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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

#201

Post by martin8412 »

nordsieck wrote: post #153
martin8412 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and NASA awarded SpaceX $278m in 2006 dollars from the COTS program when SpaceX had never even flown a rocket.

> Yes, and NASA awarded SpaceX $278m in 2006 dollars from the COTS program when SpaceX had never even flown a rocket. OK. I'm not really sure what your point is. NASA gives out contracts to new companies all the time. And the award was in a firm, fixed-price contract. The difference between that and the previous example is that NASA had already awarded Boeing money for CCtCap (the commercial crew contract). And then…

You don't see the point? You see nothing wrong with handing out nearly $300m to a company that's never done anything or demonstrated any capabilities?

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

#202

Post by iancmceachern »

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.

I worked with a guy that had previously worked in the Boeing plant making the ospreys. He called it a job factory, not an airplane factory.

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

#203

Post by shirro »

Animats wrote: post #86
bradyd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they've had 3 so far and have at least 4 more planned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon_2#Crew_Dragon_fl...

Right, billionaire space tourism is a thing.

Yes it is. It is hoped that finding commercial applications for space technology will benefit NASA by giving providers more opportunity to amortise development costs and lower prices.

It isn't all billionaires but they are part of the picture as it is probably around $55 million per seat for orbital flights though the exact numbers are not disclosed.

Axiom's last mission had two Saudi astronauts (Saudi airforce captain and a biomedical scientist) funded by their government.

The next Axiom mission will be flying astronauts for the Turkish space agency(air force colonel), Italian defence force (test pilot) and Swedish space agency/ESA (test pilot, esa astronaut) as well as their Axiom commander who is a legendary ex-NASA astronaut.

Even the upcoming Polaris Dawn which is funded by billionaire Isaacman will have two SpaceX lead operations engineers and an ex-USAF fighter pilot onboard and Isaacman is a respectable pilot himself. They are going to be pushing private spaceflight to new limits.

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

#204

Post by noelherrick »

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…

After watching him operate Twitter, it seems that he's not a good businessman or technical contributor. What he says about programming and his approach to engineering speaks of unearned confidence, and he uses the same tone to talk about aeronautical engineering, leading me to believe he doesn't know what he's talking about.

From the outside, it would seem that he's just good at PR, for his companies and for himself. Despite promoting homophobia, anti-vax, anti-labor garbage, he still manages to be the topic of conversation across the political and cultural spectrum. He's good at staying in the news cycle, even if it involves lighting tens of billions of dollars of brand equity on fire and using a since letter unmodified from a common font as a logo.

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

#205

Post by roelschroeven »

vGPU wrote: post #178
dotnet00 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still can use cutting off the ISS as a bargaining chip since half the station is Russian and handles orbit raising. They actually did do that a lot early into the war, until Rogozin was replaced as head of Roscosmos by someone who took a slightly less bombastic approach of saying that Russia would quit the ISS once they have a successor station up later this decade. What gets in the way is that the US has severa…

>can’t get a replacement station Ok, let’s break this down from the start. Russia has launched 10 space stations. The ISS was built using modules that were built for the Mir-2 station. The ISS was built on top of Russian modules. Meanwhile, NASA wasn’t even able to fly their own astronauts to the ISS for a decade until Musk stepped in. Russia has also demonstrated that they continue to have this capability as they ad…

I'm not holding my breath for Russia collaborating with China on a space station. China already has a space station. Before it launched there were talks of a collaboration with Russia, but China put their station in an orbit with quite a low inclination, which makes it practically impossible to reach from Russian launch sites. That indicates that China is not at all interested in working together with the Russians.

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

#206

Post by roelschroeven »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #158

This is I am sure a stupid question but is that a lot? In the context of building a new rocket system? Allegedly the development of the F35 cost about $35 billion according to one 2020 study. (Which I think was estimated at the start to about $400 million in non-inflation adjusted dollars) If I look at it through that frame, spending $1.1B on developing a rocket seems ok (I Know they are not done so the cost will kee…

To be precise, this is not about the development of a rocket: Starliner will launch on an existing rocket, the Atlas V.

This is about developing and building Starliner spacecraft, putting them on Atlas V rockets, and after successful acceptance tests putting people in them to fly them to and from the ISS.

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

#207

Post by throwaway2037 »

Already__Taken wrote: post #170
ChuckMcM wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this, it is pretty stunning. Also ULA's inability to come up with a launch capability that is anywhere close to Falcon/Falcon Heavy in terms of cost and time to flight. The fascinating thing is that the lack of competition allowed the space launch industry to switch from "invent" mode to "monetize" mode way too early. It is also what makes the Starship work both more credible and more interesting. There…

It's analogous to gigabit internet in the 90's. Why would anyone want that and what would you even do.

I agree. Real question: What do people need gigabit internet for today? 4K UHD streaming video needs 25-50Mbps. I have been living off 100Mbps internet connection for more than a decade, and I feel no need to upgrade. To be fair, maybe gamers need super faster connections for lower latency, or game downloads.

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

#208

Post by wongarsu »

SahAssar wrote: post #192
wongarsu wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I like the idea of having multiple independent vehicles (and knowing the impact of having your only crew-capable launch system grounded when it happened in the shuttle era), Starliner has been in systems integration hell for years now, always just a couple short months away. Boeing withdrawing and NASA restarting the bidding process for that contract might benefit everyone.

> Boeing withdrawing and NASA restarting the bidding process for that contract might benefit everyone. Who besides Spacex or ULA can reasonably bid for it? Or are you also looking at foreign options? It might not be Starliner but it seems like it'd be good to keep ULA in the game, just to make sure that Spacex is not the only option.

I would exclude SpaceX from the bid, but Sierra Space is the obvious other option with their Dream Chaser. Apart from Sierra and ULA there is also everyone who bid on the lunar lander, meaning Dynetics and the "National Team" (Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin)

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

#209

Post by lucubratory »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #207
Already__Taken wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's analogous to gigabit internet in the 90's. Why would anyone want that and what would you even do.

I agree. Real question: What do people need gigabit internet for today? 4K UHD streaming video needs 25-50Mbps. I have been living off 100Mbps internet connection for more than a decade, and I feel no need to upgrade. To be fair, maybe gamers need super faster connections for lower latency, or game downloads.

Families, and reducing friction on gaming purchases. The sooner you can download a game (especially with new business models like game pass), the sooner you know whether you like it and the sooner you get positive feedback from your purchase decision. The faster that loop is the more people will impulse buy, and the faster consumers can get the games they want to play.

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

#210

Post by 51Cards »

mcpackieh wrote: post #199
51Cards wrote: post #163

"...and the second problem came with hundreds of feet of P-213 glass cloth tape inside the spacecraft found to be flammable." How does the craft get built and you just discover this now?

Probably somebody believed an overly optimistic spec sheet without verifying it first.

I've since learned that apparently the tape itself is non-flammible, but the glue ON the tape is flammible. The manufacturer was a little liberal in their interpretation of the specs.
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