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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

#211

Post by jmalicki »

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.

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.

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

#212

Post by ceejayoz »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #188
myfavoritetings wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you are being pushed or pulled by a rocket doesn't really matter. From the inside would feel very similar.

It'd presumably feel a bit warmer for the case where you're underneath the rocket.

Probably no significant impact, and probably no significant difference between the two. It's angled so it largely doesn't touch the capsule (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_Pad_Abort_Tes...) and the capsule is made to keep the occupants safe through reentry, which reaches higher temperatures and lasts much longer than the second or two the pad abort rockets fire.

(It might even be less heat impact to the capsule than the Dragon-style rockets, as the hot spent rocket remains on the capsule; Apollo-style abort towers jettison.)

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

#213

Post by nebula8804 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #181
rtkwe wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also been a bit of a shift in the market for space launches. For the longest time there wasn't that much of a market for a higher volume, cheaper launcher like the Falcon as the number of launches were really limited to mostly government launches and a handful of communication satellites. Recently hardware has gotten much cheaper which combined with cheaper launches skyrockets the number of groups that could…

I think the nuance is different. I think there has always been demand of inexpensive access to space, what did not exist was a company willing to invest in making that true. If you lived through the "Single Stage To Orbit" (SSTO) initiatives that were kicked off by Regan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or "Star Wars" project to put "hundreds" of satellites into orbit, the idea of a cost insensitive customer will…

While you raise a valid point you chose a terrible example as even Elon, as crazy as he is, refuses to go against the laws of physics. Even he has a limit(for now at least). I get that its just an example: its just that Elon might throw you out of his office.

Its also this kind of thinking that gets people into trouble ie. completely destroying a working codebase because one only thinks in first principles and cannot map human factors(which are inherently too complex to reason mathematically) onto this other plane of thinking.

There needs to be a balance between the unconstrained dreamer and the practical realist.

Steve Jobs had a group of trusted confidants (Tim Cook, Ive and the other leaders) to help reel him back to reality from time to time.

You could argue that Bill Gates had Ballmer to help keep in him check.

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

#214

Post by Retric »

elteto wrote: post #195
Retric wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were only different in how expensive they were to conduct. NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing all expected these tests to have a significant risks, which is why they where unmanned. The entire point of spending that much money was to discover problems. As to your “sure” if admit Boeings delays are less than half of total delays, that sounds like you agree with me. Anyway, Dragon 2 as an iteration of an existing platform w…

Dragon 2 is _not_ an iteration on Dragon 1. It’s a completely different vehicle and it was risky for SpaceX to go the route of developing a completely new vehicle. Yet they got it done, cheaper and faster.

You can make that argument, but they share quite a bit of hardware and software. Considering how many software issues Boeing ran into that alone was a huge advantage.

Plenty of things were updated like IDSS, though that’s an evolution of the old docking standard etc etc. But in the end the unmanned dragon 2 is using the same Falcon 9 rocket, on literally the same mission. SpaceX even called it extended dragon in several places. The crewed version of Dragon 2 is shares most of its design though with abort thrusters, life support, etc.

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

#215

Post by tekla »

martin8412 wrote: post #201
nordsieck wrote: post #153

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. 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?

COTS was literally a grant to the private industry to challenge it to create a private rocket industry. What is the problem when does literally what is was supposed to do.

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

#216

Post by OrvalWintermute »

arijun wrote: post #106
kawehjr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My brief search indicates that is wrong: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/nasa-chief-says-cost...

Uncapped cost plus contracts (Time and Materiels contracts) are a plague, but not for the same reason, just like a Firm-Fixed Price contract that moves all risk to the contractor are a plague too, because if the contractor is carrying all the risk, they're going to make the government pay for all that risk (and aerospace engineering is risky).

Any contract type where the political leadership can't terminate a contract for cause due to excessive political pressure, or is forced into paying through the nose, is untenable.

The solution for that is not Firm Fixed Price or T&M contracts - but instead larger budgets and also multiple award contracts where you have simultaneous efforts competing against each other. When there are 5 options, all having company skin in the game, all as viable paths forward, and 1 option loses out, terminating for cause, enriching the other 4, no harm no foul.

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

#217

Post by panick21_ »

mcpackieh wrote: post #198
panick21_ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but Boeing brought the Delta into the marriage and LM brought Atlas. Pretty clear who brought to good stuff.

Delta IV and Delta IV Heavy have had a pretty good track record. Only one more will fly though, and ULA's replacement (Vulcan) is still vaporware (thanks in large part to Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin having numerous delays in producing the engines for Vulcan... )

Delta didn't have a good track recording according to the accounting department.

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

#218

Post by Retric »

elteto wrote: post #196
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…

So disingenuous. SpaceX’s “craters”, whatever that means, are not from mission failures but from working on booster landing and reusability, _after_ successfully delivering their mission payloads.

SpaceX landings require reserve fuel and thus much lower cargo capacity to attempt, and failure to land cost millions in equipment when it doesn’t work. So, cost wise it’s little different than failing to send up an additional satellite.

Partial mission success gets them a paycheck, but it would be interesting to look at their financials and see if they lost money on those missions.

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

#219

Post by nordsieck »

martin8412 wrote: post #201
nordsieck wrote: post #153

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. 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?

> You see nothing wrong with handing out nearly $300m to a company that's never done anything or demonstrated any capabilities?

1. COTS was a milestone based, firm, fixed-price contract. Which means that NASA didn't have to pay for work that didn't get done. If SpaceX failed at development, NASA could have chosen a different company and retained most of the money.

Which actually happened - Rocketplane Kistler basically did just that. And NASA replaced them with Orbital Sciences.

2. Established companies like Boeing and Arianespace entered bids and NASA seemed to think those bids were worse than the eventual winners.

3. The program largely worked - SpaceX and Orbital Sciences were successful at delivering cargo to the ISS. And all indications are that Sierra Nevada will be successful soon.

4. It was way less expensive than the traditional NASA route.

> In 2011, SpaceX estimated that Falcon 9 v1.0 development costs were on the order of US$300 million. NASA estimated development costs of US$3.6 billion had a traditional cost-plus contract approach been used. A 2011 NASA report "estimated that it would have cost the agency about US$4 billion to develop a rocket like the Falcon 9 booster based upon NASA's traditional contracting processes" while "a more commercial development" approach might have allowed the agency to pay only US$1.7 billion".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9

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

#220

Post by panick21_ »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #189
panick21_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Starliner was gone get built if they dropped 100M extra on Boeing or not. There lots of more relevant and important technologies that need more funding. The CommercialCrew program was not done for research, it was trying to solving a particular problem at the time and do it fast and efficently. If NASA want to spend money on more experimental human spaceflight, the CommercialCrew program was not the place to do i…

> If NASA want to spend money on more experimental human spaceflight, the CommercialCrew program was not the place to do it. SpaceX has been built on launch contracts displacing ULA. It is clear that the longterm for SpaceX, and their competitors, is going way past mere launch services (as complex as those are) to cis-lunar and interplanetary missions. Getting a healthy ecosystem with robust competitors is just the s…

> SpaceX has been built on launch contracts displacing ULA.

No. The CRS missions were displacing Arianespace. The CommercialCrew flights were displacing Russia. Commercial came from Proton, Soyuz and Ariane 5. Only military came from ULA.

> NASA and peer govt organizations are looking for partners on this, since companies are expected to bring their own funding to bear too.

Yes, its called the Clips program. IT shouldn't be part of CC.

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