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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

#221

Post by dotnet00 »

evandale wrote: post #156
panick21_ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mixing up Virigin Galactic and Virgin Orbit. One is suborbital tourism, the other is sat launch. VO is bankroupt. VG has raised so much money from clueless investors that they are not quite bankroupt yet.

My only point was it takes more than a billionaire with a dream to create a space program. VG is a complete failure from a getting into space perspective, I don't care how much money investors have given to them. They don't have anything unique or worth mentioning. How Branson shuffles money around between VG and VO is irrelevant if the goal is getting into space and the name of the company matters even less.

Technically what Virgin Galactic has is very unique. It's uniquely suited to killing people even moreso than the Space Shuttle.

It's insane that they insist on and advertise being manually controlled by humans as a selling point.

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

#222

Post by thegrim22 »

Kind of interesting to think about relating this to the ongoing UAP hearings, where it's alleged that private government contractors overbill for projects and funnel the extra money to the UAP programs. Boeing has been mentioned by name a few times.

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

#223

Post by throwaway2037 »

jmalicki wrote: post #211
throwaway2037 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A huge part of it is less about the gigabit download, and more that gigabit fiber is symmetric and has fast uploads... In the age of being remote, several people can be on HD or even UHD webcams without much lag or hiccups. 12Mbps upload of many cable modems is a noticably worse experience.

Excellent point. I didn't think about video calls needing good upload bandwidth. Many broadband options have terrible upload bandwidth, so you need to buy a ridiculous plan (like 1Gbps) to get reasonable upload bandwidth.

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

#224

Post by yellowapple »

wongarsu wrote: post #182
resolutebat wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Starship delivers even half of what they're promising, we'll have a bunch of commercial space stations up even without NASA support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_space_stati...

But what's the market for those, without NASA funding? Maybe one Salyut-sized station for "space tourism" (that is to say, 1-3 day stays for like 3 people at a time), and maybe one similarly sized station for space manufacturing (which is currently just optical fiber) and commercial 0g experiments. You could dock both together to share some systems. But what's the market demand for anything beyond those two stations,…

I'm pretty sure the number of people who'd be willing to pay money to vacation in LEO is considerably larger than what a single Salyut-sized station can house - even before considering the rise in demand from lowered costs.

That said, I think the real money-maker will come from factories in lunar orbit. Even if the economics of Terra importing goods from Luna never quite pan out, being able to build even some (let alone most, let alone all) of a spacecraft in space from spaceborne materials would be a game-changer for exploration and eventual colonization of the Solar System and beyond.

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

#225

Post by Veedrac »

Laremere wrote: post #26
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.

This comment hits differently after the Ukraine invasion. I hadn't thought about the sheer level of diplomatic nightmare that has been avoided because Russia can't use cutting off access to the ISS as a bargaining chip.

I still can't get over this quote from the congressional hearing with Michael Gass, then-CEO of ULA,

> Some of the most unique missions clearly don't need multiple capabilities in this country, and if we talk about fair and level competition, is it two companies, is it three companies, is it four companies? When does it stop, and how do you limit other companies from wanting to participate, and taking a niche of the of the product?

This was the same hearing in which Gass gave a last ditch defense of Russian engines, and fought Musk in favor of cost-plus and ULA's ~$800m/y subsidy for existing.

Even the people that follow newspace probably normally don't realize just how rotten through the industry and its governance had become.

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

#226

Post by vGPU »

dotnet00 wrote: post #179
vGPU wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Russia added a module that had been sitting around for 13 years and was only finally launched because warranties on some parts would've begun expiring. Then the first thing that module did was flip the station. While yes, they have a history of doing better than the US on space stations, the point is that their space industry is a shadow of what it used to be. This can be seen from how many next generation rockets, r…

Indeed. Though Rogozin was a net benefit to Roscosmos over the past decade, as can be seen by their current launch record, with 100 successful launches in a row over the past few years. However, he is definitely not a Musk type visionary. From what I know of him, he's a "fixer", that was sent in to clean up the ridiculous amounts of waste and corruption in the system.

Under Borisov's management there are rumors that they are building a new satellite factory that should be starting production soon.

And realistically, let's not forget that the US has always significantly lagged Russia in this field. If it wasn't for Operation Paperclip they would not have been competitive at all.

>Ukraine

Let's be honest here: Ukraine has existed as a state for less than 40 years in it's entire history. The geographic location of current Ukraine has nothing to do with the accomplishments of the former USSR. This is evidenced by the complete and utter lack of any accomplishment in the field by Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR.

Side note: Gotta love this tweet threatening Musk for praising the Russian space program: https://twitter.com/KristiTalmadge/status/110375176440949555...

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

#227

Post by vGPU »

roelschroeven wrote: post #205
vGPU wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Russian and China signed a deal collaborating on the creation of a new station last year.

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

#228

Post by Etherlord87 »

jackmott42 wrote: post #157
Etherlord87 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> basic physics napkin math. Exactly, it's not rocket science. Oh, wait, it actually is.

Right, and you can land on the moon with basic newtonian mechanics. The are millions of devils in the details but for a person to decide how big a rocket to build and whether it could land vertically after a payload of X that needs a delta-V of Y, its easy napkin math to prove feasibility. Executing it is then one of the hardest things people can do but SpaceX had all the best people at the time.

You can claim anything is easy this way. Just take the easiest subset of a problem, and show how easy it is. I find that to be a pointless argument.
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