or take longer to get to Step A. And everyone criticizes them to death. So the only option is to get bought by Boeing or Lockheed, who then do really good at Step A just to fail a Step C and D and E.
I fully agree. There has to be some disruption to allow a healthy competition to exist. This will allow at least the possibility for better companies to thrive. At present the behemoth contractors are propped up by the fact that people will always say the small upstarts can't scale enough to meet the needs of the massive purchaser. Companies like SpaceX on the space side and Anduril on defence are showing that innovation is possible in these industries, and that small companies have something to offer. In both cases they probably got more of an audience in government than the average startup because of high-profile connections (Musk and Thiel respectively). It would be great if the playing field were set up such that others could also innovate and disrupt without having that leg up.
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.
> gone completely to shit over the last decade or two
Has the 777 and 787 done this? I don't think so. Yes, Airbus has many competitive aeroplanes in adjacent categories now, but that does mean the originals (and their many sub-models) from Boeing have "gone completely to shit".
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.
In almost all mergers the management of the worse comapny ends up winning, provided there was no loopsided difference in size. The thing is, since those executive were not good at creating product, they are more likely to be good at politics and hence they end up overtaking management of the new combined company, even if their company was the smaller one.
A good series of examples is in the book "Barbarians at the Gate", chronicling the career of F Ross Johnson. His company would get acquired and then he and his folks would outmanoeuvre the acquiring company management.
Boeing was known as a great engineering firm that was not that great at turning their engineering excellence into shareholder returns. The shareholders wanted executives more focused on said returns.
Sounds like the solution is to turn it into a privately owned company then. Of course, that's greatly simplifying things, but it would be a right step in the right direction.
Finance people prefer finance people. MD's bean counter management were seen as being more responsible and "hard nosed" than the Boeing management who were focused on things that "didn't drive the bottom line" like the product, culture, etc.
I recall that in a previous thread, someone had explained that the agreement between Boeing and MD was that MD's management would be retained at similar positions in Boeing, and that many of MD's management gamed this agreement by raising their position before the merger. Leading MD's management to end up higher in Boeing's management.
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”.
Software is unfortunately a big part of the complexity crisis. What you are describing is an investible consequence of abstraction (not that abstraction cannot be handled sensibly at some level, but it at any point you reach a situation where nobody is capable of understanding the entire software stack, then we are in trouble. We are almost certainly at that point now in most industries).
There was an interesting lecture Jonathon Blow gave a while back that addressed this issue but it was predictably panned as the ramblings of an insane game developer, I think wrongly. A lot of the points made were true.
Most of the complexity in modern software is not inherent to the problem meant to be solved by that software, but instead emerges from both the organizational structures used to develop software, and from the modern engineering culture of software development.
For instance, Boeing famously bungled the 737 Max. But 737s were first created in the era of slide-rules, there is nothing about the plane which is too inherently complex to be done well. MCAS, the software portion of the debacle, was so simple in principle it could have been easily implemented by one competent engineer plus a few more to check his work. Complexity inherent to the problem space is NOT the problem here.
Go on then, explain why you believe something like MCAS is too complex to make properly. Mismanagement is the root of these problems, not the supposed complexity of the problems.
MCAS was one flight control law, a one that was poorly conceived in the first place and then botched in implemention, but still only a single flight control law. If you think that such a system is too complex to created properly, then please tell me how many thousands of engineers must have been on the team that created the first all-digital fly-by-wire system for an aircraft. That was a hell of a lot more complex than one flight control law on a 737, and they were actually doing something new back then. Thousands, why it must have taken tens of thousands of people amirite.
When did I talk about any specific system? You can’t make a toaster without at least five databases. You can’t change oil in a car without consulting the internet because there are 400 oils and special mfg requirements like a programmer to reset the counter or to run a replaced oil routine.
It’s not my fault you can’t think beyond Boeing.
It’s the whole world, and you are just one of the people that even if it is pointed out to them can not see it. Because like I said, you haven’t made anything to see the issue.
> 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.
Nah. That's just another facet of engineering incompetence.
Complexity doesn't just happen, it is allowed to happen.
We repeatedly went to the moon over 50 years ago, with complex systems that were well understood by the different teams that built them.
Now, 50 years later, if we are not capable of repeating the same feat, we are doing something wrong.
If we use software-controlled hardware and then throw are hands in the air screaming "it's too complex", we are doing something wrong. That stuff shouldn't have been used in the first place.
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.
Except that in this case, the consensus HN view is also the wider consensus. Boeing engineers have been yelling about this as loudly as they can, for many years now, and the public is finally listening.
> 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'd be extremely happy to be wrong, as I invest my life and my family's in the US.
Spend less time reading the news and more time enjoying your family. The world has been “ending” for decades now, the U.S. isn’t going anywhere and will continue to get some things right while getting other things wrong.
“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”
> Was hilarious in one case to be called a racist by a white fella for pointing out how indians only hire indians, and then later seeing him get laid off by said indians.
Maybe I'm missing something but is this antidote to show you're not racist? What were the other cases this was hilarious?
My best friend, basically my brother of 15+ years is indian. I don't really care that you think I'm racist.
This case in particular was just great because it was some liberal white guy calling me (a minority) racist for pointing out something clear as day. And then he got his karma.
I never said that I think you're a racist. The fact that you think I did is telling.
Does your best friend of 15+ year also consider you a friend? Is he also able to capitalize proper nouns without trouble but can't seem to extend that same effort to americans?
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.
Are there actually people doing work at Boeing? As far as I can tell they outsource every last thing, retaining only a management hierarchy internally. Elements which were once Boeing are now spun off subcontractors, and machining, assembly, component design, integration - all of these are third party activities.
But wouldn't you say "I feel bad for the people working at X" in that case? And besides, isn't that also a quite strange sentiment?
Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all. I mean, why? People obviously like it there, otherwise they wouldn't work there, so why feel bad for them?
> Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all.
I don't understand this sentiment at all. I know quite a few people who worked on the Google Domains team. It was a good team, a good product, and it sadly was all blown up by some senior executive decision that didn't make any sense.
Why can't I feel bad for the workers I knew whose product got deleted out from under their feet?? Some of them are in the process of getting laid off now!
There is a lot of pride to be had from seeing something you worked on, with your own hands, successfully work - look at mission control videos for examples of how excited people get. Conversely, if it fails, there’s a lot of disappointment.
You can’t compare something like these massive pieces of hardware with people inside failing and taking all your work with it, with some software launch that maybe fails and takes a couple of bugs to be fixed before relaunch.
The Boeing story is tragic because they were a source of pride for America overall, played a huge part in winning WW2, made some great technological advances, but succumbed to MBAs fleecing all their goodwill. There are still world class aerospace engineers working there, and sure they could probably get a job somewhere else, but they might need to uproot their lives to do so.
Interestingly the market for Aerospace engineers is really small. For many of those guys, they could only go work at Airbus or Embraer. Some could potentially get jobs in military with Lockheed or something. Very few may be able to find work with Textron or similar.
> Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over all. I mean, why?
Because there are people working at Boeing, people like you or me, who poured their heart into the project and the institution sapped their energy away and made their efforts ultimately worse than futile.
There was someone working at Boeing who spent years of their life qualifying those thrusters. They tried their very best. Perhaps they even batted for more testing. Or more analysis. Or perhaps they didn't because they didn't know better, but they still spent their best effort to do a good job.
And when they heard that the engines are acting up they probably felt like a trap door has opened under them. They felt that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. Either angry that they haven't caught this in testing, or angry that they haven't approved their request to test more.
Years and years ago they proudly told their mom/girlfriend/drinking buddies that they are working on a beautiful spaceship. And they were very proud of the project. And now all those people have heard that their spaceship is a liability. All that good feeling turned ash in their mouth.
There are people at Boeing who worked very very hard the last few weeks (months?) trying to uncover what is wrong with those thrusters. There are others who spent endless hours in meetings with NASA discussing risks and explaining tests and arguing persuasively that the space ship is fine enough to ride. And it is not really their individual fault that the spaceship is not fine.
And even worse, there are people who spent years of their life designing and building flawless systems. And they did a great job and built their subsystem really really well. Well made, high quality products. Yet nobody will think of their stuff positively because some other subsystem failed.
It is kind of like you are working on a beautiful great pyramid. (FYI pyramids were not built by slaves.) And you work hard, and quarry stone all day, and shape it, and push it and pull it and you really really do your best job. You are really a champ. And you should deserve to celebrate in the sun with your team mates the beautiful pyramid. But unfortunately you are not one of the lucky ones working on Khufu's pyramid, you are on the team which works the second pyramid built for Sneferu. And something is wrong with the plans. Or the foundations, or the site selection. Or the rocks are not strong enough. Nobody really knows but even though you are doing a great job individually the damn thing is collapsing in front of your eyes. And it will be known forever as the "bent pyramid". And it sucks. And you feel bad. And that is sad and we should feel bad for those people.
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.
Most of the time, workers and managers are smart, well-meaning, and hard-working. Even executives (though as you get higher and higher up, you see more and more people whose qualification is political skills and not expertise).
The issue with Boeing is less any individual and more institutional decay. Over time, a spigot of effectively unconditional cash corrupts an organization, especially once anyone with enough internal weight to fight against it is no longer involved in the day-to-day. Give it 20 years, and SpaceX will be the same way.
> Most of the time, workers and managers are smart, well-meaning, and hard-working.
This has not been true at any job I’ve had, from working in fast food as a teenager to now being a data scientist. What you describe would be exceptional in almost any company, where things otherwise regress to the mean of these various aspects, or, in especially bad circumstances, go south of that. Boeing would seem to be in the latter category at this point.
Neither Nvidia nor Apple have access to a spigot of unconditional cash. Their customers are quite discerning and have alternatives they could switch to.
Succession remains an unsolved problem. Seemingly.
I hope to be alive long enough to see how Toyota's story plays out. They seemed to have lost their way under Akio Toyoda. We'll see if Koji Sato can get them back on track.
I'm also keenly interested in Haier and its "Rendanheyi model". They're worthy of HBR style case studies, receiving at least as much attention as Apple, Sony, Honda, Toyota, etc. And yet we know so little about them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier
In 2021, Liang Haishan succeeded Haier's legendary CEO Zhang Ruimin. What happens next? Continued success? Long slow decline? Jump into a volcano?
Every organization will have incompetent individuals. A healthy organization is able to remove them; a typical one will blunt their effects; and an unhealthy one will allow them to reproduce themselves and seize power.
We want it all to be a matter of just one or two incompetent individuals, because then the solution is simple. We just need to be aware that incompetent individuals exist, and through sheer force of will we can prevent them from destroying great things! But a much darker possibility is that it's something inherent to complex systems. Then, there's nothing to do to escape the inevitable cycle. Whatever brilliant schemes we come up with are doomed to failure, because the issue isn't individuals being stupid but institutional incapability to repair itself.
Because while the issues are serious and many, Boeing is still making extremely safe and working airplanes. It's impressive and shows that in general, things are going right. It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're just held to an extremely high bar.
Manager's entire job is to provide the organizational support and navigate the organizational challenges to allow the non-manager employees the space to do their job. When we talk about systemic organizational failures, managers are the ones that own that problem and are accountable for the failures.
Sure, on an individual basis, you have pockets of amazing managers that can't overcome organizational inertia. I feel for them as well, but when organizational failures come into play, I'm certainly taking more pity on the employees then the managers.
