Boeing won a US$4.2 billion contract to complete and certify the Starliner by 2017, while SpaceX won a US$2.6 billion contract to complete and certify their crewed Dragon spacecraft. Both contracts were awarded in 2014. SpaceX flew its first full crewed mission in 2020, and Boeing can't even put together a test flight in 2024. What a bloated, underskilled contractor robbing the taxpayer blind...took 1.5x more money t…
Note that SpaceX has since flown eight more crewed missions to the ISS (one is up there now), as well as four other crewed missions to orbit (not for NASA.)
I think it's clear that Boeing, ULA, and all of the "old guard" space companies are still trying to catch up to the disruption from SpaceX and the ensuing boom of innovation that followed it. Let's face it - Starliner would not have even been thought of without SpaceX bringing competition. They were caught flat footed and had to scramble to catch up. Now we see the results of that - a capsule that's only partly baked…
I can't think of a larger moat in any industry where the leader has such a gigantic head start than spaceX. The "old guard" is so far behind why would the US Govt. or NASA give those companies any money now as it would be akin to setting it on fire. I mean spacex had 96 launches last year compared to ULAs 3. It just shows how much bureaucracy can just kill a companies innovation.
Access to space is a vital enough national interest that it cannot be left to the whims of a single company. The alternative to giving money to the competitors would be installing a politruk in SpaceX and authorizing them to override any decision made by the company. Spending a few billion dollars a year inefficiently is probably preferable to that.
SpaceX absolutely has a head-start now on reusability, launch costs, etc. Boeing's century of experience was supposed to give them a head start on Commercial Crew; they squandered it, and recent history has the resulting gap getting bigger, not smaller.
exactly, I mean Boeing can't even make planes with doors that don't fall off in flight. I wouldn't look to Boeing for any engineering excellence in 2024.
They can obviously do that. They just can't do it fast enough or profitable enough to satisfy their managements' sales goals.
> capsule isn't responsible for the booster's valve issues But Boeing is responsible for putting it on an Atlas V. Why?! There are fewer than thirty of them left! Why aren’t they practicing on a modern stack? I’ll eat my words if Starliner can rapidly transition to another booster. But given its track record in software alone, I’m incredibly sceptical.
Dissimilar Redundancy. Say the Falcon 9 suffers an in-flight failure. The last time that happened, there was a stand-down for quite some time, and I suspect that there would be a similar amount of time before people could be flown on it, even if I'd think Starlinks could resume right away. Starliner/Atlas wouldn't be affected, and so ensure the US and our allies have access to the station without getting Russia invol…
Ignoring the issue of Atlas being EOL: At the rate Starliner is progressing, it would be faster to wait for SpaceX to fix whatever was ailing Falcon 9 than to wait for Starliner to be ready.
I feel like this would just have been shrugworthy news if SpaceX didn't exist. Most NASA projects used to be like this. The problem for all the other companies is that SpaceX showed up.
I can't think of a larger moat in any industry where the leader has such a gigantic head start than spaceX. The "old guard" is so far behind why would the US Govt. or NASA give those companies any money now as it would be akin to setting it on fire. I mean spacex had 96 launches last year compared to ULAs 3. It just shows how much bureaucracy can just kill a companies innovation.
Access to space is a vital enough national interest that it cannot be left to the whims of a single company. The alternative to giving money to the competitors would be installing a politruk in SpaceX and authorizing them to override any decision made by the company. Spending a few billion dollars a year inefficiently is probably preferable to that.
What you have here is a false dichotomy: Giving money to ULA or nationalizing SpaceX to penalize them for success.
Here's a third option: Give that money to Rocket Lab so they can develop their capabilities instead of giving it to ULA for their executives to snort it up their noses.
Boeing won a US$4.2 billion contract to complete and certify the Starliner by 2017, while SpaceX won a US$2.6 billion contract to complete and certify their crewed Dragon spacecraft. Both contracts were awarded in 2014. SpaceX flew its first full crewed mission in 2020, and Boeing can't even put together a test flight in 2024. What a bloated, underskilled contractor robbing the taxpayer blind...took 1.5x more money t…
Ars Technica just had an article about this the other day. For context: SpaceX had a “head start” because they had an existing cargo capsule they modified while Boeing was designing from scratch. Still you can add this to the pile of stuff Boeing is going through lately and it doesn’t look good at all. One more thing that’s not working out right.
Boeing had a 50 year headstart on putting things into space. Have talked to engineers from ULA and NASA, there was very much a disbelief that a. SpaceX would ever achieve a reusable rocket and that b. they would ever have a market share because the incumbents were doing so well.
It's not uncommon for the aerospace industry to lose touch with reality. They consistently get told how amazing they are and budgets just keep on coming. When an actual competitor enters the market, they get caught in utter disbelief.
Glad this is happening. ULA is a good launch provider even if they are insanely expensive vs SpaceX. Yes, Elon is right, SpaceX did it cheaper, faster everything that you'd dream of. But, from a policy making standpoint, you always need to diversify at the expense of upfront money because the downsides risks are too high if you put all your eggs in one basket. That said - I do wish Boeing+ULA would get it's act toget…
The diversity argument does ring slightly hollow when iirc Boeing has only made two Starliners and it only has enough rockets for the 6 missions in the contract. Basically they're set up to have one capsule in refurb while the other is at the station, and once the 6 Atlas V's are spent, someone has to cough up the money to do the stack of paperwork for crew rating the combo of Starliner and Vulcan.
> do the stack of paperwork for crew rating the combo of Starliner and Vulcan.
Or/and Falcon 9!
Starliner is designed for compatiblity with . . . Falcon 9, and Vulcan Centaur.
Access to space is a vital enough national interest that it cannot be left to the whims of a single company. The alternative to giving money to the competitors would be installing a politruk in SpaceX and authorizing them to override any decision made by the company. Spending a few billion dollars a year inefficiently is probably preferable to that.
What you have here is a false dichotomy: Giving money to ULA or nationalizing SpaceX to penalize them for success. Here's a third option: Give that money to Rocket Lab so they can develop their capabilities instead of giving it to ULA for their executives to snort it up their noses.
Public money goes to companies that can make plausible bids when the government has a need for some capability. For the Commercial Crew Program, that was in the early 2010s, when SpaceX was the upstart with a new unproven rocket. Rocket Lab has won some government contracts, but probably less than $1 billion in total, because it has been in serious business with big rockets only for a few years.
The Starliner stack is way less stupid than SLS. It's less than 2x the price of SpaceX, whereas the SLS vs Falcon Heavy cost ratio is like 20x.
> It's less than 2x the price of SpaceX, whereas the SLS vs Falcon Heavy cost ratio is like 20x Starliner is directly comparable to Dragon. SLS can technically do things Falcon Heavy can't ( e.g. more payload).
Starliner is specced to be able to boost the ISS. Dragon (today) can not.