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NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

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Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#191

Post by JumpCrisscross »

wmf wrote: post #148
nordsieck wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The purpose of a system is what it does. Defense contractors extract money from the government, they are not here to enable space travel, they are here to move money from other people's pockets to their own. Any other actions are purely ancillary. And if they can get the money without delivering any result at all, why, they're fine with that. This is part of the reason why the new era of firm, fixed price contracts…

Old Space companies will never adopt fixed price. NASA just needs to drop them.

> Old Space companies will never adopt fixed price

Starliner is fixed cost.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#192

Post by JumpCrisscross »

desperate wrote: post #53
whatshisface wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our GDP is about 50x higher now than it was then, in real terms.

Yeah but money can't pay for skill that doesn't exist anymore.

> money can't pay for skill that doesn't exist anymore

Expert welders can be trained in years. We could easily buy an Apollo-era generation of aerospace welders if we wanted them.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#193

Post by AnthonyMouse »

edmundsauto wrote: post #178
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we were to have made these workers government employees The problem is monopoly. Spacefaring isn’t exactly the type of work that attracts the safe and secure job for life types. (Most folks I know at SpaceX would have chosen another career if the only option were a public job at public pay with public promotion limits.)

What do you think has changed since the 1960s? There were high paying private industry union protected skilled jobs, but many people went to work for NASA.

The USSR had just beat the US to put the first man into space. The same USSR that was killing political dissidents en masse and building an arsenal of terrifying nuclear weapons. John F. Kennedy set out the ambitious goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and then he was assassinated.

People wanted to make that happen. So they did.

There hasn't been a lot to inspire people to work for the government like that lately.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#194

Post by cco »

School-Cotton wrote: post #23

Does anyone actually seriously believe the U.S. will land a person on the moon in 2025? This is the country that takes decades to open a new subway station.

There is a very interesting video from Smarter Every Day that suggests everyone knows that the SLS is physically incapable of landing on the moon as designed but nobody seems to be mentioning it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#195

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #193
edmundsauto wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think has changed since the 1960s? There were high paying private industry union protected skilled jobs, but many people went to work for NASA.

The USSR had just beat the US to put the first man into space. The same USSR that was killing political dissidents en masse and building an arsenal of terrifying nuclear weapons. John F. Kennedy set out the ambitious goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and then he was assassinated. People wanted to make that happen. So they did. There hasn't been a lot to inspire people to work for the gov…

> same USSR that was killing political dissidents en masse and building an arsenal of terrifying nuclear weapons

One more factor: decolonisation created new countries. That created a unique competition for ideological supremacy.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#197

Post by Sophistifunk »

dehrmann wrote: post #138

I wonder how much of this is Boeing and how much is NASA. It's very easy to throw Boeing under the bus right now, and they might even deserve it, but at a minimum, NASA deserves blame for not doing due diligence. They're also trying to build something that we've largely forgotten how to build. It's a different NASA, and different Boeing, and design technology and manufacturing is completely different. It isn't reason…

Boeing haven't exactly been covering themselves with glory with their non-NASA work over the last decade or two, either. But I'd still go with "both" :)

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#198

Post by shiroiushi »

edmundsauto wrote: post #178
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we were to have made these workers government employees The problem is monopoly. Spacefaring isn’t exactly the type of work that attracts the safe and secure job for life types. (Most folks I know at SpaceX would have chosen another career if the only option were a public job at public pay with public promotion limits.)

What do you think has changed since the 1960s? There were high paying private industry union protected skilled jobs, but many people went to work for NASA.

I think we're talking about highly-skilled precision welders who built things like the F-1 rocket engine. These people didn't work for NASA in the 1960s: they worked for private contractors like Rocketdyne. NASA doesn't build rocket engines, and never has.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#199

Post by boxed »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #177
School-Cotton wrote: post #23

Does anyone actually seriously believe the U.S. will land a person on the moon in 2025? This is the country that takes decades to open a new subway station.

That was always a bullshit date. No different than elder Bush's Mars in 2030. 2028, maybe if everything goes well with Starship, and the suits. Their lunar variant is still a disaster waiting to happen without a better design. We've seen how Starship destroys a launch pad with ill-conceived flame diversion. How is it going to land on unprepared regolith without toppling in its own crater or destroying the engines wit…

Super Heavy isn't going to the moon. Also, the moon has less gravity. WAY LESS.

I think those two things combined means your logic is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude.

Re: NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

#200

Post by zo1 »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #61
zo1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The problem is that you can't run a large engineering department based on "Bob says Steve isn't that good". It just doesn't scale, that's the whole reason metrics get introduced.

Fair point - but we've seen how metrics can be gamed and cease to be useful measures of reality. People are smart and they will game them, even if it means hiding it behind a score/checklist/report.

We can either choose excellence and competence, or we get this weird mediocrity that is killing us slowly but somehow we can say "but it's running our large department based on science and scalable metrics".

Maybe we're not supposed to make these departments scale, maybe we need to keep them small and autonomous and "unfair" to some degree in order to function. Have we considered that? Not everything has to be optimized to the N-th degree and made to grow large like an instagram or google.

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