The problem is management sets the core rules and incentives. And no matter how competent and motivated you are, at some point you either move along or stop caring.
There are bad employees but they have less influence over the company overall.
"Management" is short hand for the Jack Welch wannabe MBA try hards. Not middle management.
From my limited experience with megacorps, and lots of reading, persons Director level and up are bat guano insane. Execs live in their own separate Machiavellian fantasy world bubble. Any nod to reality (eg rocket go boom) is a selfown for corporate ladder climbers.
Any productive work at an org like Boeing, post infection by MD's leeches, is in despite of "managagement"'s best efforts.
I don't think the comment you replied to implies such a black and white distinction. Is it so absurd to suggest that some of the people working on Starliner actually cared, and did the best work they could?
Managers too, though ultimately this failure must come down to management at some (presumably high) level.
Except that's capitalism for you. The profit motive means only those willing to put profit (and often very short term profit) ahead of everything else means that only unempathetic assholes (and often psychopaths) end up as leaders of these organisations.
So not everyone who is not a manager is good, but almost all top-level managers are bad. They need to be in order to make the decisions needed to advance short term profit before all else.
This isn’t any better. Are you an IC? All you’re probably saying is, “the people that I work with more directly, that share the same organisational context as me, that I personally can relate to, etc are good, and the other ones aren’t”.
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,”
If companies voluntarily choose to operate with lower cash reserves and then end up unable to weather hard times or make necessary investments in their products, do they have any fault for what happens next?
> You can't operate a successful company (i.e. with a decent ROI) if you're sitting on a Scrooge McDuck cash vault.
Of course you can. There are thousands of examples around the world - not least the great success story of the last decade or so, Apple.
Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization. It might get you a fraction of a percent more return in good times, but that doesn't make it wise.
The purpose of being in business is to make more money than you could by putting the money in an interest-bearing account. Another way of saying it is there is no point to operating a business if you cannot make more than the "opportunity cost".
> Minimising your cash holdings is a microoptimization.
What businesses are in business to do is put cash to work earning more than the opportunity cost, often meaning about 15% ROI.
That certainly is not a microoptimization.
In fact, what most businesses do is borrow money at, say, 5%, and then invest the money so it earns, say, 20%, and therefore make 15% overall.
I do something similar with my investments. I borrow money and buy investments with the borrowed money.
It's similar to borrowing money to buy a house, and then selling the house at an appreciated price to make many multiples of your down payment.
> In fact, what most businesses do is borrow money at, say, 5%, and then invest the money so it earns, say, 20%, and therefore make 15% overall.
Getting more of your capital as debt is a microoptimisation (unless there are special circumstances like different tax treatment, and usually even then) - that's the classic Modigliani-Miller result. Holding more cash makes your nominal return on equity lower, but improves your cash position, and unless you push it to the point where you're taking a real risk of actually going bankrupt the two effects balance and your risk-adjusted return is the same.
> I borrow money and buy investments with the borrowed money.
Exactly. So it really doesn't make a lot of difference how levered a given company is, because an investor can always make a more or less levered investment in the company - if a company has a lot of cash then an investor can lever up a lot, if a company has a lot of debt that same investor levers less or not at all, and ultimately either way the investor gets the same level of risk and the same return.
> It's similar to borrowing money to buy a house, and then selling the house at an appreciated price to make many multiples of your down payment.
Not really - there are all sorts of special treatments for home mortgages (in particular the mortgage interest tax deduction, the most horribly regressive piece of the tax code) that mean you're genuinely disproportionately better off to do one. But it's rare for something like that to apply to corporate borrowing.
You're never going to make much money if you aren't willing to take on risk.
Elon Musk at one point was within hours of personal bankruptcy with Tesla when he managed to secure more funding. He's the richest man in the world, and got that way by taking on enormous personal risk.
How wealthy would you be today if you put everything you had into Amazon stock the day of its IPO?
Yes, but the world doesn't work better if everyone maximally leverages their way into every weakly EV-positive (or EV-negative) high volatility play. If everyone is maximally leveraged, any tiny negative disturbance wipes out all wealth.
At some point, you're just hoping to get lucky, and to leave other people (debtors, governments) holding the bill if you don't. This is what people talk about when they criticize others for "privatizing profits, socializing risk."
Back to Boeing: Boeing put up really good numbers by gutting engineering and manufacturing organizations, hoping it would all turn out okay. For awhile it did, but then it didn't.
And it's questionable how much of these costs Boeing is going to bear, because there's a whole lot of talk in policymaking circles about how to keep an important defense manufacturer and top manufacturer alive (through contracts, tariffs, and supportive policy).
A degree of risk is priced into the interest rate. I still have a fiduciary duty to my lenders to not take undue, undisclosed risks. In practice, people get away with this except in the most egregious cases, but that doesn't make it less wrong.
Worse, systemic risk isn't priced into the interest rate, because the government tends to bail out the banks.
Everyone using leverage and betting on things going up forever is a really big part of how you get 2008. A lot of people made a ton of money in the run-up to 2008 (privatized profits); the population as a whole paid the costs (socialized losses).
edit: I wrote "borrowers" above when I meant lenders.
Boeings choice to not sufficiently invest in its core products while pumping its stock through buybacks belongs solely to Boeing and Boeing’s board. The impact to their reputation was a predictable and ignored consequence.
In Boeing’s case it has very little to do with coronavirus, which was just a related example: some businesses set aside enough seed corn to survive without help, and others didn’t.
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.
But it's exactly the same at Facebook/Google/Amazon/Palantir and countless of other places, yet people chose to work at those places. Why feel bad for them? They've made their choices, and if they're not happy with those anymore, they can make new choices.
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.
The commercial aircraft part of McD was dead when the merger happened. The had a cash cow called the "MD-80", which was a derivative DC-9. That had stopped selling.
Boeing got more value out of the defense part of McD.
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.
Sure, if Starliner returns in auto mode successfully, then Boeing will be able to save face, and NASA will be able to take some stock in that. However, if there is a viable alternate option that has a much better track record of working, NASA would potentially not survive as an agency if there was a catastrophic ending to a Starliner return with the astronauts on board.
So from a keep humans safe while still attempting to complete the Starliner mission as much as possible, to me this is the best solution. In fact, it's kind of bonus for Boeing to test the automated return that was not part of the original mission. </spinDocter>
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.
[EDIT]: apologies, my reading comprehension needs work. I thought you were referring to the 737 MAX, not the 777
What? Do you have a source for the last one? That sounds like corporate propaganda.
It’s well understood AND PROVEN that the MCAS system (which was a system borrowed from decades old military code) was at fault for this incident. Saying it was suicide seems incredibly disrespectful to both pilots…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610
In the article it even states they found the wreckage…
I guess I misunderstood the comment I was replying to. The parent comment mentions the 737 MAX so I assumed that’s what the commenter was referencing.
I have read up on the 777 and yes, I agree it’s incredibly safe statistically (as is the 787). I didn’t realize the commenter was talking about the Malaysia flight either. Apologies to them
Personally I am amazed just what the focus on safety has achieved.
The 737 Max was objectively surprisingly safe to fly at the time of the groundings. As in for the average flying passenger their odds were significantly higher to die of something else on the day of their flight than from a crash. But still we know how to do better and things improved.
Imagine if we treated each individual car accident as a failure and millions of like could have been saved. It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.
Perhaps be generous with your reading of the post and consider the 737 MAX's flight record and fatality rate on a per-mile or per-passenger rate to, say, cars in the United States. Because, by the standards of other transportation methods, even the 737 MAX was very, very safe.
It is a testament to the not-yet-entirely-captured regulatory regime of international flight that the 737 MAX was not considered safe enough.
2 nose dives in 6 months apart within 2 years of first operational flights. This is not safe. This was anything but a testament to the aviation regulatory regime at the time. There was glaringly obvious engineering and procedural issues the FAA and Boeing management waived through.
Is the MAX safe now? After killing over 300 people needlessly, being grounded for 1.5y, and an extensive investigation? Yeah sure, probably.
To be saying what your saying, I think you mustn't of followed Max 8 MCAS debacle very closely, or at all.
First being X months apart isn’t how you calculate risk. What matters is total failure over total flights and there’s a gap between the last crash and the fleet being grounded where that risk kept on going.
~2 years * 2 flights per day * 365 days per year * ~350 aircraft would be 511,000 flights but it’s / 2 because aircraft where being delivered over time that’s 2 crashes per ~255,000 flights or 1 per ~127,000. (Edit: Actual numbers were less than half that at 3 crashes per 1 million flights.)
By comparison someone living to 80 is 80 * 365 days = 29,200 days. Meaning the average day would be more than 3x as risky as taking a flight on a 737 Max. It’s not actually that simple as hospitalized patients are unlikely to fly, but you get plenty of elderly people dying from hart attacks etc on aircraft.
I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft, (edit: it beat the DC-8 and 707 which was still in use at the time) but general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours not flights. https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/GeneralAviationDashbo...
I don't think that's an apples to apples comparison at all. An elderly person dying of natural causes is a relatively unavoidable, normal death that just happens.
People dying because a plane crashes because of the negligence and penny-pinching of the airline manufacturer is no comparable at all.
What we want to compare is the crash/fatality rate of the 737 MAX during that period with rates for other aircraft types. And I suspect we'll find the 737 MAX falling far short of the standard if we do that.
> I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft
Right, but that's the only kind of comparison that really matters.
> general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours
We're talking about commercial airline safety. It's pretty well-known that general aviation is less safe, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.
I agree that I'm safer getting into a 737 MAX than I am into a buddy's Cessna or a car or train(?) or boat or whatever, but I don't care about that. If I've chosen to fly somewhere, I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.
> I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.
So, I’ll ask you which commercial aircraft have still in use have worse safety histories. If you’re being rational clearly you should be concerned with actual risks not just media reporting.
Not that I actually mean this as personal attack on you, it’s just the kind of irrationality I am referring to here.
Right, exactly. The 737 MAX mess is bad. But the numbers remain on the side of any cleared-to-fly jetliner, even including that situation, compared to almost any other form of transportation except maybe walking.
Current research shows ~850 people die in the US each year from mechanical failures in cars, but underperforming tires breaks etc contribute to far more.
The difference is we don’t do NTSB style investigations after a traffic accident.
Much worse than other modern aircraft, but there’s many with worse track records globally. The DC-8 and 707 where still in use at the time (https://simpleflying.com/douglas-dc-8-active-2022/) and had worse track records, as did the 720 which just retired. Going back to Concord which retired in the early 2000’s and was far worse. Go back further and the prop aircraft were crazy dangerous.
Again it should be compared to modern aircraft, but this just shows how far we’ve come that the bar has moved this far.
Right, exactly, and this is why this sub-thread is so maddeningly weird. I'm going to compare the 737 MAX's safety record to that of the 737 NG, 777, 787, 757, as well as to Airbus' current-gen 3xx planes. I don't care how it compares to the DC-8 or 707 or 720 because it's exceedingly unlikely I'll ever fly on one of those.
And I'm certainly not comparing to the kinds of small planes general aviation pilots fly, and I'm not comparing against other modes of transportation. I already know that I'm safer in a plane (even in a 737 MAX) than in a car, but if I'm choosing to drive, I'm choosing to drive. If I'm choosing to fly, then then the 737 MAX's record, coupled with how poorly Boeing has handled the situation, is a big concern to me.
