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Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

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Re: Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

#31

Post by 52-6F-62 »

ryanmercer wrote: post #28
hinkley wrote: post #22

There are a lot of big organizations that seem to understand something that few of us in the software industry ever did: When you have one vendor they have no reason to give you any special attention. They are min-maxing you against all of their other customers and if you aren’t about to either Give them more money or take it away you fade into the background. If you have two vendors, they have to pay attention. They…

>If SpaceX is ahead or Boeing is ahead doesn’t matter. What matters if SpaceX is still at the table. Not only that but SpaceX is delivering commercial payload after commercial payload to orbit while still TESTING new stuff on their rockets while they do all the planning for ITS/BFR... how many launches has Boeing been doing while designing SLS?

+ the successful landings of the early stage reusable rockets. Pretty monumental stuff.

Re: Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

#32

Post by Waterluvian »

BurningFrog wrote: post #24
hinkley wrote: post #22

There are a lot of big organizations that seem to understand something that few of us in the software industry ever did: When you have one vendor they have no reason to give you any special attention. They are min-maxing you against all of their other customers and if you aren’t about to either Give them more money or take it away you fade into the background. If you have two vendors, they have to pay attention. They…

The standard failure mode is that the two vendors reach an understanding and split the market at a comfortable level of effort and progress.

I wonder if it's an understanding of just a natural equilibrium found when two companies iterate on focusing where their money seems to be most successful at earning contracts. Soon enough one company is great at one thing and the other another.

Re: Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

#34

Post by yashevde »

lukeify wrote: post #30

I find it hard to treat news published by Eric Berger as objective, sadly. He receives special treatment from SpaceX & Elon—for example, its arguable he only had permission to interview Musk and attend the launch of FH from 39A precisely because his articles mainly cast a positive light—and in turn, this clouds his objectiveness when it comes to such reporting. It's quite a shame.

If this allegation were true, it would definitely render the journalist unreliable and ethically compromised. But, this article is in favor of Boeing, not SpaceX, so I'm wondering what you're trying to say..?

Re: Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

#35

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Having worked at one of Boeing's competitors (not in this specific industry but a similiar one) I think I'd rather sit on top of the rocket built by the big, old, slow defense contractor. I'd hard to overstate how much consideration of making sure edge cases (for both hardware and software) don't kill people is baked into the culture at these companies.

As a taxpayer I think the rocket that moves fast and breaks things is just fine for nonhuman cargo.

Re: Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

#36

Post by rory096 »

lukeify wrote: post #30

I find it hard to treat news published by Eric Berger as objective, sadly. He receives special treatment from SpaceX & Elon—for example, its arguable he only had permission to interview Musk and attend the launch of FH from 39A precisely because his articles mainly cast a positive light—and in turn, this clouds his objectiveness when it comes to such reporting. It's quite a shame.

Berger is a competent but aggressive journalist who has a bias, but wears it on his sleeve - much like Andy Pasztor. Worth reading, but with a critical eye. Ignore them and you'll be missing out on important scoops and original journalism.

Re: Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

#37

Post by bikezen »

ryanmercer wrote: post #28
hinkley wrote: post #22

There are a lot of big organizations that seem to understand something that few of us in the software industry ever did: When you have one vendor they have no reason to give you any special attention. They are min-maxing you against all of their other customers and if you aren’t about to either Give them more money or take it away you fade into the background. If you have two vendors, they have to pay attention. They…

>If SpaceX is ahead or Boeing is ahead doesn’t matter. What matters if SpaceX is still at the table. Not only that but SpaceX is delivering commercial payload after commercial payload to orbit while still TESTING new stuff on their rockets while they do all the planning for ITS/BFR... how many launches has Boeing been doing while designing SLS?

That may be useful for stuff you can afford to lose, but during the same period how many spacecraft have Boeing lost.

When a mission takes a decade to plan a build, you go with the launch vehicle most likely to get you to destination successfully. Fail rates matter immensely. You don't want a launch vehicle iterating on your launch.

Re: Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

#38

Post by swimfar »

bikezen wrote: post #37
ryanmercer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If SpaceX is ahead or Boeing is ahead doesn’t matter. What matters if SpaceX is still at the table. Not only that but SpaceX is delivering commercial payload after commercial payload to orbit while still TESTING new stuff on their rockets while they do all the planning for ITS/BFR... how many launches has Boeing been doing while designing SLS?

That may be useful for stuff you can afford to lose, but during the same period how many spacecraft have Boeing lost. When a mission takes a decade to plan a build, you go with the launch vehicle most likely to get you to destination successfully. Fail rates matter immensely. You don't want a launch vehicle iterating on your launch.

He's probably referring to tests that don't significantly affect the probability of a successful mission. I don't know anything about how Boeing does this. But I can imagine a contractor going another route where they offer to come up with a new technology and then make the customer pay for all of the testing.

Why kill two birds with one stone when you can get them to pay for you to throw two stones?

Re: Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

#39

Post by BurningFrog »

Waterluvian wrote: post #32
BurningFrog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard failure mode is that the two vendors reach an understanding and split the market at a comfortable level of effort and progress.

I wonder if it's an understanding of just a natural equilibrium found when two companies iterate on focusing where their money seems to be most successful at earning contracts. Soon enough one company is great at one thing and the other another.

I won't pretend to have studied this at any depth, but my possibly overconfident intuition is that it can be either an outright conspiracy or an unspoken understanding of not stepping on each others toes.

It doesn't matter much; you don't have to be a genius CEO to see what is in both companies interest, conspiracy or not.

The more companies are added to the mix, the less stable the truce becomes, and somewhere around 4-5 I think ruthless competition is empirically the norm.

Re: Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew

#40

Post by civilitty »

bikezen wrote: post #37
ryanmercer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If SpaceX is ahead or Boeing is ahead doesn’t matter. What matters if SpaceX is still at the table. Not only that but SpaceX is delivering commercial payload after commercial payload to orbit while still TESTING new stuff on their rockets while they do all the planning for ITS/BFR... how many launches has Boeing been doing while designing SLS?

That may be useful for stuff you can afford to lose, but during the same period how many spacecraft have Boeing lost. When a mission takes a decade to plan a build, you go with the launch vehicle most likely to get you to destination successfully. Fail rates matter immensely. You don't want a launch vehicle iterating on your launch.

Whether or not NASA (and by extension Boeing) can afford to lose a mission isn't dependent on how much it costs but on public relations and legislation.

Money has diminishing returns when it comes to mission success rates. A common ballpark example I've heard from JPL PMs: you can spend $500 million on one launch with a 95% chance of putting one satellite in orbit - or - you could spend $250 million per launch on two launches, each with a 80% chance of putting up one satellite. The probability of getting at least one satellite in orbit with the latter scenario is ~96%, higher than than the $500mil/launch option, with an 80% chance of saving 25-75% of the budget for the second launch (depending on scheduling and staff retention costs for that mission).

The problem with the latter option is that the public is swayed more by the absolute number of failures rather than the percentage, especially since NASA's missions usually draw a lot of global publicity. This kind of public pressure effects legislators and eventually starts changing the "cost-benefit" analysis agencies like NASA do until they're chosing the one launch option every time.

The SLS is inseparable as a project from NASA as far as the public is concerned. Even though SpaceX is also heavily funded by NASA historically, Musk's cult of personality has largely saved them from feeling the kind of public pressure NASA has had to deal with in their usual missions. That ability to experiment without PR consequences is invaluable but we'll have to see whether their failure rate is big enough to scare away NASA for manned missions.

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