To be honest I wouldn’t ride a scooter made by Boeing let alone a spaceship, they messed up too much too fast lately.
Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
41–50 of 172 posts
Re: Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
#42Glad 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 chances of SpaceX failing in an irrecoverable way are zero. In some sort of crazy black swan event, a public offering of stock/equity would easily bring in vast sums for them. They even managed to get through COVID unscathed. The main danger of relying on a single provider is them taking advantage of that position and charging unreasonable rates, exactly like Boeing/Lockheed have been doing for decades (two compa…
COVID was a single DARPA grant cycle in length. These companies move at glacial paces compared to the SaaS plays that the typical HN dev is familiar with. I'm guessing COVID never really threatened big programs like Starliner.
Re: Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
#43[deleted]
Re: Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. Funny how it used to be SpaceX making this argument, and ULA was fighting tooth-and-nail for "sole source" as cheaper. :-\ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSbL7o_SJsA I don't see SpaceX pushing to discontinue ULA's contract, so it would se…
SpaceX was a threat to ULA, and ULA knew it. But is ULA any sort of threat to SpaceX? If I were Musk, I'd want them sticking around just to make me look good.
ULA (a largely anticompetitive merger of Boeing and Lockheed for those who don't know) was actively and patronizingly taunting SpaceX during their efforts at reuse, making comments along the lines of 'We tried reuse. The economics just don't work out. Good luck learning what we already did.' He (Tory Bruno, CEO of ULA) seemed to be under the impression that reuse was only possible Space Shuttle style, which was them essentially "refurbishing" engines to the point of rebuilding them after each launch, and claiming it was reuse.
There's every reason to believe that this is also exactly what they genuinely believed - that SpaceX was just going to be a failed gimmick. They made 0 efforts to try to ensure they stayed technologically ahead of SpaceX, in spite of having many orders of magnitude greater resources and manpower available to themselves. They simply watched, mocked, and became obsolete.
In any case ULA's not going anywhere. Boeing and Lockheed are both major arms dealers that the US government depends on to keep the bombs flying.
Re: Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
#45> If all goes to plan, Boeing will be able to finally certify its Starliner for human transportation and begin fulfilling the terms of its $4.2 billion NASA astronaut taxi contract. That contract, under the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, was awarded in 2014. Elon Musk’s SpaceX was also granted a contract under that program, for its Crew Dragon capsule, and has been transporting astronauts to and from the ISS since…
>> How is it that SpaceX was able to accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time
Because they already had Dragon sending cargo to the ISS at the start of the commercial crew program. They used the money to upgrade and get man rated. Boeing started their capsule from scratch. This still doesn't explain all of it, but nobody else has mentioned their head start.
Re: Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The chances of SpaceX failing in an irrecoverable way are zero. In some sort of crazy black swan event, a public offering of stock/equity would easily bring in vast sums for them. They even managed to get through COVID unscathed. The main danger of relying on a single provider is them taking advantage of that position and charging unreasonable rates, exactly like Boeing/Lockheed have been doing for decades (two compa…
COVID was a single DARPA grant cycle in length. These companies move at glacial paces compared to the SaaS plays that the typical HN dev is familiar with. I'm guessing COVID never really threatened big programs like Starliner.
Your guess would be incorrect. Boeing felt they were in risk of collapse during COVID and immediately went to the government asking for a $60 billion bailout. The government wanted equity in exchange for this bailout, which Boeing didn't want to offer. So they ended up offering Federal Reserve facilitated 'Boeing bonds', and took in about $25 billion to stay afloat. [1] Amusingly a big part of the reason they ended up in such catastrophic danger is that they'd been dumping all their cash reserves into buying their own stock, to try to bring its flagging price up. [2]
[1] - https://www.chicagotribune.com/2020/05/04/how-boeing-was-res...
[2] - https://archive.is/eO3FJ (WaPo archive)
Re: Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
#47Glad 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 chances of SpaceX failing in an irrecoverable way are zero. In some sort of crazy black swan event, a public offering of stock/equity would easily bring in vast sums for them. They even managed to get through COVID unscathed. The main danger of relying on a single provider is them taking advantage of that position and charging unreasonable rates, exactly like Boeing/Lockheed have been doing for decades (two compa…
Don’t say the chance is zero unless you have a mathematical proof or something. Would the odds be zero if they lose of a crew of astronauts?
Re: Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
#48The funny thing is that Elon Musk promised us Mars and gave us orbit for cheaper than ever before. Boeing in its various incarnations has promised us orbit and given us nothing for just as expensive as before. Some people like to optimize for delta between promise and delivery. I think I like it when just delivery is optimized. There's really only one space company in the US today, and perhaps if there were other peo…
SpaceX may be by far the most prominent of the new space companies, but many smaller companies, especially Rocketlab are also punching above their weight relative to the old guard. The issue was that all the incentives for Boeing were to stagnate. The government would happily sign blank checks to them as long as they kept saying "space is hard, it can't be made cheaper, outsiders wouldn't understand". It took SpaceX…
>> "space is hard, it can't be made cheaper, outsiders wouldn't understand"
There's a fantastic clip out there where Gwynne Shotwell is asked by someone (I think in congress) how they are able to launch so cheap. Her answer was approximately "I don't know how to build a four hundred million dollar rocket."
Re: Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
#49Glad 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 chances of SpaceX failing in an irrecoverable way are zero. In some sort of crazy black swan event, a public offering of stock/equity would easily bring in vast sums for them. They even managed to get through COVID unscathed. The main danger of relying on a single provider is them taking advantage of that position and charging unreasonable rates, exactly like Boeing/Lockheed have been doing for decades (two compa…
I think it's because SpaceX is more influenced by engineering/design/cost than their competitors.
Other companies, like Toyota, have intermittently focused mostly on engineering/design/cost, but they went back to their old habits after gaining market dominance instead of using their position to push the market forward in some other way.
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28...
Re: Boeing Starliner's first crewed mission scrubbed
#50Glad 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 chances of SpaceX failing in an irrecoverable way are zero. In some sort of crazy black swan event, a public offering of stock/equity would easily bring in vast sums for them. They even managed to get through COVID unscathed. The main danger of relying on a single provider is them taking advantage of that position and charging unreasonable rates, exactly like Boeing/Lockheed have been doing for decades (two compa…
“ Space is orders of magnitude more complex than air flight”
Not true! The challenges are different but space is in a sense simpler since the reliability requirements for space are not as stringent.