And I get that, it’s obvious given the choice you pick the safer aircraft. But in a broader context the numbers are so low it’s hard to contemplate.
Currently it’s 2 per 6 million flights. Spend the cost of a flight on Powerball tickets and you’re more likely to with the jackpot than have been on one of those fatal crashes. But people still think of those risks and chances as worth thinking about, which is also why lotteries stick around.
All while the expected value as given by the competition through the A320 Neo series is zero deaths per passenger mile with more than double the fleet size.
Without diving into your bizarre claim about 737 MAX being safe...
> It may have involved making breathalyzers a mandatory feature [for cars] etc, but I suspect there’s a lot more we could do even without that.
My understanding is that drunk driving is a small minority of car crashes/fatalities. In most crashes, the driver(s) involved are completely sober. Making breathalyzers mandatory in cars would be awful.
> My understanding is that drunk driving is a small minority of car crashes/fatalities
Your understanding is wrong, “About 32% of all traffic crash fatalities in the United States involve drunk drivers (with BACs of .08 g/dL or higher).”
> 737 MAX being safe
At the time it was under 1 accident per 300,000+ flights which is objectively lower than 2 other jets flying at the time. Today with 346 died in 2 crashes but another 200+ people died of medical emergencies on 737 Max flights. That’s the kind of risk people are taking, flying it’s slightly more dangerous than spending that much time sitting at home watching TV.
I agree it’s bad for modern aircraft, but the Concord would be over 33 crashes per 3 million trips not 1. These numbers are just really low by any objective measurement except modern airline safety standards.
Driving 25 miles in the US is in 2022 was as dangerous on average vs a random 737 Max flight over its history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... In 2022 the average car was driven 14,500 miles or ~600 flights worth of risk, but people still really worry about it.
I don't really get why you insist on continuing to compare the 737 MAX deaths to unrelated, irrelevant other statistics.
The Concorde was a niche aircraft that hasn't flown for over 20 years. Even if it were flying today, I would still consider its safety record as in a completely separate bucket than subsonic commercial airliners.
And I don't care how the 737 MAX compares to driving. I care how it compares to other, similar, commercial aircraft in use today. If I'm going to drive, I drive. If I'm going to fly, I'm going to care about how the plane on my itinerary compares to other planes I could be sitting on with a similar itinerary.
Risk I regularly take are hardly irrelevant to me. I consider this kind of comparison to be foundational to rational behavior.
> completely separate bucket than other subsonic commercial airliners
It didn’t have the worst history compared to other subsonic commercial airliners flying at the time when they grounded it. What it had was the potential for improvement.
If you actually care about safety knowing what the actual most dangerous aircraft are would be the rational decision. And today the 737 Max has had 20x the flights and still the same number of accidents. So if you’re concerned about safety how does it stack up?
The groundings happened after the 2 crashes. When the groundings happened it had the 3rd worst record of then flying large commercial jet aircraft and far from the most dangerous of commercial aircraft of all time.
Tossing that many caveats and still not being the worst aircraft is shocking to many people.
It actively harmed the environment. Once the thing has been manufactured doing anything less than driving it into the ground is wasting the upfront environmental cost.
Not always. The average car in Wyoming gets driven 24,000 miles a year something getting 12 MPG is burning 2,000 gallons a year directly and another 30% indirectly from manufacture transportation and extraction of oil. That’s a lot for a 5 year old car you could easily be saving 30,000+ gallons of oil.
Obviously, that’s average many cars are significantly worse. Run the numbers and swapping a high mileage but poor fuel economy car for a hybrid/EV and the payback can be a net positive.
Starter gives you enough juice to enter the intersection, but engine sputters and you get tboned. Same for not providing enough acceleration/ hp.
Also 1 pedal driving.
Electric cars that outweigh the 'old' 'inefficient' light trucks because batteries are heavy. Harder to stop, more wear on roads. Tires that are designed to extract breaking energy over stopping.
Lithium fires (not cause but much more dangerous result).
Aluminum crush zones in cars not big enough to have crush zones.
Or don't try to regulate 'class 1' into something people don't want to buy.
And FYI those trucks are bigger because you need more volume and moment-arm when building them out of lighter aluminum instead of heavier steel- a direct consequence of CAFE standards.
It says a lot about the insane dangers of the Space Shuttle in particular. There were several issues with its design that made it an accident waiting to happen, notably its spotty abort coverage on ascent (even worse pre-Challenger) and the exposure of its fragile thermal tiles to debris falling off the external tank. Both issues stem from basic architectural choices and could not easily have been solved without a radical redesign.
I think Dragon 2 could easily be roughly an order of magnitude more reliable than the shuttle, if not more. It has full abort coverage and a TPS that doesn't habitually receive damage from falling debris, and is more robust to impacts besides; and its record so far is exemplary.
Both I reckon. Still, I wonder what the safety record for airplanes was back when the total number of airplane flights ever taken was the same number as today’s total number of space flights ever taken.
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. "
I meant it the other way around - incompatibility is the easy-to-imagine default! In absence of some heavily-funded, top-down, NASA-driven standards-development process, no such thing as a standard spacesuit connection should be expected to exist.
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.
927 is a noun at this point to me. Hell so many xkcd could be: 1319, 936, 2347. It's crazy how often referencing a xkcd is the highest signal to noise way of communicating a concept.
A group of professors liked jokes, but got tired of hearing the same ones, so they started numbering them. So instead of telling a joke or funny observation when something happened, they'd say "112" and the others would laugh. or "64", more laughter.
One day they get a new prof on their team and after a few weeks of this number, laugh, number, laugh, during a meeting, the new guy says "-149". There's dead silence for a while. The eldest prof starts laughing, "i've never heard that one!"
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.
Yes it is and it is not the first time having such contigency plan.
Quite recently there was a Soyuz with crippled cooling and the contingency plan for the American astronaut that came with it was to evacuate via Dragon if there was an emergency before new Soyuz arrived.
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.
1-in-270 is overall probability threshold for a 210 day notional ISS stay.
For the journey home from ISS to Earth, the probability threshold is 1-in-1000. Likewise, it is 1-in-1000 for the journey from Earth to ISS.
The riskiest part, which increases the probability from 1-in-500 to 1-in-270, is the ISS stay – the extended stay in space is faced with a continuous risk of micrometeoroid damage.
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?
There are lots of spacecraft being built, they just aren't all human rated at the moment. I should mention that I'm including first stages here too because my point is that we have to build the stuff to work the organizational muscles so that we can build more similar stuff which is better performing later.
Rocket lab is launching electron a bunch, working on Neutron which will be a falcon 9 competitor, and is building spacecraft for their customers (e.g. they built some Martian orbiters that should get launched later this year).
Intuitive machines, the folks who built the most recent US lunar lander.
Blue origin is not exactly speedy, but they do fly their rockets semi-regularly now and New Glenn is supposed to fly later this year.
Northrup has a human-rated rocket that flies periodically.
And of course there's ULA.
And those are just the successful ones.
There's also:
Astra
ABL
Firefly
Relativity
Sierra Space
And probably some more that I'm not aware of.
That's a pretty long list of places that are working on these problems and paying American engineers to work on and think about these problems.
We also have X-37 the military space plane, although that’s for the military.
X-33 was a thing, Venturestar by Lockheed. It seemed tantalising in close, a few mishaps and it was cancelled, but surely that would have been worth picking and taking that bit further.
Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft. Besides that, iirc one proposal is basically a "basic" cylinder which relies on a docked Dragon to support it. Starship is in an interesting spot because in a sense it's a station in itself. Starship deployable stations currently have the problem that the payload bay opening mechanism and volume aren't set in stone yet.
> Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft.
Right, but to be practical, those commercial crew spacecrafts should exist in sufficient numbers to ensure the orbital stations are supplied, preferably without exorbitant price tags, which an insufficient supply could result in.
Agreed, so far, SpaceX seems to be fine with building more Dragons, I had been assuming they were just refitting the 3 they built initially for the free-flying missions, but turns out they have 5 in service at the moment. Boeing seems to have decided to stop at 2 Starliners, and of course too early to say about fleet size for Dreamchaser.
"Not as successful as was originally hoped" is quite an understatement. The program missed all of its economical and operational targets (reliability, cost per kg in orbit, launch frequency) by a factor of one hundred. It was supposed to usher in a new era of scientific, commercial and civilian spaceflight, and competing programs were cancelled and deprioritized because they were about to be obsoleted by this amazing new reusable space lauch system. What it ended up being, instead, was an epic exercise in space budget whoring, which continues to this day with the Artemis program that insists on "reusing" Space Shuttle derived hardware for that exact reason.
Sure, if you define "successful" in the most cynical way possible. I don't disagree with you at all that many projects (even many non-space-related) are just jobs programs masquerading as "progress" or "research" or whatever.
But so what? I don't care about that measure of "success". I care about reliable, reusable, cost-efficient space launches, and all the technological and scientific advances that can bring. By those measures, the space shuttle was a disaster of a failure. That's what we care about.
It explored an idea that ended up being a dead end. But we only know it in hindsight. Decisions need to be judged given the information available at the time. Was there a consensus that shuttle was a bad design at the time? Was it obvious that it will be the case?
Obviously it was not known from the beginning that it would be a dead end. However, engineers have this blind spot for keeping track of bigger-picture objectives, as opposed to technical specifications. If you set out to build a lawn mower, and end up with a rubber duck, this will be deemed a failure. But if you do build the lawn mower, all is good. Even if it costs a million dollars, and all the lawns in the country remain unmowed (except for a handful of government properties). So long as someone is paying for continued development, where's the problem?
In other words, a lot of such government-backed projects utterly fail in their objectives, not so much due to lack of prophetic foresight, but due to inability to re-evaluate when it becomes clear that the previously chosen approach can no longer lead to the envisioned outcome. ITER is another fine example of this.
The first space shuttle prototype (Enterprise) started construction in 1974. The first shuttle launched in 1981. To the best of my knowledge, there were no major upgrades to the design over its career, save avionics. So even though the space shuttle was “serious space development,” it’s been a long time since a new human rated vehicle has been designed.
Yes, also there's a world of difference between a single extremely hard to repeat mission whose only purpose was to win the race to the Moon at any cost for reasons that had more to do with politics than engineering (not to dismiss the huge engineering accomplishments, my point should be clear) and something whose plan is to send stuff in orbit every week and potentially people every month with the goal to do the same on the Moon very soon and Mars in less than a couple decades.
The great accomplishment today isn't reaching a higher orbit than in the 60s, but doing the same every damn month, with significant cargo capabilities, and safely. One can't build a Moon base by sending up there a bag of screws every six months.
What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.
You learn to do things better by doing it repeatedly. The best way to build up to weekly launches is to do it more and more and more often, which is exactly what SpaceX has done.
Stopping the funding that NASA was getting at the time is the reason we lost those institutional muscles and stopped building them up.
> What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.
