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Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

arstechnica.com

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Re: Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

#111

Post by inglor_cz »

shellfishgene wrote: post #75
inglor_cz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the effects of the invasion was that the Antares rocket stopped being viable. Antares used a pair of Russian RD-181 engines. The first stage was built in Ukraine (Dnipro). This sort of cooperation is basically dead.

I've been wondering, with the rocket science knowledge the Ukraine has, are they not capable of designing and building mid-rage missiles for their military, or is that just a much longer process?

The Hrim-2 missile (hrim/hrom/grom is Slavic for thunder) may be precisely that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hrim-2

Re: Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

#112

Post by freeopinion »

legitster wrote: post #63
krisoft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, a few month delay on a brand new space vehicle isn't "OMG, Boeing failed!" The hubub is not about the few more months of delay just anounced. The starliner and the dragon 2 started development around the same time to deliver about the same thing. The first crewed dragon 2 launched in 16 November 2020. It is not about the months of delay, but the years.

SpaceX is the only organization in the industry that prioritizes speed. For the regulators and the other players, they are all pretty happy to do things at their own pace and speed.

By "other players" do you mean the incumbents? Parties with existing revenue streams and contracts stretching out years without any performance requirements?

Anybody who is guaranteed a job with a decent salary for life and a great retirement plan is not incentivized to perform except by some personal drive. Anybody who wants onto the gravy train is motivated to do whatever work it takes to get a seat at that table. And they are motivated to do it as fast as possible.

It is not wrong to prioritize safety over speed. But you can use the safety excuse to drag things out for as long as people are willing to pay you without producing results. While space travel risks involve the obvious threat to human life, those risks can be generalized like any other risk. Usually, the lower the risk, the lower the reward. Unless there is something interfering. Interference that manipulates the risk/reward ratio often has the smell of corruption in the minds of many people.

Re: Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

#113

Post by dotnet00 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #93
evandale wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The haters don't want to admit space flight is really really hard and Elon, excuse my language, fucking nailed it. Richard Branson is a billionaire who tried to do spaceflight long before Elon and Virgin Galactic hasn't launched anything useful (before SpaceX) as far as I know. If someone thinks a suborbital flight is impressive I highly recommend them to play KSP and find out how easy that is compared to getting int…

> So many people want to erroneously believe Elon is some child with the mental capacity of a 3 year old with access to billions of dollars because they don't want to like him or give him credit for anything. I think the contrast between Musk's SpaceX and Twitter experiences is largely down to whether the organization grew up around Musk. SpaceX has an immune system built up for the nutty stuff, from Gwynne Shotwell…

I think saying that SpaceX is somehow "containing" the nutty stuff in a way that Twitter is not isn't all that accurate.

SpaceX does tons of nutty stuff, some of it turns out to be good, and that's how they have their 10+ year technology lead on most of the world. In the early days this was stuff like using shears to roughly trim an engine bell in the field.

Nowadays it's stuff like attempting to catch rockets with giant arms to avoid putting landing legs on them, stacking satellites held together with a simple bar and just spinning to release, replacing the concrete underneath the launch pad with a giant water cooled steel plate to deal with the effect of the engine exhaust and so on.

SpaceX as an organization encourages some amount of nutty creativity since, especially in aerospace, a lot of dumb sounding but potentially good ideas tend to get shot down because the old guys are used to doing things a certain way.

Re: Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

#114

Post by zitterbewegung »

notquitehuman wrote: post #25
areoform wrote: post #8

This comment is your regularly scheduled reminder that they were supposed to be the safe option. The people who'd come in clutch when SpaceX failed (and it was assumed in certain quarters that SpaceX would fail to deliver on time). They were paid 2x more than what NASA paid SpaceX. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/nasa-will-pay-boeing... RIP Boeing.

Boeing has offices in nearly every congressional district, and has been openly bribing congress for decades. They will never fail, experience hardship, or suffer consequences for anything so long as the current republic stands.

What you say is true but now they do have some competition from SpaceX. If we make other companies that can compete with Boeing we can at least have price competition which is really the only thing that is needed.

Boeing though has so many government contracts that are used so often for other projects you can’t shut down so you are correct.

Re: Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

#115

Post by somewhat_drunk »

hinkley wrote: post #33
OrvalWintermute wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a different perspective on that from large acquisitions around firm fixed price contracts. If you're doing some low risk building, say a 10 mile road on flat ground with known soil, replacing a previous road, that is well-known to current specs with set-in-stone requirements (no pun intended) it is easy to pitch that firm fixed price because the contractor will know exactly what to do, and there are 20 road…

You can't even get your plumber to tell you how much it's going to cost to get your toilet working smoothly again. And you want to get to the moon on a fixed budget? (Which will also require a toilet). Software has the same problems. An unreasonable expectation of being able to predict the future (except the bits they don't want you to know about), and a lot of whining when we run into unexpected issues.

>(Which will also require a toilet).

Haha, nice.

Re: Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

#117

Post by pavon »

kawehjr wrote: post #18
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #5

> Because Starliner was funded by NASA through a fixed-price contract, as part of the Commercial Crew program, Boeing is responsible for any cost overruns and financial losses due to delays. Given Boeing’s history here this feels like the right kind of contract for this sort of work. Ensures all incentives are aligned

The current NASA administrator, a bureaucrat who grew up during the Bush Cost+ era, is actually opposed to fixed-price contracts because they only save a lot of taxpayer money and might not actually help us get deliverables faster.

That wasn't the NASA Administrator, Bill Nelson. It was Jim Free, Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development[1]. Nelson has been a surprisingly strong supporter of fixed-price contracts, given his background.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/06/weirdly-a-nasa-officia...

Re: Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flight in sight

#120

Post by FireBeyond »

panick21_ wrote: post #99
FireBeyond wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By all accounts, Starliner is behind is every possible way with much greater funding than SpaceX. That's only true if you assume SpaceX strictly allocated budgets per program and that no revenue from their other missions have gone to the crewed flight programs. I'm not saying Spaceliner is a success, or that there are arguments to be made about each company's approach (you could argue that while Boeing's approach s…

Sure its startup SpaceX that has massive amount of money from other programs that the can smash into Dragon. Its not like the were not also working on 5 other development projects at the time. It Eric Berger, not "Ars". And he absolutly did report on all the SpaceX delays. After the testing explosion he even said SpaceX might be behind. Stop spreading your conspircy threory nonsense.

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