Possible bad wording on my part. I meant that the cost was hardly sustainable in a long run, so that once it was clear that the US had won the race to the Moon, the lack of significant incentives doomed the project because of high cost compared to the return. Back then there was no or very little interest in placing commercial satellites in orbit and nobody cared about Mars. The shuttle was different as it served as a lab and carrier to put satellites in orbit, and more importantly (replying also to avar here) disasters aside one would still have the shuttle returning after each launch, while every single Saturn V had to be rebuilt. I believe the move to a reusable carrier was obligatory to make short term launches feasible economically, which is what the Shuttle started and now SpaceX is continuing.
I don't buy that the cost was unsustainable. All that money being spent was going directly into the American economy and was stimulating technological development all over the country.
The story that NASA was too expensive during Apollo sounds like political spin to me.
Apollo's single mission was "get to the moon", which it performed admirably more than once. Skylab was an attempt at a secondary mission; others were canceled in early planning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Post-Apollo_proposal).
IMO the shuttle program did a decent job of preserving American human-spaceflight know-how, especially when measured against what it was feasible to accomplish at the time.
The true problem is that the US government stopped funding space in a serious way and so NASA did not continue pushing the envelope at the rate they did before. We've had some pretty great robotic missions in that time though.
No, the true problem was that the Shuttle program was just a terrible idea. Alternatives (like economical expendable launchers, or even just evolving Saturn) would have been much better.
The shuttle program had several problems, but perhaps the biggest was something of a "design by committee" issue. Too many interested parties wanted it to do too many things, making it somewhere between bad and mediocre at all of them, to say nothing of the costs.
To build reliable, economical rockets and spacecraft (at least those burdened with the task of escaping Earth's gravity well), you need to be able to intensely specialize and streamline them to the greatest degree possible, with what complexity remains pulling its own weight several times over. They need to be really good at one thing, with any other use cases coming as a bonus.
That's not even the root cause. The need for so many parties came from the need for a large enough market to justify the program. And the need for a large market came from the large cost of developing the launcher. And that came from the top down decision for reusability combined with overall inefficiency of the NASA-industry development system. And that is sourced back to Congress viewing NASA and space spending primarily as a pork delivery vehicle, not as an effort intended to achieve real results as economically as possible.
It took SpaceX to slash costs, accelerate development, and choose an approach that really made engineering success to push partial reusability over the finish line. SpaceX was not subject to the perverse incentives under which NASA is forced to operate.
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.
The problem isn't government meddling, but the government creating perverse incentives. Boeing has an extremely strong relationship with the government, which means they get sent endless billions of dollars with quality being only a distant concern. Because it's not like Congress cares about space - NASA is just seen as a convenient jobs/pork medium. So long as money gets redirected to the right people, they're happy. And so maintaining this relationship, and milking it for all it's worth, becomes much more profitable and reliable than trying to compete, innovate, and bring down prices. On the contrary, high prices and long development times just drive even more profit. Most of their contracts have been cost plus where the government pays for all costs and then gives them a fat chunk of profit on top. Even the fixed price contracts tend to end up getting 'adjusted' over time.
Any company solely motivated by profit would probably be destroyed in this system, because the incentives created do not reward competence.
Whether it's in the public or in the private sector, the real problem is a lack of competent leadership. At some point we started respecting the person with the most profitable hustle more than the person showing actual competence and integrity.
Right, the public-sector government becomes afraid to take risks for political reasons. On the other hand, the publicly traded private sector over-optimizes for shareholder value, putting the cart of gold before the horse; Boeing.
SpaceX remains a private company solely focused on their mission undeterred by outside influence which allows engineers the space to do what they do best.
There’s a difference and anything that’s truly critical to our lives or human livelihood should consider delisting. Once shareholders demand your company to stray from excellence and quality in the name of raising the bottom line, it’s time to give it a hard look.
As a (very) small shareholder in SpaceX, I can tell you, it's Elon (and Gwynne's) game, full stop. I would be very surprised to learn an investor has even a tiny bit of influence at SpaceX.
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 is undeniable that NASA/NROL/USAF contracts and support benefited spaceX especially early on .
However their commercial launch business is still considerably larger than what US gov gives them and always has been , it is possible and quite likely they would have existed as a successful commercial space launch company without government contracts , albeit smaller and perhaps slower to reach many milestones .
I can also argue reasonably that many things US government wants is not useful (or simply restricted) for other customers and building those features were and are a distraction.
No different for a startup to have a very large customer who has all sorts of customization needs that no other customer will focusing on that can kill the company as ULA and Boeing space are feeling today.
SpaceX is successful because they don’t need government support not because of it, they can build starship without waiting for a nasa mission and not even using VC money but just money from their revenues .
"“I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. And fortunately the fourth launch, which was, that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1. That fourth launch worked. Or it would have been — that would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that day. So, the fourth launch worked,” says Musk."
Flights one, two, and three all involved government funding (Air Force and DARPA payloads).
"Even though SpaceX finally has achieved a successful orbital flight, Musk only has $30 million left and was unable to support both SpaceX and Tesla for two months. Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts. Through 2008, SpaceX launch manifest at the time only consisted of RazakSAT. Rather, it was NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services and subsequent Commercial Resupply Services contracts that provided SpaceX much-needed fund to save it from bankruptcy."
Don't forget SpaceX was the first private company which achieved orbit without external money, and did that for awfully less money than e.g. Air Force thought possible.
Thanks for the links. I can't find in the article how much DARPA gave SpaceX, in dollars, and the second link talks about payment for the launch, not the grant.
The mission carried a $6.7 million price tag covered by the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
How big share of about AFAIK $90 millions spent on Falcon-1 program was from SpaceX investor(s) and how big was from external sources? In other words, how material was that external funding?
I think it stands to reason that if they were nearly bankrupt after flight floor, having to self-fund flights one, two, and three would have definitely bankrupted them.
I think they had money to make up to 4 flights. Looks like they got some money even before the flight 4, but not sure how much compared to their own expenses.
> 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.
This was the claim of OP I replied to, Are we not moving the goal posts here? Government support for early stage startups is absolutely not what OP claimed
DARPA AND USAF funding is important and also available to many companies before and since, the size of them is however not significant in comparison to what it takes to run a rocket company or even R&D.
> Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts ...
> Even Musk doesn't make that claim.
In the alternate reality where Falcon 4 succeeded but there were no COTS and CRS , would SpaceX have survived? Yes I think so, Musk would not have been able to keep it funded personally yes, but it is hard to see the first private rocket company with a functional rocket not being able to raise any money from investors at all.
We can of course argue how much Musk loosing partial control would have affected the trajectory of the company, quite possible they won't be where they are today without singular focus he was able to drive in the company, who is to say ? but they would likely be still here. It is also possible that Musk is talented and effective enough even with constraints external investors would have been still able to achieve the same kind of things, keep in mind SpaceX does have lot of external investors and raised outside money heavily in the last 15 years including a $1Billion from Google in 2015, Musk has been able to operate with that so not that far fetched.
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Nobody is denying that US Gov has been instrumental in the success of SpaceX and rocketry in general. After all even with zero government support, SpaceX would still need the rich talent pool US Gov developed and allowed to work in the private sector to build a rocket at all.
The point is how much the revenue from Government launches helps/helped not how they has helped at all. US Gov is a large customer but not so large that loosing those contracts would make the TAM impossibly small, there is enough business outside to make it viable business not just attractive but viable nonetheless.
So, two flights to the Moon - ~$4B. SpaceX already spent around that on the developments in Boca Chica, each flight - expendable - is estimated at $0.1B, we already had 4 and they are surely more costly. We still have to have 2 HLS to fly and 20-30 Starship flights to refuel them, and that's the lower bound in expenses.
Big chunk, likely. But definitely not nearly all the money.
That's an interesting cost-based criticism of Starship. I hope you are wrong and SpaceX can actually do this profitably, otherwise its potential will be much reduced.
The development is what already being spent... Each flight, after development is complete, will be reusable - that's the plan - and will cost less than $0.1B == 100 millions dollars, if total per-Starship expenses are divided into the total number of that Starship flights. Yes, I hope the eventual costs per flight would be lower, the point is the cost of the program is surely way more than $4B.
and the government should continue to fund private enterprise for innovation.
much of the billions for a charger network for EVs has made <10 chargers, they could have provided that to Tesla. similarly the EV tax credits provided to private companies has fueled EV proliferation
> Just looking at the $5 billion program dedicated to building charging stations along major highways, Nigro said updated data from 10 states shows the government’s share of building each port is $150,000, on average. That works out to more than 30,000 ports and as many as 7,500 stations, assuming each has four ports (Nigro said the station number will likely be lower, since many stations will have more ports). Even more charging stations and ports can be built with the other $2.5 billion.
> The charger thing is misleading. The money hasn't been spent yet
Not certain if that is any better. If an organization can't execute, it can't execute. It doesn't matter if it is some frankenstein of Boeing prime contractor and Rocketjet subcontractor or Federal and States.
Sure, and if we’re still at ten completed charging stations in a few years, I’m happy to criticize.
I think that’s unlikely.
Phase one is “submit your plans”. Phase two is “we review, approve, and fund your plans”. I’m not surprised these have taken a while to coordinate across 50 state governments.
2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal, it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.
The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years. He said most will be coming online 2027+ but seemed to admit that the expectation was for more to be online by now. While I agree the "9 stations for $7.5B" there are reasonable concerns here that the money will be well-spent. I can't even find anything on how much has been actually allocated to far and how many chargers are expected.
> 2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal, it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.
Yes, it is. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger... "Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure package into law in 2021 with $7.5 billion specifically directed toward EV chargers, with an eye toward achieving his goal of building 500,000 chargers in the United States by 2030."
> The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years.
Yes, to hand out to the states. Who then get to spend it on projects. Allocation is the start of the project, not the end.
"FHWA must distribute the NEVI Program Formula Program funds made available each fiscal year (FY) through FY 2026, so that each state receives an amount equal to the state FHWA funding formula determined by 23 U.S. Code 104. To receive funding, states must submit plans to the FHWA and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation for review and public posting annually, describing how the state intends to distribute NEVI funds. The FHWA announced approval of all initial state plans on September 27, 2022, and FY2024 plans were approved in 2023."
You'll find me fairly unconvinced by a letter from Republican House Representatives to Biden. (You probably would find a letter from Democratic reps to Trump similarly useless as evidence.)
Turning Elon Musk into the richest person on earth was a US government project on the same kind of scale as the TVA and Apollo program. It’s actually kinda funny when you think about it.
This is reductive, in the extreme, to the point of being incorrect. SpaceX had to sue to win its first contracts, Tesla was actively cut out of Biden administration EV programs and awards. Whatever success they've had, they have absolutely earned.
the command of critical projects Elon has is unnatural. He builds his massive projects with no permits or regulatory approvals;
see:
- the massive supercomputer in Memphis, no power power approval from TVA and did do an EIA. The city council never new about the project.
- Starship and Starbase, no lauch approval
- Tesla FSD, no regulatory approval
-Starlink version 2 upgrade, the competition is still fight. Again, no approval
and many more.. all this projects a massive like really massive.. True Elon is a government project.
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.
Pretty much this. Polaris Dawn is happening because Jared Isaacman wanted it to. And my point is that SpaceX has gotten the price down to the point where he was able to afford multiple trips.
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.
Jet set was a thing in 50/60s Jet travel was viewed as a play thing for the extremely rich . Even today there is staggering 80% of the world population who have never flown in airplane ever in their life[1].
From the perspective of that 80% they can say airplanes are "just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with".
It takes a long long time for transportation to become affordable. What SpaceX has done so far is just make it a bit cheaper to make it possible for civilians to be able to even pay any money and do this. No innovation will be ever enough, that doesn't mean we demean it.
I'm not demeaning anything, I'm just pointing out that OP's argument makes no sense. There may be other evidence that SpaceX is safe and cost effective, but rich people paying them to go to space is not it.
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.
Yes indeed. It shows the importance of cultural and political issues in everything. And not least in space flight. See the motivation behind the Apollo programme in the past or who might be part of the next Crew-9 mission in the current situation.
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).
Commercial space flight will become mainstream as soon as it becomes viable to profit from it. Probably via asteroid or moon mining. At that point motivation to be in space will hit its peak. Let's not forget why humans went to orbit and the moon in the first place.
Just a couple hundred years ago, Settlers who risked their lives and spent several months on cutting edge technology (aka wooden sail
boats) to find “new” land would like to have a word.
It's also a bit poetic in that it took 30-60 days to sail from Europe to the New World. When Mars is aligned with Earth, the travel time will be similar. For example, New Horizons was able to reach Mars in 39 days.
Am I missing something? New Horizons didn’t go to Mars, right?
According to this, it also crossed the orbit of mars 78 days after launch, and at that point, it was closer to earth than mars:
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.
People have been waiting for that like forever. It may happen, it may not. I spoke to multiple SpaceX employees post Musk twitter and they are as committed as ever with an insane amount of dedication to the cause...so if he does not lose his top talent, the likelihood of screwups like what you are describing seem small.
He’s our generation’s Howard Hughes. One Ket trip away from becoming a recluse, shuffling around with kleenex boxes for slippers muttering about being unclean and denouncing conspiracies against him.
This was literally debunked by nasa but I’m so glad HN is so captured by anti musk narratives it’s impossible to post anything good about him with getting downvoted.
I'm all for holding him accountable to his outlandishly unrealistic claims, but he and the entire SpaceX team are wholly responsible for the biggest advancements and innovations in space explorations since the space race. Credit where credit is due.
People thought the Wright Brothers were crazy, too.
Innovators are often dismissed as having outlandish, unrealistic claims. And then they succeed.
And, frankly, how are you going to hold him "accountable"? It's his and his investors' money he's spending. They know what they signed up for.
P.S. I own a bit of Tesla and SpaceX stock. It could go to zero, and I'm still happy to have a "piece" of what Musk is accomplishing.
The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires. Though I do understand Musk wanting to run Twitter as he saw fit rather than having to listen to activist shareholders.
Musk is one of, it not the, greatest entrepreneur in American history.
> The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires.
You got lucky. Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private, and your shares would correspondingly be worth a tiny fraction of what they were originally worth if you still owned them. Musk has succeeded with other companies but his Twitter acquisition has been a total failure. He simply doesn't understand how to run a social networking company.
The point is, the stock would likely be down at least 5X, so if you wanted to be a long-term investor, you could take the cash that was forcefully cashed out and re-buy in now and get over 5X the share of the company. Selling high and re-buying in low is a very good strategy if you can actually do it, and you have the opportunity to do it!
But you certainly don't want to be the bagholder who held it when it was high (the price Elon was willing to pay for it) and then rode it all the way down to the bottom when it cratered.
I've held many of bags. Some of them all the way to a smoking hole in the ground. But several of the bags turned out to be winners that far outstripped the losses.
I prefer to invest in the management of a company, rather than the financials. I'm willing to see them through the bad times if I believe they're on the right track. I've been a patient investor of Intel since the 90s. But a couple months ago, I finally gave up and sold it. It pained me a great deal to do so, but Intel just seems to have lost its mojo.
Sure, my Twitter stock may have tanked under Musk. But I am willing to be patient with him.
Let's say I invest in 10 stocks, and hold, hold, hold. 3 of them go to zero. 3 do modestly ok. 3 do well. 1 goes up a hundred fold. The other 9 are irrelevant.
I do not know how well X is doing as a business, but Musk buying Twitter has certainly helped to wrest it out of the hands of the left and to shift the Overton window. It could well be that to Musk, the political impact is well worth billions of dollars.
I'm curious, how does one buy stock in SpaceX? Is this opportunity only available for wealthy individuals or people who can put down 6-7 figures towards it?
What happens is some big investors buy chunks of stock, and then resell it on a secondary market. So my shares are claims on the big investor's shares, not mine. There's usually a non-trivial minimum, and a hefty fee.
Biggest advancements ? Give me a break. Voyagers, Hubble, ISS, James Webb, upcoming Europa mission - SpaceX has nothing on that level of sophistication and cooperation between dozens of countries. I'm very much fond of SpaceX, but giving Elon too much credit does not feel right .
Biggest advancements in launch technology would surely be correct. Scientific research isn’t in their domain and should never be. There’s just too much political influence there.
What is SpaceX doing that the Apollo project (or the Soviets, for that matter) wasn't doing 50 years ago. Re-usable booster stages is all I can really think of.
Beyond the cost aspect that other commenters have referred to, they're evolving tech. They're the first ones to have a working full-flow staged combustion cycle rocket engine (the Raptor, currently used in the Starship prototypes), something the Soviets tried before and failed. Their Dragon capsule was also a gigantic technological leap relative to the admittedly tried-and-true Soyuz, and it also looks far more comfortable for astronauts than the Soyuz does.
SpaceX is also doing right now what Apollo and the Soviets are not doing right now. That's very important, because they are using modern materials and manufacturing techniques and developing new concepts. If SpaceX (and soon their competitors, hopefully) manage to keep themselves in business (and they might, because of the profit motive, which is enduring, rather than national pride, which comes and goes), there's a fair chance our species might bootstrap its way out of the ancestral gravity well this time around.
Profit has not been the goal. If profit is the goal, one'd start another eyeball catching internet application. As the joke goes, the way to make a small fortune in space, is to start with a big fortune. SpaceX is the exception, not the norm. It worked only because of the unwavering, perhaps maniacal drive of one man. The man being hated on all over the place here that shall not be named.
I'd suspect the space industry will slow down drastically again if somehow that man stops putting space as a priority (or at least one of his priorities). Currently I don't think there's any one or company that is able to push the envelope AND still turn an operational profit at the same time. Even Starship program is not. Making it work is the exception, not some inevitable norm as others are making it as. Aka - "just because of government money".
Space is a perfect example that this isn't true. It kept going up and up with NASA/Boeing. The Space Shuttle ended up costing, in total, $2.2 billion per launch! [1] The SLS, if it ever finishes, was expected to cost more than $2 billion per launch [2], and that's before we went into inflation land. Add the inflation and the fact that expected costs tend to be dwarfed by real costs, and it's easy to see it going for $3+ billion per launch.
By contrast a Falcon 9 costs $0.07 billion per launch. And the entire goal of the Starship is to send that cost down another order of magnitude. Without significant competition + price sensitive market, the only way costs come down is if you have an ideologically motivated player. And it's fortunate that we have exactly that with SpaceX.
The overwhelming majority of SpaceX's revenue has been government contracting. That is starting to diversify in the last 2-3 years with more truly private launches and with Starlink, but that's relatively new, and even so government is a very, very large share of revenue.
Many were. I'm not saying this is terrible-- these programs cost too much for private entities to bear all the risk, and most of the programs that SpaceX has gotten funding from have been well-run programs.
COTS paid for vehicle development for Falcon-9 and Dragon; CRS paid for flights. COTS was a pretty well-managed program with a lot of clear milestones for funding release.
The troubled Artemis program has paid for a whole lot of Starship development and demonstration. It's questionable how well Starship actually meets Artemis needs, so this is more troubling.
And, of course, the government has bought early flights with no guarantee of success, including just to fly masses/demosats. DARPA/NASA/ORS paid for the first 3 Falcon I failures.
OK granted. NASA and legacy aerospace contractors were milking a cash cow and never thought they would face a new competitor.
But I was more thinking of fundamental capabilites. We (USA and USSR) have had crewed low-orbit space stations since the 1970s and have been sending astronauts to and from them since then. We sent probes to Mars and Venus and other planets in the 1970s. The Voyagers were launched in 1977. The stuff we're capable of doing today has not really advanced.
You can be great at one phase of your life. Motivating people, working 20 hours a day, sleeping in the office. Probably Tesla would have gone under without Elon pushing, motivating, and showing his investment (meaning of time and energy).
It doesn't mean you are a statesman, a scholar, or all knowing. About anything.
It also doesn't mean that you can solve every problem you encounter in life with that kind of behavour.
Tesla as a company is an impressive accomplishment. Elon does sound crazy, however.
I recommend reading a biography of Musk and the creation of Tesla. It's abundantly clear neither would exist without Musk. Anyone would want to be called such a "sad loser"!
There are lots of nice people in the world who don't do anything much for us. People like Musk, on the other hand, create this world we can enjoy. Consequences matter more than motivations.
And what exactly have you accomplished in your life that has bettered others' lives?
Don't get me wrong it's perfectly fine to criticize someone on specific things - however, you are just blanket calling someone you don't know a sad loser... honestly says more about you than him.
oh bugger all, and I'm content with that. I don't think he is though. he just doesn't seem okay. if I were that filthy rich, I'd pay somebody to make sure I'm not coming across as a lunatic, I wouldn't joke about buying a blog and then panic when I can't pull out of the contract. i wouldn't tell advertisers to go fuck themselves and then sue them for not advertising on my blog.
I follow Musk on twitter. I usually get a chuckle from his tweets. It's nice to see a major figure speak his mind rather than the careful pablum filtered through a PR department and read off a teleprompter.
I don't think he has said anything outright. But he has endorsed (coded) antisemitic tweets, he has directly espoused transphobia, and his companies have lost a few lawsuits alleging racist working conditions.
I don't think he himself is racist, but he seems to enjoy hanging out with a lot of racists, and he gives me vibes that he thinks anti-racism is more of a problem than racism.
It is true that Musk endorsed a post which said that Jewish communities have been endorsing anti-white hatred.
There is no doubt that one can easily find many individual Jews, and even groups of Jews, who have endorsed anti-white hatred. However, Jews are prominent in all parts of the political spectrum due probably mainly to their high average level of intellectual ability, so basically anyone could find prominent Jews among their political opponents no matter what sort of politics one has. Some of the most prominent figures who are generally considered far-right in today's Western Overton window, and most definitely are not anti-white, are Jewish. For example, David Horowitz, Curtis Yarvin, Costin Alamariu, and many others. Then there is Israel, which in some ways is far-right by modern US standards, and is a place where I imagine the majority of the population both consider themselves white and are not anti-white in the slightest, rather the opposite. The idea that entire broad communities of Jews promote anti-white hatred is not supportable by reality as far as I can tell.
I forgot about that endorsement of his. You make a good point. I am not sure that his endorsement was just a case of misunderstanding on his part rather than revealing a deeper racist sentiment. It could go either way. It is possible that he was just sloppy and interpreted "Jewish communities" to mean "certain groups of Jews", which is what he tried to say when he backtracked from his endorsement later, and it is also possible that he actually dislikes Jewish people in general. But I agree that it is not unlikely that he has at least some underlying anti-Jewish sentiment.
Funnily, I notice that many people who have anti-Jewish sentiment misunderstand what is typically happening when individual Jews express anti-white sentiment. Usually what is happening in such cases is that the person considers himself both white and Jewish, so when he expresses anti-white sentiment it is not as a Jewish person hating on whites, it is actually as a self-hating white hating on whites. I would not be surprised if Jewish whites in the US are more likely to express anti-white sentiment than non-Jewish whites are, since Jewish people in the US tend to be leftist and being a self-hating white person is a very common characteristic of leftist whites, but that does not mean that communities of Jews are anti-white unless you use the word "communities" in a rather non-standard way.
As far as transphobia goes, I am not so sure. Musk seems to be a bad father to his trans child, but I cannot think off the top of my head of any transphobic things that he has said, unless you think that it is transphobic to not consider a trans woman a woman. Which I do not consider transphobic at all. But I might not be aware of some of his statements.
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).
Since then 500 million people or more have been taken out of poverty. They are competing with you for resources. That's why what was going on in the US in the 50s is no longer possible.
Wouldn't you wonder why then that it seems, at least according to you, society have went backwards and not forward in this time frame?
"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." still applies. Fixing the everyday problem is part of the problem-set to get to the "civilization advancing" goals.
I'm 100% with you about fixing fundamental societal problems first. But we still have to ask why we can't do that anymore with a single breadwinner in a household.
After the super-basics like hunger, homelessness and violent crime, the next item on the list should be this problem of the value of a human's labor (As to how, I'll leave open for discussion). I believe it's been going down since the 1950's because we've transitioned away from manual labor and onto more "knowledge based" labor, of which most people are not keeping up. And of no fault of their own necessarily. We're simultaneously not assisting them with schooling and training, but we're also trying to insulate them from the negative effects of their falling-behind by not promoting a meritocracy.
All fair points. If we could even get an honest dialogue of this issue in the mainstream maybe we could start fixing it. At this point all I hear from politicians are catchphrases and an insane amount of effort has to be undertaken just to get breadcrumbs. I saw this when Bernie Sanders lost the primary, he and his people worked to push the Biden white house to adopt some policies to help working families...it took a lot of effort and we got some tiny wins but with those wins, the elites got hoards of goodies as well.
Most economies are not meritocratic and/or capitalist but mixed economies where the state direct good % of gdp towards political goals. in these societies the ones who makes real money are in proximity of the "printing press", usually finance, banking, real estate and generally incumbent megacorps; all actors that can take full advantage of low interest rates & stimulus programs that end up inflating assets (cantillon effect) further devaluing the value of labour. We need real meritocracy and capitalistic competition to put back power int the hand of labour.
But the 50s were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors, first of all being an overheated economy, the only country with serious industrial capacity post WW2
You are explaining a symptom of the problem. Solve the underlying problem. If humans are to become a space faring civilization and all the other things this cannot be an insurmountable problem.
>But the 50s were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors, first of all being an overheated economy, the only country with serious industrial capacity post WW2
Why is it that society should be expected to solve these extremely difficult problems to go into space and to do all these other sci-fi things but when it comes to the standards of living that humans were once capable of, its "oh what you had were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors".
I'm sorry but I don't buy it. If you want the magic of the future that you see in the comic books get the fundamentals right first!
investing on cutting edge tech has historically been more beneficial to society in large than similar (tiny) amounts in welfare projects. Increasing workers productivity also makes similar levels of taxation less burdensome. lets say you need 10k a year per capita to finance welfare for everyone. if gross income doubles, tax burden halves.
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, because NASA and Boeing have been both putting their own spin on the things they say. If you read his threads on X you can get a good idea of what I'm talking about
I'm guessing if the ISS was no longer able to sustain life support, Starliner would be used. Guaranteed loss of life by staying on ISS or having an unknown <100% chance of surviving using Starliner, of course it will be chanced.
I'm not really sure what point your question is attempting to get at
I'm sure the astronauts would much prefer to have a Dragon available, but I don't think NASA's "cleared for human flight" means much. After all, 4% (14/355) of all the astronauts that flew on the space shuttle died when their vehicles exploded.
ISS is huge, and is very unlikely to fail all at once. In a case of a catastrophic failure, they could stay in a less affected part of the station. All life-critical systems on spacecraft are duplicated and triplicated. With the current SpaceX launch capabilities, a rescue Crew Dragon could arrive within days if not hours.
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.
Space journalist Eric Berger of Ars Technica has been speaking to his contacts and writing articles about the very likely SpaceX Crew 9 plan for the last week.
This was the only way this could ever play out. After all of Boeing’s last five years, even if 100% unrelated, no bureaucrat anywhere would take that risk. If something goes wrong, you’re the idiot who put the astronauts on a vehicle from a company who has had a long string of recent failures.
Even at the best of times space travel is risky, why tie your career to that?
Not only would you be the bureaucrat who put astronauts on a vehicle with documented problems, you would have done so when a perfectly capable alternative was sitting there able to help.
I'm waiting for Boeing to change its name to get away from all of the negativity associated with Boeing. It's the classic move for a company that doesn't really want to change business practices, but need to "start over"
I think this is much less embarrassing for NASA than Boeing. NASA outsources their engineering now, and Boeing was, until very recently, a prestigious aeronautical engineering company. It's going to be very difficult for the world to adjust to the new reality that Boeing is no more. It's an even stranger reality that the company which routinely blows up rockets in pursuit of what everyone believed was impossible just a few years ago is now the clear and obvious choice. I think that's the even bigger story here for me: what Musk has done with SpaceX is nothing short of revolutionary. In hundreds of years people are going to be watching this as a pivotal moment in human development: https://youtu.be/sf4qRY3h_eo?si=fAhcunCLHY803wn7&t=454
It's amazing how many people, whether sympathetic to SpaceX or not, believe that NASA built its previous spacecraft in-house or something. The main differences between Commercial Crew and previous US manned space programs are that a) two different vehicles were built, not one, and b) NASA does not own or operate the vehicles; their builders do. Everything else is the same: NASA provided specifications for what it wanted in a manned spacecraft capable of reliably carrying people to ISS, various companies bid based on the specifications—their designs varying greatly from one another—and NASA chose the winning bids.
> The main differences between Commercial Crew and previous US manned space programs are that a) two different vehicles were built, not one, and b) NASA does not own or operate the vehicles; their builders do. Everything else is the same: NASA provided specifications for what it wanted in a manned spacecraft capable of reliably carrying people to ISS, various companies bid based on the specifications—their designs varying greatly from one another—and NASA chose the winning bids.
I think there is a big difference you haven't mentioned.
With Apollo, with the Space Shuttle, with the US components of the ISS, with SLS/Orion – NASA owned the design and made the big design decisions. They hired contractors to do a lot of the grunt work of the engineering – analysing different options, fleshing out high-level designs into detailed designs, etc – but the big picture design decisions were made by NASA. (Or, in the case of SLS, dictated to NASA by Congress.)
By contrast, with Commercial Cargo/Crew and HLS, NASA is just writing the requirements spec and letting the contractors make the big design decisions. And then the contractors have to convince NASA's engineers that the design actually fulfils those requirements. But NASA isn't making decisions like "what fuel should the launch vehicle use"–so long as they can convince NASA that what they are doing meets the requirements spec, the contractor can do almost anything they like. Whereas, on earlier programs, NASA was making the final call on many of those high-level design decisions.
I grew up in Huntsville, AL, in the 60s and the space program was the main business of the city. My father worked for Chrysler Corp. on the Saturn 1B, and most of our neighbors worked for either NASA or one of the many contractors.
>and Boeing was, until very recently, a prestigious aeronautical engineering company
what do you define as "recently"? This Boeing/lockheed project has been a taxpayer funded disaster for over a decade and this is just the obvious end result. Boeing managed to siphon billions of tax dollars in the meantime
imagine if you could go back in the past 20 years and show someone that video. it's science fiction level crazy. im happy and proud that happened in the US and not china or russia, everyone else should be too
It’s hard not to be cynical these days when almost everything seems to be “maximize every possible drop of profit at the expense of almost anything else.” It seems so short-sighted and instant-gratification-y.
No, it is not an embarrassment. Space is hard, failures do happen often there. There is and will always be a human factor, politics and cost optimizations. Despite that they delivered people to ISS and have a plan B. It is partial success. The problems will eventually be fixed and USA will solidify its leadership in space race by having different launch systems and never again being dependent on rival powers.
Many of you might assume that Starliner is a cost-plus contract. Cost-plus contracts are common for large capital projects but they often end up running way over budget because the provider is essentially incentivized for budget overruns because they get paid more.
It turns out Starliner is a fixed-price contract (for $4.2 billion). So when Starliner had an issue a couple of years ago Boeing was forced to do another test and eat the launch cost. We ened more of this.
SLS (and Artemis?), for example, is largely done by cost-plus contracts.
It's common for companies and governments to want to have more than one supplier so they can't so easily be price-gouged (which doesn't really work but that's a separate topic). SpaceX got a $2.6 billion contract for Crew Dragon and its launch cost has to be substantially lower than Starliner's.
So NASA will still push Starliner for this reason. But this whole debacle is deeply embarrasing for Boeing, so much so that people at the top may actually get fired. That's really rare for the executives responsible for a strategy to be held accountable for its failures.
Boeing is just not in a great place and I honestly don't know how you right the ship at this point. A fish rots from the head and I imagine Boeing has descended into warring fiefdoms where some VPs just try and increase their head counts so they can get promoted to SVP.
It's very likely to not blow up. The engineers who studied the issue all think it's much more likely to work just fine with lower thrust levels.
Why not just fly the crew back in it then? "likely to work fine" is not sufficient level of certainty for NASA (anymore, because of bitter lessons). They need to be able to quantify the risk. And this is not possible, because an uncertain amount of damage was already done inside the thruster dog houses when they overheated and some material in them melted, and they cannot be inspected.
What guaranteed the unmanned return was that when they did new ground tests with the equipment, the damage was not consistent between tests. This means they cannot model what happened, and they cannot inspect the current state of the dog houses, meaning that no sane engineer will sign off on it, even though the damage is probably not very large and they can prevent future damage by using a less aggressive flight plan.
> is not sufficient level of certainty for NASA (anymore, because of bitter lessons).
It never was. If you trip into a known failed safe situation the mission rules immediately change. This has been true since manned space flight started.
While Boeing - the union of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas - needs some fundamental changes, Boeing the company represents a significant trained workforce for aerospace construction.
Saying "welp... guess we'll close up shop and ship those jobs somewhere else. Time to learn French and go work for Airbus (The ArianeGroup is Airbus and Safran)."
Wishing for the demise of Boeing represents an irrecoverable loss of industrial capacity for the US.
It is an incredible but true fact there’s often no known way to repair large organizations once they have gotten sufficiently sick. They have to be dissolved and new companies have to be built from the ground up. As you suggest, this is incredibly destructive. The employees and expertise aren’t destroyed — they start and join the new companies — but the relationships and institutional knowledge is largely lost. But it is recoverable, and the alternative is often worse.
> All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
There is no scripted formula to repair a large organization. Each one needs to be addressed in a way that is particular to that organization, its culture, and its ultimate desired end state.
One could look at the Gil Amelio to Steve Jobs Apple - that was a turn around of a not small organization. However, what worked for Apple certainly won't work for Boeing.
A true scientist would come to the conclusion that at this point in time it's time to give up on the great liberal democracy project. A true scientist has the scale needed to recognize that capitalism, as practiced under liberal aims, does not have the desire nor the ability to satisfy modern industrialism's education prerequisite. A societal culture that has prioritized the reverse of education is what has led to the United States's incompetence at technology and industry. The United States was never going to succeed in this arena.
The kid gets a failing grade. Pick someone else that is a better candidate at mission success. Select someone that's serious about doing real work.
Maybe capitalism's competitor, whatever that may be, is better at heralding space travel and mass production?
China does appear to be a good replacement and contender for a sustainable modern empire (according to whatever objective analysis would support that claim). But, if they flirt with liberty and the pursuit of happiness even one bit, then it's game over and futile for this strain of politics too.
Excellent question. And the answer is, of course, very simple: Being American (or, more generally, a liberal-democracy subordinated entity), you should expect even Elon Musk's SpaceX to be a bad bet. SpaceX will display its inherent inability too, eventually.
I'm only minimizing the value of the Enlightenment's liberty proposition (liberalism) as a result of the scientific observation that entropy most definitely accelerates through liberal-democratic ideas and enterprises. Don't propose liberalism and then I won't appear aloof when I'm actually watching the situation very closely.
That's the problem of the generic establishment's dominant principle: there's a pedagogic influence where a trend towards aggressive responses to criticisms of popular science is valuable and, really, should be expected. Capital rewards and incentives go to the distributed liberal justice warriors when they implement regurgitations of trite and irrelevant talking points. Like an objective optimizing GPT-4 model that focuses on “no true X” meme tokens. Civilization's trained citizens miss details that matter, as they're limited to the compliant programming script they must follow and never deviate from.
Besides violating some sacred cow and norms, how does the "no true Scotsman" fallacy proposal relate to the fact that no true scientist would ever consider the Boeing aerospace company or Elon Musk anything close to engineering geniuses? Because, otherwise, you're just avoiding the objective commentary's point and discussion it leads to. Whether this evasion is intentional or not.
Lol. Who else is in this class? Little Piotr Communism dropped out of school 30 years ago. China's busy just trying to catch up. Everybody else can't seem to figure out how to pass econ-101.
Oh please. The answer was globalization. People couldn't get along well enough to make that work so here we are.
There is no magic sauce that will make economies work for everyone. Specialization is how we built civilization tens of thousands of years ago. It's how we get off the struggle bus today. But if nations can't rely on a global trade order then they all have to build everything.
I hope it does not. We do not need more space debris in orbit or more risk to the station and crew.
Also if it lands okay then they are more likely to deduce and correct what the issues are for a possible future mission (though at this point I do not know the likelyhood that Starliner will get another chance)
It would only "blow up" on reentry, don’t think there’s much risk of an actual pressure vessel rupture or hypergolic explosion. So no space debris at least, just littering the ocean.
The problematic thrusters are in the service module, which separates and burns up on reentry. So even if it lands OK, they won't learn anything new about the thruster problem by recovering the capsule.
If it were to blow up it would almost certainly be in the atmosphere due to entering at a bad angle or something. This would leave no debris in orbit and would not endanger the station or crew.
I doubt NASA wants to put 4 astronauts on the next Starliner flight. So if NASA declares this crewed flight test a failure and requires a redo (and possibly even reverting back to a third out of one planned uncrewed flight test), Boeing is still on the hook for their operational 6 crewed flights.
Here's the problem: Starliner flies in the Atlas 5 rocket. Which is officially deprecated and all of the vehicles that will ever built have been booked. Which would mean that Boeing has to nicely ask Project Kepler for one (or more) or their remaining Atlas 5 slots. All of this also pushes back the final flight of the Atlas 5. Starliner already has 5 years where it's the only mission in that rocket, requiring hardware and operational knowledge to be on retainer just for Starliner. At least the pad that launches Starliner can also do Vulcan launches, so they won't be hogging a launch pad just for this problematic program.
If they manage to human rate Vulcan, I don't think it would be technically hard to launch Starliner on it. Just looking at Cygnus which used three different rockets from three different companies.
So, what happens if it does blow up, or otherwise has a catastrophic failure on re-entry? Will we be able to say for certain if it was due to Starliner’s faults, or just the fact that there wasn’t a human pilot?
All Boeing hate aside this is a learning experience for everyone involved.
I would be very surprised if any human actions are required for delivering people into and returning them from space, or even any controls being present in the capsule to allow the human payload making any changes to flight parameters ;)
It will certainly be (rightly) blamed on the vehicle. It's designed to operate completely autonomously---they flew two full test flights that way before ever putting crew on it.
What do you imagine is the material difference between what I said and what you said?
But if you want to split hairs like this, get it right: companies. Boeing is the primary contractor, but others likely share some responsibility---for instance AJR, who supplied the problematic thrusters.
Starliner is the capsule, SLS is the rocket. SLS [1] is not a fixed price contract. The government's dumped tens of billions on it already, and continues to throw good money after bad. And the "fixed" price contract for Starliner keeps getting adjusted with NASA giving them hundreds of millions more dollars, allowing them to skip certain qualifying tests, and so on.
You keep posting this reply everywhere, doesn't make it true. They've always had the option of coming down on crew 8, they will have the plan of coming down on crew 9. The starliner is still functional as well, just the risk is unquantified. Remember NASA requires a risk assessment of 1:270 odds to proceed. Saying they're not coming back on starliner doesn't mean that it's certain death if they do
>You keep posting this reply everywhere, doesn't make it true.
Amazing that, even after today's confirmation of what we all expected, there are still those in denial.
>They've always had the option of coming down on crew 8
Yes, lashed to a jury-rigged harness in the cargo department. Right now NASA is in de facto violation of the ironclad rule of always having a seat for everyone aboard ISS, and for about three weeks between Crew 8's departure and Crew 9's arrival, the violation will be even greater.
>Saying they're not coming back on starliner doesn't mean that it's certain death if they do
As I wrote in the link in the comment that you keep seeing everywhere but never bothered to read:
>NASA has said that in an emergency the astronauts will use Starliner. That is not the same thing as saying that using Starliner (whether in an emergency or not) to return to earth is as safe as using Soyuz or Crew Dragon, and every day the return is delayed (hitting two months very shortly) is additional proof of this.
>Put another way, if there is an emergency on ISS right now, the two astronauts that flew on Starliner have to take Starliner back because there is no alternative. There are no extra seats on Soyuz or Crew Dragon docked there.
and
>In an "ISS explodes tomorrow and there is no Starliner" situation, of course Wilmore and Williams will be strapped in as tightly as possible as cargo in Crew Dragon. The ride might be bumpy, but should be survivable.
>The interesting question is, in an "ISS explodes tomorrow" scenario, does the above still occur? Based on all available reporting the answer would until very recently have been "No; Wilmore and Williams will use Starliner". I am no longer sure that this is the case.
Common sense has finally prevailed. IMO Boeing fought this tooth and nail because of Musk, risking the lives of the astronauts to save corporate face. Heads should roll but Boeing is too big to fail, to big to jail, and the executives will make out with a golden parachute in the end.
Did anyone explain to Boeing management that two astronauts dying a fiery death would be a far bigger hit to the company's stock and reputation than just writing this capsule off?
Where was that stated? In the press conference they said Boeing deferred to NASA to make the decision because they had a better perspective on the entire landscape of the problem.
I wonder if the astronauts get some type of extra-pay for the time when they are in space. It feels they they should. If that's the case, these 2 astronauts got quite lucky. They were supposed to stay only a few days in orbit, and they end up staying a few months.
>“Starliner is a very capable spacecraft and, ultimately, this comes down to needing a higher level of certainty to perform a crewed return,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. “The NASA and Boeing teams have completed a tremendous amount of testing and analysis, and this flight test is providing critical information on Starliner’s performance in space. Our efforts will help prepare for the uncrewed return and will greatly benefit future corrective actions for the spacecraft.”
The most bonkers thing to me is how Starliner was allowed to fly with crew on board when it was on the pad leaking helium. This leaking was known and ongoing for hours and they let it fly anyway.
Are there any more detailed technical reports about the current starliner problems out there yet? All I can find are a few paragraphs in press releases. Maybe we just have to wait.
McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money. Engineering culture died and became bean-counter, lowest common denominator corporate-culture. Lobbying went up, outsourcing to third world went up, quality went down, whistleblowers fired and suppressed.
These organizations no longer exist for the purpose of building great products and pushing the limits of engineering. It's easier to operate on the tit of the state and rake in billions through sleazy backroom deals and lobbying with the state acting as an artificial intermediary between cause and effect.
You have to assume Boeings reputation is an issue here. It changes the expected value for the decision maker(s) since the cost of going with Boeing (allowing a crewed return) is so much higher for them personally in the failure case.
It actually disgusts me reading the boeing subreddit and how there's comments coming from obvious traders or management being upvoted straight up lying through their teeth about this.
I'll quote one:
"It’s ridiculous. Only a few of the 27 thrusters had issues. The capsule is designed to operate with only half the thrusters."
(4 upvotes)
Obviously the reply to it straight up calls him out and exposes it, but it just shows that people around Boeing have no respect whatsoever for human safety, it's all dollar bills to them...
I do not think I'd trust my life to boeing anytime soon, I do not want to be guessing mid flight if the boeing I'm on was built in the last 20 years or not (newer = less safe)
This is evidence of the utter failure of constantly pumping money into a dated cartel of prime contractors that have no incentive to do better. I am very thankful we have Elon Musk to be bold enough to enter this impossibly capital heavy market and show a better way. I hope this is the start of a reset on how taxes are funneled to government contractors.
So let's get this straight -- the quasi-nationalised Boeing fucks up, a private company steps in to save the day, and your conclusion is that fully nationalising Boeing is the answer?
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "
I think a stronger interpretation would be that Boeing's management/corporate culture needs a dramatic shake-up.
Short of letting the company fail completely if left alone, nationalization might well be the best measure out of a long list of not-great measures to shore things up.
Not saying that it's the measure that should be chosen per-se, but as usual it's often better to be pragmatic than ideological at least.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? These same people complain how everything is broken and that the solution is to double down on it. It’s such a sad state of affairs that the corruption is actively supported by people and they want to feed it more and make it bigger.
>For those who "More Engineers and Less MBAs", that's a dog whistle - Just so you know, Boeing is the most diversified aerospace and aircraft manufacturer in the U.S. Typically, Engineers are more arrogant and misogynistic, while MBAs tend to be more progressive, though they can also be more driven by profit. Want an example? SpaceX is a so called "Engineers driven" company.
>At this point, Starliner is actually safe enough (less 1/270 of failure chance) to bring those 2 astronauts back home. The only reason why NASA is not using Starliner, is because there is an election 3 months away. NASA administrator (a politician) made the final decision, so it's not up to MBA or Engineer, it's up to a politician.
>Vote Blue, Nationalize SpaceX and Pass it to Boeing to Run, everybody wins except Musk.
I recommend reading a blow-by-blow account of the causes of the Chernobyl disaster, and compare the long list of failures and coverups with that of the other disasters you mentioned.
Any large disaster will be caused by a long list of failures. Chernobyl was a particularly colossal screw-up (mostly a concatenation of unlucky coincidences, one specific instance of ignorance due to political meddling, and severe human errors eg by Dyatlov).
But it is preposterous to draw conclusions about state vs private enterprises from this N=1 example. There have been many successful government-run megaprojects (Panama Canal, Dutch North Sea dams, China's high-speed-rail). There have been many unsuccessful private ones.
Adjudicating this question would require careful enumeration and analysis across many instances, not just throwing out one example.
McKinsey, for example, states that megaprojects can fail "when big projects cross state or national borders and involve a mix of private and government spending."
I loved Kelly's memoir; reading his story and how he did what he did makes it seem so simple in the telling; looking at the many billions wasted by companies trying to get close tells you -- not so fast.
I learned in that book that he actually returned money to the government for, I think, the U-2 project -- they made a few extra planes and had money left over. Amazing.
I'd love to read a longitudinal retrospective of failed skunkworks setups and see why participants thought they failed -- I bet it's a diverse list of reasons.
Kelly had a subversive quality to him that is probably almost impossible to institutionalize; I think it's unusual to find that mixed with some nationalist pride -- in that way, I see him as a product of the war, and the postwar boom.
That plus his broad multilateral intelligence -- seeing design and implementation as one thing that one could expect to understand and possibly master -- stood out for me, reading about him.
Anyway, if a leader like Kelly is needed for a skunkworks, that itself may be quite difficult. I'd guess most large companies would take a functioning "almost as good as" Skunkworks any day, if they could tolerate the guy/gal running it.
This actually happened on Apollo 13. Backup pilot Jack Swigert was assigned to Apollo 13 two days before launch because the expected pilot, Mattingly, had been potentially exposed to rubella. The flight launched on April 11, just a few days before the April 15 tax deadline and Swigert realized in flight that he had forgotten to file his taxes. Flight controllers thought it was a joke but Swigert was serious: "It ain't too funny. Things kind of happened real fast down there and I do need an extension. I may be spending time in another quarantine besides the one that they're planning for me." (I.e. besides the 21-day astronaut quarantine, he might end up in prison.)
The IRS stated that they could resolve the problem since anyone outside the United States on April 15 automatically gets a two-month extension. (Even though "legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States.")
Of course, Apollo 13 soon had problems that pushed aside any concerns of tax filing.
>"legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States."
That gave me a good laugh. Shouldn't it definitely count? You're zipping over every country on earth while you're in orbit so you definitely left!
But if you take off and land in the US, did you _really_ leave? You don't go through customs and immigration for every country you fly over when you're in an airplane, and generally aren't legally considered to have "visited" them. So, wow, good question.
You don't have to go through customs on every country you fly over in a regular plane. If I take off in California and fly to Hawaii I leave the airport like I never left the US, even though I've flown over "international" waters and have left the US' exclusive economic zone. I probably don't get a break if I'm in the air over Canada on the way to Alaska when it turns April 15th. If I take off from the US, orbit the earth a bunch on Tax Day, then land in the US was I "out of the country?" It _seems_ obvious but you did but you could potentially argue against it.
OTOH, if you leave US contiguous waters by boat and sit out in international waters for the month of April you have certainly left the country, even if you never entered another country.
The government forces HN to turn into Reddit: everyone has to post vacuous banter comments until you file. (edit: the post I am replying to was the top comment at the time, for about an hour)
edit: I have to admit my reply was a bit dismissive but can someone enlighten me: Surely you have to be able to pay someone else to file your taxes for you, right?
Yes of course those exist, and the other thing is that the US doesn’t jail people for failing to file a tax return. If you owe, you get a fine, and if you don’t pay the fine they seize assets or garnish wages or whatnot. Usually takes years for this to happen. If you don’t owe, they’re happy to keep your refund til you get around to claiming it later.
Meme replies should be downvoted, there are other places online where joke comments are a regular occurrence. I like how HN at least tries to force a real discussion and attempts at humor need to be both sincere and not low effort.
If we're going to keep Boeing around because it's in the national security interest to have an American airplane manufacturer, we need to either nationalize it, break it up, or remove the entire leadership class. The company exists at this point for the same reason that Chase bank does: because they cannot fail, because we will not let them. The market structure will not work for this company, at least not the way corporate management is done in 2024, and if I'm the Air Force or any other branch of the US military reliant on Boeing goods, I'm not feeling particularly optimistic about my supply of Boeing parts, planes, and armaments right now.
Breaking Boeing up would make it ineffective and likely lead to its failure. You could maybe spin off a couple small divisions, but not more than that. Nationalization is a non-starter in the US - not worth wasting the time and effort to try to make it happen. The only real option is to remove the current leadership, and place the company into Conservatorship to force the new leadership to do the right thing - ideally for at least 10 years, but 5 to 7 years would be the more likely political outcome of such a move.
I think virtually anybody who wants to see Boeing succeed long term, would get on board with this option.
At the same time, the FAA needs to be reformed (and funded) to bring it back to the enforcement agency it should be. They got into bed with Boeing and their lack of oversight in civilian aircraft let the corporate sickness fester and have a safe space from which to spread throughout the organization.
It's not clear to me that splitting up Boeing in commercial+business jet, defense, and space would make it more ineffective than its current incarnation? Boeing's ability to purpose build commercial jet frames for defense applications both seems to be... a) not performing well (see KC-46), and also b) not a future growth industry with the focus shifting to the Indo-Pacific and peer conflict (given the vulnerability of these types of platforms).
It's not a technical problem. It's that they need to stay too-big-to-fail, to be able to resist the very aggressive competition of other aircraft manufacturers. If they are broken up, the smaller companies would not be able to compete effectively, and they would also be immediate acquisition targets by largely foreign competitors.
I agree with others here that think they need to be a quasi-government-run company, but in the US that is done through oversight, managing the manager rather than stepping into the management role directly. Of course we have to absolutely gut that awful management with extreme prejudice, to start.
We should just go ahead and admit that Boeing is a government company, and that's what it takes to be one of the big-3 global commercial aircraft manufacturers these days (Boeing, Airbus, Comac).
Fire all Boeing senior leadership, go through the remainder of the company with a fine toothed comb and fire anyone mid-level who did anything dumb, then conduct a search to replace everyone.
Make the government an explicit stakeholde (25%?) with board representation.
Dilute shareholders ($0.50 per dollar?) for investing in a bad company, but make any employee shareholders who are still employed whole ($1 per $1).
Yup. There's no market pressure of note on Boeing, otherwise they'd be even the slightest bit concerned that their planes are falling out of the sky. They exist to turn government contracts into stock buybacks.
It's not true that there's no market pressure on Boeing. It's true that Airbus' production capacity limitations have blunted the impact of the QA issues on Boeing's financial performance, but Boeing is in fact suffering. They've been suffering for at least a year (their net profit margin has been 0 or lower for the last 4 quarters). Their stock price is down ~20% from a year ago, and is down ~35% from their high from just before the Air Alaska incidence.
The problem isn't that management assumed that there would be no market pressure, the problem is that management assumed that engineering and production excellence "just happens". They're not dumb enough to believe that shoddy products won't effect their financial position - they just don't know how to make non-shoddy products while also posting decent financials.
This company needs to be audited, starting at the top. Once a business is considered critical for natural security (Boeing is certainly in this category), it has an obligation to deliver with quality and on time. Boeing is failing and needs recovery.
a better bank would have been Wells Fargo. Chase and JPM are not in the same category they are profit machines with great balance sheets. that's why they swooped in last year during the bank crisis and took over some banks.
Wells Fargo is a better example of criminal vs negligent. Has Boeing verged into criminal? It's not like they were continuously bilking the gov't for all of this, which to me keeps them out of criminal. but of course, IANAL
Yeah, I'm mostly referring to Chase's relationship with the Fed, FDIC, and regulators - they're clearly the bank of choice for rescuing distressed banks, and they're the largest bank in the country by a pretty substantial margin.
You're right about the difference, though - they're stable, well-run, and with a solid balance sheet, and it's clear the tradeoff for being effectively the Bank of the US is they're regulated and stress-tested six ways to Sunday.
If that were the model being applied to Boeing, this'd be a different story, but I think there's been a clear decision made that Chase is critical infrastructure and should be treated & audited like it that hasn't been made about Boeing yet.
Nothing I'm aware of with Chase's leadership, but they're the largest bank in the US by far by AUM, and that's because they've been the partner of choice for the FDIC & regulators looking to rescue distressed banks. In other words, they're a private corporation being used to fill a role the government deems essential, and consequently probably the safest place on earth to put your money right now, at least with regards to the risk of a bank failure.
(As I noted elsewhere, they're treated much differently than Boeing, in that they're audited, stress-tested, and generally put under the kind of scrutiny warranted by that kind of role.)
Letting them merge? Boeing and McD were essentially forced to merge by the Department of Defense post cold-war. So were Lockheed and Martin-Marietta, and Northrop with Grumman, etc. It was in the national strategic interest, apparently. Recommended reading: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...
Eh? I haven't been following this closely, yet I've seen multiple headlines the last few days about SpaceX rescuing stranded astronauts, at at least one on the front page about the spacesuits being incompatible. Who exactly is avoiding mentioning it?
I'm honestly unclear on what you are getting at here. I can find multiple mentions of SpaceX and Musk in comments older than yours. Are you objecting to the fact that no one has called out that he's originally from South Africa? Why would they?
You're correct in that there are some references to SpaceX but as far as I can tell no-one talked about the fact they were chosen to bring the crew back home.
I read "A City on Mars" last year, and it opened my eyes to just hard space travel is. The government constraints on aerospace projects doesn't help. There's a reason SpaceX moves so much faster; they don't have to justify and explain things to taxpayers.
Beyond that, the book makes a good case for how unrealistic a long-term colony on Mars is... at least in the short term (Short being the next 50 to 100 years).
My biggest take away is: for all his talk, Musk basically just wants to be the Uber to Mars: shuttling people there and back. He don't seem serious about _actually_ solving the problems of how to stay alive and thrive once we get there.
I found it sort of depressing as first, as I'd love to see people loving on Mars in my lifetime. But when I thought about it, I saw that they outlined a bunch of really important problems we should be working on as a society. The sooner we work on those problems, the better.
> Boeing developed Starliner under the exact same set of constraints that SpaceX had for crewed dragon.
You could be right. My (limited) understanding is that SpaceX is doing most of their R&D internally, and therefore they don't have the same oversight requirements more NASA-centric projects require. But that was based on an article about Artemis, and not Starliner.
NASA officials have previously admitted to applying more oversight to SpaceX than they did to Boeing regarding commercial crew. SpaceX's success is in being self-motivated. The government money is nice, but they want to develop and commercialize the tech anyway and are willing to put their own money into it. As evidence we have all the private Dragon flights, extra capsules built for free-flying missions and their self-developed EVA capability that should launch some time in the coming week.
That significantly relaxes the controls compared to Boeing, which is structured around exploiting cost-plus contracting, so every bit of work needs to be tracked and billed, the more time it takes, the better. Starliner was fixed price and they had to put in their own money so they would've been doing the bare minimum to keep the program going. They've only built the bare minimum 2 vehicles they'd need to meet contract requirements, and can only launch on the few launches reserved on a now retired rocket, so no room to commercialize until someone pays them to make it work with Vulcan.
I suspect this is a component of why the presumptive president is pushing the unrealized gains tax. If Elon were forced to produce tens of billions liquid he would have to sell shares of his companies, and perhaps IPO spaceX, allowing the government to more tightly control it.
